External Review: Outside Perspective—or Something Else?

What a Promotion Case Taught Me About Teaching, Standards, and Process

A few years ago, a faculty member at another university contacted me to ask whether I would be willing to serve as an external reviewer for a promotion case. I agreed.

I take these requests seriously. External review is one of the few moments in academic life where someone outside the local ecosystem is asked to evaluate a career with fresh eyes. The stakes are high. The expectation, at least in theory, is honesty and external validation.

So, I gave it the most honest and thorough evaluation I could.

Teaching “Growth” Versus Teaching Quality

I was explicitly told to focus on this candidate’s teaching, as that was their primary responsibility and was the most heavily weighted component of their application.

The teaching evaluations told a familiar story: early struggles in the classroom, followed by improvement. Growth is good. We want faculty to get better at teaching over time. On paper, this looked like progress.

But when I looked more closely at the teaching materials themselves, something felt off.

Nearly all of the course content—the syllabus structure, the major assignments, even the overall pedagogical design—was material I immediately recognized. The material itself was not bad, but not anything original. I knew for a fact that it had been created by someone else years earlier and was now being reused by this individual. (Again, keeping this all anonymous, I won’t reveal the details behind my knowledge, but I was 100% certain of who created it and how it had been previously used).

Reuse itself is not a problem; academia runs on shared materials. But nowhere in the dossier was this acknowledged. There was no indication of adaptation, innovation, or even stewardship. The materials appeared to have been inherited and delivered, not developed.

Given the broader context (which I won’t detail here for anonymity’s sake), it didn’t read as collaboration or continuity. It read as minimal effort, a turn-key course this person was assigned to teach. In 5+ years of teaching the course, not a single change was made to the hand-me-down material.

The criteria asked me to evalute things like novelty, innovation, and creativity in the applicant’s profile. There was none.

When a Graduate Course Isn’t Graduate-Level

Their other primary course raised deeper concerns.

It was a graduate-level course. But the content, assessments, and expectations looked indistinguishable from an undergraduate offering—introductory material, low cognitive demand exams, and no meaningful progression beyond what students would have already encountered earlier in their undergrad pre-requisite coursework to get into this graduate program.

At first, I wondered whether this was my own bias showing. Maybe I was being overly strict. Maybe institutional norms differed.

So I did something intentionally simple: I anonymized the syllabus and exams and sent them to a trusted colleague who teaches both undergraduate and graduate versions of this subject. I gave no context. I didn’t say this was part of a promotion file. I didn’t say I had concerns.

I asked them one simple question: What level does this course appear to be?

Their assessment was unambiguous. This would be an excellent freshman- or sophomore-level course in that discipline.

I thanked them and moved on.

This candidate was going up for promotion, and was teaching grad level classes at the undergrad level.

Writing the Review

Since my task was to focus primarily on teaching rather than scholarship. That made these issues impossible to ignore. This individual had taught essentially the same small set of courses for five to six years, with little evidence of curricular development, increasing rigor, or pedagogical leadership.

In my report, I laid out my concerns carefully and professionally. I avoided inflammatory language. I documented what I observed. I acknowledged growth where it existed. I also made clear where I believed the candidate fell short of the stated criteria.

Initially, I stopped just short of a firm recommendation. I expressed reservations and concern rather than an explicit “no.” I explained the reasons behind my decision (i.e., those describe above regarding lack of indpendent development or novelty, and insufficient course rigor). I wanted to be kind and constructive, but honest. Here’s my actual text that I provided:

“Based on the materials provided in the dossier, I believe [Redacted] is an asset to [Redacted] and the [Redacted] and has demonstrated growth since joining the faculty, but does not yet qualify for promotion to [Redacted] based on the criteria provided by [Redacted] Handbook.”

I e-mailed the university representative that sent me the file, and they replied that I needed to make a definitive statement: “recommend” or “do not recommend.” After much thought, I chose the latter.

The administrator then asked for my availability to discuss my decision further. I provided it.

I never heard back.

And Then They Were Promoted

Several months later, I learned the faculty member had been promoted.

I don’t know what conversations happened internally. I don’t know what weight my review carried relative to others. I don’t know what institutional pressures or priorities shaped the final decision.

But I do know this: my honest, external assessment did not change the outcome.

What This Left Me Thinking About

This experience didn’t make me angry. It made me reflective—and a little disillusioned.

External review is often framed as a safeguard: a way to ensure standards don’t quietly drift, that internal incentives don’t overwhelm rigor, that promotion means something beyond survival and time served. It was supposed to help ensure that politics didn’t come into play, and that somebody with distance from the candidate could objectively evaluate them.

But when an external reviewer is asked to be honest, pressed to be definitive, and then effectively ignored, it raises uncomfortable questions:

• Is external review meant to inform decisions—or to legitimize decisions already made?

• Are we evaluating teaching quality, or merely documenting adequate performance over time?

• And what does “meeting criteria” mean if originality, rigor, and level appropriateness are negotiable?

I don’t regret serving as an external reviewer. I did what I was asked to do, as carefully and fairly as I could.

But I now see the role more clearly for what it often is: advisory, not determinative; symbolic as much as substantive. In many cases, the decision to promote (or not) has already been made, and external review functions less as an independent evaluation than as a procedural step that confers legitimacy. It’s a piece of data, not a determining verdict.

That realization matters—not because it makes the work meaningless, but because it changes how we should approach it.

Serving as an external reviewer is real labor. It requires judgment, care, and a willingness to say uncomfortable things in writing. It also carries moral weight, because our words can shape how standards are understood, even when they don’t alter outcomes.

If there is a lesson here, it’s not cynicism. It’s clarity. We should agree to this work with open eyes: knowing that honesty may not be rewarded, that rigor may be inconvenient, and that standards can drift quietly while procedures remain intact.

When that happens, the consequences extend far beyond a single promotion case. They shape departmental culture, signal expectations to junior faculty, and ultimately determine what kind of education students receive—often without anyone ever explicitly deciding to lower the bar.

External review won’t prevent that drift on its own. But naming its limits might.

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