During the 2004-2005 academic year I was denied tenure at Colby. There were a number of troubling aspects to my denial. Perhaps the main discrepancy that keeps me going involves the fact that all my performance reviews prior to the tenure review were positive, and there are still a number of people at Colby who claim to believe that I should have been awarded tenure. However, the promotion and tenure committee voted 8-1 to deny my tenure case, and to read their comments it appears that I was not even close. So far it has been impossible for me to reconcile these opposing points of view.
Between the time I started at Colby (1998) and the year of my tenure decision (2004-2005), nearly every candidate at Colby who made it to the tenure review was awarded tenure. There was a notable exception in 2003-2004 in a case apparently riddled with procedural irregularities and personal back-stabbing. However, overall there seemed to be a high record of success. Some people claimed that the tenure requirements were becoming too "soft". Others claimed that the high success rate was due to the rigor involved in the various pre-tenure reviews. I understand that at least one person ran for election to the P&T committee by campaigning to reject more candidates. In the year I came up for tenure there were ten candidates and fully five of them were denied tenure. Among those five were the only four job-sharing tenure-track faculty on campus (there is one other pair of job-sharers, but they received tenure a long time ago). Coincidence?
It is worth pointing out that I was completely taken by surprise by the tenure denial. One of the problems in the current procedures manifests itself this way. I believe that any candidate who is denied tenure ought to have at least a little bit of warning, most likely in the form of some negative reviews. This confusion surrounding my case has led me through a great deal of legwork and conversation, as well as jumping through the various Colby procedural hoops, in order to try to find out what happened and hopefully to correct the problems in my case and in the tenure procedures in general. As a result of these efforts (which have unfortunately so far been mostly in vain), I have come to realize that the tenure criteria and procedures at Colby are ill-specified, overly subjective, capricious, inconsistent, opaque, and ad hoc. This web site is my attempt to prevent, as much as possible, future tenure candidates from having to go through the same types of things I have had to go through. I hope to accomplish this by discussing the problems inherent in Colby's current approach to tenure, as well as by providing my own tenure case as a (negative) example, so tenure-track faculty can have at least one datapoint with which to guide their understanding and efforts.