Navigating the unchartable: paths to promotion and tenure in health professions education

Varpio et al. lay out challenges that new faculty face in negotiating different meanings of scholarly contribution, teaching and service in a quest for promotion and tenure within their universities [1]. Promotion and tenure processes are indeed a labyrinth for young faculty. The halls are dimly lit, the thread to follow is tenuous and one may have the sense of foreboding that a wrong turn or miscalculated step may put one’s career advancement squarely in the arms of the Minotaur. Searching desperately for a map, young faculty find that there are none. Rather, pathways through this maze shift and change, with review committees moving and adjusting the signposts as times and circumstances demand. Within even a single university community, each unit participates differently in scholarly activities, and similar words in broad university policies come to powerfully connote locally different meanings in individual departments. How can up-and-coming faculty successfully navigate their way? Navigating this future means first developing a deeper sense of our heritage. Universities first formed in Europe as self-regulating communities of scholars and learners that determined the qualifications of their members. Today, that spirit lives on in the form of communities of tenured peers, who rely upon specific processes and practices in the pur-