Robert Diamond's recent Preparing for Promotion and Tenure Review: A Faculty Guide is blessedly short and unerringly to the point. Its content has been thoroughly and repeatedly combed to remove snarly extras--and the topics it so succinctly treats are ones which can too easily lend themselves to extended discourse and disquisition. Diamond has removed all the wind, leaving just what will fit into a nutshell: all of the things that the old professorial cognoscenti know, because they've been there, done that; and several new things that the old heads may not yet have thoroughly considered, but certainly ought to. (Diamond's even shorter book Serving on Promotion and Tenure Committees: A Faculty Guide [Anker, 1994] guides through the same dark woods, but it's for the judges, not the judged.)

Those new faculty pursuing P&T, the much-coveted marks of advancement and security, seldom have spare time; and Diamond's short (67 pp.) book offers not only easily accessible descriptions and examples, but also several admirably honed lists and summations. For those who really, really have no time, I suggest they read at least the Table of Contents: this in itself nicely outlines the keys to professordom. If a new assistant professor is quality stuff, Diamond's advice will show her or him how to plan ahead, document work, and demonstrate that fact successfully.

As Director of the new Center for Instructional Development at Syracuse University and Co-director of S.U.'s Focus on Teaching Project, Bob Diamond has helped that institution alter its course. Formerly focussed on highlighting its faculty's prowess in research and scholarship, Syracuse recently has emerged as a national leader in the improvement and emphasis of college teaching. In recognition of its fruitful and timely efforts to adjust this difficult balance between areas of faculty accomplishment, the university received a 1995 Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Faculty Development to Enhance Undergraduate Teaching. Dr. Diamond was the man who set the course for this adjustment, and his clear and strong thinking come through in these books. What he offers Syracuse University, and what he delivers in Preparing for Promotion and Tenure Review and Serving on Promotion and Tenure Committees is ground-breaking; yet his suggestions and observations, while taking us in new and healthy directions, dovetail neatly with run-of-the-mill P&T procedures. He doesn't shock us: he helps us to think better.

One of the features I found most striking and helpful is a section entitled, "The Disciplines Consider Scholarship." With funding from the Lilly Endowment and FIPSE, Syracuse University has undertaken a project involving task forces from a number of professional and disciplinary associations. Their task (and I quote from this section) is "to consider ways in which the full range of faculty work can be recognized and valued within institutional reward systems." This undertaking is not yet complete--but both of Diamond's books include several examples of statements published by these associations, "proposing broader definitions of scholarly or professional work for their fields." (Included are statements by, for example, the American Historical Association, The American Chemical Society, The American Academy of Religion, and The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business.) Such centralized efforts at re-envisioning the criteria for research and scholarship are most timely, thought-provoking, and welcome: as our cultural paradigms shift, so too should our understanding of our roles as professional and ethical leaders. These statements can stimulate both healthy debate and new optimism, especially for junior faculty struggling to meld their several areas of responsibility and prowess.

Unless one holds the warped belief that "Well, I had to suffer through the awful, boogey-manned nightmares of tenure and promotion review, and so should they!" (the motto of the Hang-By-Your-Thumbs School of Professional Development), one will welcome Professor Diamond's distillations of just what it takes--or should take--to make it in Academe. Whether preparing to be judged or preparing to judge, faculty (and administrators) would do well to consider Robert Diamond's advice on how best to display and identify Faculty Excellence. Even if his advice is not adopted wholesale, it is, at the least, very helpful.

Peg Downes, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
University of North Carolina at Asheville