Advocacy Corner

Advocacy and Academic Promotion

As the academic year begins, so do thoughts about academic promotion.  Promotion is the achievement of excellence and contribution to an institution and profession.  It demonstrates accomplishment over and above the basic carrying out of assigned job responsibilities.  Earning academic promotion is a career milestone, an honor, and, in some settings, a raise.  However, one of the challenges for faculty interested in advocacy is the perspective that advocacy will not help one’s career or contribute to a promotion because it’s “not academic.”  While I do not doubt there may have been some truth to this perspective in the past, it is much less likely to be accurate moving forward for many of us. 

Specifically, while promotion criteria vary across institutions, there is quite a bit of overlap.  Typically, to meet the criteria, faculty must demonstrate marked contribution at increasing levels of influence (e.g., regional/state and national/international) in a specified number of domains.  These domains often incorporate research, teaching/education, clinical impact, and service/community engagement.  Advocacy usually works well as service/community engagement and can be achieved at state and national levels.  For example, active and sustained participation in state legislative day opportunities from your institution or state psychological association demonstrates state-level contribution.  The same can be said about the national level via involvement with APA's virtual federal advocacy summits.  It is also not unusual for promotion criteria to include a minimum requirement for scholarly publication.  Consider disseminating knowledge from an advocacy lens, such as a focus on justice for a specific patient population, a case study, or bringing patient/family voices to the forefront.  Lastly, this article proposes a helpful approach called the Advocacy Portfolio to document advocacy activities from a scholarly perspective.

Ultimately, don’t forget that much of the promotion process is telling the story of your career and how your work meets the criteria for advancement.  You control the narrative, so consider it as self-advocacy to clearly demonstrate why your advocacy work fulfills the criteria for academic promotion.

Amy R. Beck, PhD
drbeckadvocates@gmail.com