Through various conversations in the past few months, I have tried to figure something out:
How much time do tenure and promotion committees typically spend on each candidate's file? I am speaking here of the P&T committee that is at the college/school level of a university or the equivalent at a smaller institution (i.e., above the department level).
If you have not (yet) been on such a committee: What is your guess for the range of typical duration of file-gazing/discussing?
If you are tenure-track faculty, do you hope this is a long time or a short time?
If you have been on such a committee: How much time did you spend on a typical file, and/or what is the total range of time, from the easy cases to the difficult cases?
Do you think or know that your experience differs from that of colleagues on similar committees in other parts of your institution or at different institutions?
Today I am posing these questions to see what kind of comments come in. Ideally, there will be comments with guesses from the uncommitteed as well as data from P&T committee members.
For now, I will just say that the results of my informal, statistically meaningless, anecdotal investigations surprised me.