PAR: Professional-Track Faculty (PTF) Prior Approval Requests

Purpose:

To provide an overview and details regarding COLA-specific policies, procedures, and guidelines for attaining approval to extend a formal offer of employment to a professional track faculty member.

PAR Submission Deadlines:

• Fall (8/16) Start Dates: June 30

• Spring (1/1) Start Dates: October 30

Overview:

PARs for professional-track faculty (PTF) follow a very similar process to tenured and tenure-track (TTT) hires, however they have fewer requirements.

Key items that are not required for most PTF PARs:

• A pre-review

• A departmental assessment of teaching competence

• Any type of financial commitments/other commitments (and therefore approval and documentation of these commitments), beyond the 9-month academic rate (and therefore, also, no requirement/need to enter anything in the COLA Offers database)

  • In the rare event that there are additional commitments, these commitments and their approvals would need to be documented, but unlike TTT PAR commitments, a COLA Offers record would not be created.

• Appointment Process Summary form

  • Note: Although this document is not required for the PTF PAR, a posting waiver would be required if the faculty hire did not arise from one of the typical paths listed in the PTF Recruitment section below.

Relevant Definitions:

PAR: Prior Approval Request; refers to the *DEFINE (UT Mainframe application) document and a PDF file comprising documentation required for approvals. The PAR must be final-approval before formally extending an employment offer to a faculty candidate.

PTF: Professional-Track Faculty; formerly known as non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty; per HOP 2-2010 Faculty Titles (sections A.1.c and C), appointments to these faculty titles (unless otherwise indicated):

• are not on the tenure track;

• may be “short-term, two- or three-year fixed term, or two- or three-year rolling term”;

• “may be full- or part- time”; and

• “shall terminate upon expiration of the stated period of appointment without notification of nonrenewal.”

Pool Posting: a generic posting in Interfolio that collects applications from individuals wanting to teach at UT for a given academic unit; enables units to hire temporary faculty (from the pool of applicants) when needed. See wiki article for additional details.

• Academic units planning to recruit for a specialized, unique, and/or longer-term position would create and post an ad on Interfolio separate from the unit's pool posting.

Research Faculty: 12-month non-tenured faculty who primarily conduct research. The research professor titles (Assistant, Associate, and Professor of Research) follow specific faculty recruitment and hiring processes that are different--and more involved--than the majority of PTF recruiting and hiring, including additional materials and additional layers of approval.  For more information, please see the EVPP site on Hiring Research Faculty.

COLA HR: Liberal Arts's college-level HR team; also cola_hr@austin.utexas.edu; lead contact for this process: Stuart Tendler

Associate Dean: For this article, refers to COLA’s Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs; currently Daniel Brinks.

Dept Staff: For this article, refers to the staff member responsible for completing faculty HR tasks for the hiring unit.

EVPP: The Provost’s Office; specifically the staff in the Academic Personnel Services team.

Process:

At the most basic level, the PAR process for PTF is the same as for TTT. For this reason, we will generally not duplicate the guidance found in the TTT PAR wiki. The TTT PAR Process Overview from Step 7 onward will generally apply. Also, the PAR Process Details will apply except for Part 2: COLA Offers Database.

Here, we provide instructions only for aspects unique to hiring professional-track faculty that are not otherwise discussed in the TTT PAR wiki.

Instructional Overloads

1. Occasionally a PAR will need to be created for someone who will be teaching an “overload.” If the PTF PAR includes an instructional overload, there are additional steps and approvals needed before you will be able to submit the PAR. Please see the Instructional Overload wiki page for information about the forms and approvals needed.

Specific PTF Terms of Hire

Certain considerations are unique to PTF hires and would generally be established prior to creating the PAR itself. Comparable to step 6 in the TTT PAR Process Overview, perhaps.

1. Consult COLA guidance on percent time appointments to determine the correct FTE percentage for the hire.

   1. Professional-track faculty are not always hired on a full-time basis

   2. Letters should be from faculty with terminal degrees who are capable of speaking to the applicant’s teaching abilities; at least one letter should be from outside the university;

      1. NOTE: Department Chairs/Center Directors may not provide a letter, as they constitute the hiring manager.

      2. One mistake we sometimes see is that the letter provided is from a supervisor discussing a candidate’s non-academic employment. However, letters need to specifically address teaching competence, and thus need to be from individuals qualified to ascertain teaching competence.

      3. For candidates who are newly minted PhDs and who earned their PhD at UT Austin: if applicable, you may request an exception to the requirement that at least one letter be from outside the university.

   3. Appointments that did not require application to a job posting, require a completed Applicant Screening Questionnaire. Please consult the Provost's PAR handbook for examples of PTF hires that do not require postings.

   4. Consult our PTF PAR checklist for detailed instructions and additional assistance.

2. COLA has developed a PTF contract length policy. New hires should only be offered a short-term contract.

   1. Anything other than a short-term contract for new hires should not be offered without prior written approval from the Associate Dean, even if the offer is consistent with your unit’s approved contract length criteria.

PDF PAR Packet Contents List

(see also Part 1: The PAR Packet)

Please include the following items, in order, when initially submitting the packet to COLA:

1. CV

2. Minimum of three letters of recommendation (on letterhead and signed;

   1. These should have been written within the last three years.

3. Primary Language Determination form(s). (See PAR Packet Tips, #8)

4. EEO Summary Report (See PAR Packet Tips, #10)

   1. OR, in rare circumstances, an approved posting waiver with signed Applicant Screening Questions form. (See PAR Packet Tips, #12-13)

5. PDF of Job posting as published on UT faculty recruitment website (See PAR Packet Tips, #11)

COLA’s PTF PAR Checklist

Consult our PTF PAR checklist for detailed instructions and additional assistance.

Related Policies:

Professional-Track Faculty Recruitment in COLA

The recruitment process for PTF tends to be different than the TTT process, and sometimes the “recruitment” process is almost indistinguishable from the hiring process. Requirements vary according to the circumstances, but we include some basics here:

1. Pool Postings: The most common route to hire professional-track faculty. Pool postings have their own wiki article.

2. Targeted Hire: Occasionally, a unit will need to fill a specific professional-track faculty need on a longer-term basis and want to create a posting targeted for that specific need. In such cases, the unit head should contact the Associate Dean to seek approval for advertising such a position.

3. Circumstances (generally) Not Requiring a Posting:

   1. Hiring someone at 0% FTE

   2. Hiring someone into the Visiting title series (though faculty in the visiting title series may not be appointed for more than two consecutive years).

Hiring PTF outside of one of the three paths listed here will generally not be possible. Posting waivers for professional-track faculty hires would usually not be approved outside of exceptional circumstances.

COLA Faculty Policies 

Faculty Offer Letter Templates

Other Related Links:

Provost PAR Handbook

Provost Faculty Knowledge Base

COLA PTF PAR checklist

VIRTEL (UT Mainframe; location of *DEFINE)