Like many colleges, mine is currently involved in trying to create a more precise definition of scholarly expectations for tenure. It is, no doubt, a venture undertaken with the best intentions and with recognition of the stress the traditionally fuzzy tenure critera can cause. I’ve only been tenured for a couple years and can still recall the trepidtation this process evokes.
That said, I’m just not sure how this can work.
For example, we might say we expect you to publish three scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals. It’s easy enough to imagine a scenario in which three articles could be less impressive than two or even one article. That is, we can imagine scenarios where three articles would not be sufficient and fewer articles would be.
Then, of course, we get into things like poems, short stories, articles in non-peer-reviewed journals, essays in book collections, entries in encyclopedias, conference presentations (national and regional), grants, and (god forbid) even blogs, just to name a few. Plus there are other scholarly activities like serving as an editor for a journal or a press or working as a consultant.
You could never anticipate all the possible scholarly activities, so any statement along these lines would eventually end with the phrase "or equivalent work." But equivalent to what?
Why, three scholarly articles of course. Which is what? Something that may or may not get you tenure.
Are we having fun yet?
That said, I think the guideline is useful. Being told you need to publish three scholarly articles is clearly different from being told you need to publish six articles or land a major grant or publish a book or two books! But its really not the kind of thing you can quantify. If you’re in a department where everyone publishes lit. crit essays and you publish poems, it’s going to be a bit of a struggle to get your work properly valued. One way to think of this is as the logic of the marketplace. The college can try to fix prices but generally local marketplaces will determine value. Your poems may be great but they won’t sell well in a market for lit. crit essays.
Actually, it’s more complex than this. This effort, however good-intentioned, is founded upon the commodification of higher education. We may not value academic work strictly in terms of commericial value, but we are attempting to imagine some academic capital (of reputation or academic excellence) against which all intellectual activity can be weighed.
Unfortantely information, knowledge, thought are material and singular. Though the value of knowledge lies, to some degree, in its ability to be applied elsewhere, this does not mean that can correspond to some universal value system. What is fungible about intellectual work are elements that we probably consider (or should consider) as least meaningful or indicative of academic merit (e.g., popularity, quantity, etc.).
I realize this doesn’t do anything to lessen the uncertainty of the tenure process. That sucks. The best answer there, I believe, is regular open evaluation and conversation between T&P committees and faculty, as well as mentoring and other support for junior colleagues.
Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 
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