Harvard even sends out a list of “comparands,” and they don’t have to be at same career stage, though they ask you to compare them when they were at this stage. In other words, you could compare someone just getting tenure to someone 10 years beyond “when they were at that stage.”
Columbia does too
Wow
Intentionally choosing comparands from past decades could be good b/c it could undo the ratcheting up of expectations -- but also, wow, way to make this uncompensated, largely invisible-to-home-institution work more time-consuming
Well, right, the conceit is that you know all the work of everyone on the list equally well. Leon Fink decried this decades ago for an outside senior hire Harvard was doing. Apologies for the light text but here it is:
And sorry, just realized my screenshot didn’t include the reference. It’s the April 1, 2005 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
This is excellent (too bad it seems to have gone unheeded)
(Also, "comparand" is a perfectly cromulent word.)