Tenure-Track Professorships

The University of Bremen provides outstanding scientists with ideal conditions for research and teaching - at all career levels.

By offering professorships with tenure option, the university gives early-career researchers the chance of foreseable career tracks and thereby wants to foster potential as well as encourage early-career researchers.

It is of great importance to the university that procedures are transparent, continously reflected upon and improved. Our Tenure Board is responsible for monitoring and developing these procedures.

The Executive Board of the University of Bremen has adopted a set of guiding principles for the conceptualization of tenure-track professorships in 2018, in order to create university-wide standards and transparent conditions, also for early-stage researchers who are about to apply at University of Bremen.

These guiding principles clearly define the target group of professorships with tenure option, framework conditions for appointment as well as endowment negotiations and evaluation preocedures. Tenure-track professors are endowed with all the rights and duties of a full professor.

The university's aim is to conceptualize 30 percent of all advertized (newly created and/or vacant) professorships with tenure option. Most of the current tenure-track professorships are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

In order to ensure that the evaluation processes are transparent, criteria and expectations are formally agreed upon in an evaluation agreement. In the individual evaluation agreement, the "General Criteria for Evaluation Agreements of the Tenure Board" are specified by taking subject-specific and internationally customary evaluation standards into account. The transition to a tenured professorship requires a successful evaluation according to the evaluation agreement. The Tenure Board has also developed and adopted a mandatory evaluation guideline.

Since 2018, the Tenure Board has been a standing committee established by the Academic Senate of the University of Bremen and is responsible for all professorship with tenure option at the university. It is an independent committee, in which all of the twelve faculties of the university are represented, in order to prevent conflicts of interest and dependencies within the faculties as well as biases.

The Tenure Board develops guidelines and templates for the evaluation processes to ensure cosistent quality standards, transparency and reliable procedures. Furthermore, the Tenure Board decides on granting tenure to the evaluated professors at the end of the individual evaluations based on external assessments and the results of an internal evaluation commission by the respective faculty.

We are currently translating our internal website (log-in required) on tenure track evaluation procedures - the link can be found here soon. There, you will find further information about our Tenure Board as well as helpful documents like guidelines and templates for evaluation processes. Some of the official documents are currently only available in German, but we are working on translations for these documents as well.