The Committee of Three

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Matilda Luk, Office of Communications

Princeton’s excellence depends on many factors, but foremost among them is the caliber of the professors who produce world-class research, educate our students, help to run the institution, and conduct searches to identify potential colleagues.

At Princeton, the most important guarantor of faculty quality is a committee known as “the Committee of Three,” or simply “C3.” Because the committee’s work is profoundly consequential and highly confidential, I don’t mind the aura of mystery that sometimes surrounds it. But it is also a model of rigorous assessment that should inspire confidence among Princeton’s alumni and all who care about this University. It deserves to be better known.

Formally called the Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements, C3 has eleven participants, including the five highest ranking academic officers in the University along with six other members of the faculty who are elected by their peers. The six faculty members must represent all four divisions of the University (that is, the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and engineering). At least two must be department chairs.

Nobody seems to know why this eleven-person committee with six faculty members from four divisions is called “the Committee of Three.” Somebody once told me that it is because the University previously had three divisions, not four, but that might be a myth.

The committee reviews every tenure recommendation at the University, including both internal promotions and external appointments. Its task is to ensure that Princeton tenures only scholars whose academic achievements are outstanding and who will continue to be leaders in their fields.

C3 serves as a quality-control check on the academic departments, which have the primary responsibility for ensuring the excellence of tenure candidates. Departmental faculties at Princeton are, after all, world-class experts in their fields. They are in the best position to judge the merits of potential appointees.

When a department recommends someone for tenure, it sends the dean of the faculty a dossier summarizing its reasoning and providing evidence such as, for example, teaching reviews, reference letters, and scholarly reviews of the candidate’s books.

The dean of the faculty then solicits more external reference letters. Some invitations go to professors drawn from a long list submitted by the department, and others go to experts identified independently by the dean’s own staff.

The department does not know to whom the dean has written, nor does any member of the department see the letters to the dean. Confidentiality is essential; we want reviewers to express candid opinions.

C3 then reviews the departmental dossier and the external letters obtained by the dean. If any member of C3 is from the department that nominated the candidate, that person is recused and never sees the file.

C3’s meetings are formal. Its procedures have been unchanged for decades. The University president chairs the meetings and calls at random on one of the six faculty members to introduce each case.

There is no presumption that the faculty member presenting the case is an expert in the candidate’s field. On the contrary, I might call on an English professor to introduce a case from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, or a physicist to present a case from Religion.

After the initial summary, we go around the room and each member of the committee, including the five academic officers, offers brief comments. The cases usually pivot on the external letters. If they reinforce the department’s favorable judgment—and they most often do—then we endorse the appointment and recommend its approval by the Board of Trustees.

C3 applies a standard that is exceptionally high. Roughly speaking, we want someone to be at least in the top half-dozen or so scholars in their subfield and experience cohort. A case may therefore be in trouble if two or three letters say, in effect, “I can think of five people in the subfield who got their doctorate at around the same time as this person, and who are better, but this person is probably in the top ten.” Tenth best in the world is almost never good enough for the Princeton faculty.

When C3 has doubts about a case, we ask to meet with the department chair. The chair then gets interrogated about the nomination by eleven leading representatives of the University faculty. We try to get replies to objections or reservations raised in the letters, but we are careful never to ask any question that would reveal the identity of a letter-writer.

The chairs often persuade C3 that their candidates deserve tenure. C3, however, usually rejects a few appointments each year.

This is the most rigorous personnel process that I know, far more exacting than what exists at most universities or in most professions.

Is it infallible? Of course not. But I have now served on the committee as provost and president for more than twenty years, and there are very few decisions that I regret even with the benefit of hindsight. The dedication and hard work of C3’s members are manifest in Princeton’s dazzling academic quality.