Failing to win promotion to full professor can feel more personally painful than being denied tenure — because it’s not about your potential but about your record. It means people who know you very well perceive your work as “serviceable” rather than spectacular. It’s a judgment that you have lost momentum and failed to fulfill your potential somewhere along the way. At this point in your career, you know a lot of people across the campus. So being denied the right to wear the mantle of full professor is a source of real embarrassment since friends and colleagues may be aware of your unsuccessful gambit.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored how to decide when (and whether) to seek promotion to the top faculty rank. This time, we analyze the most prominent reasons why things might not have gone your way.