Tenure dossier

This page links to copies of most of the materials that I included in my tenure dossier. The main things that are missing are some of my course materials. I do not want to put my exams and computer programming solutions on the web, but I included hard copies of those items among my teaching materials.

Cover letter
- I have redacted some personal details from this version of the letter, but other than those edits this is the cover statement I submitted with my tenure dossier.
Curriculum vitae
- This is my current CV, as of Fall 2005. There are a few new things in it, but it has substantially the same content and format as the CV I submitted with my tenure dossier.
Faculty activity reports
Teaching materials
- Course materials
  - I included literally reams of course materials in my tenure dossier. I keep all of my course notes on-line, and almost all of my classes involve intensive programming projects that I must design, implement, and debug. The need for these programming projects to be significant and precise makes course preparation extremely time consuming. I printed all of this material to include in the dossier, which filled multiple three-ring binders. Using the link above, you can view the on-line versions of this material. The only significant things that you cannot see on-line, but that I included in the dossier, are my quizzes and exams, as well as solutions to the programming projects.
- Student evaluations
  - I have included scans of all my student evaluations on the same course web page above. Note that these web pages include all the evaluations I have received so far, but my tenure dossier only included the evaluations up to Spring 2004.
  - You can also examine some charts of my evaluations scores, to see the positive trajectory that the P&T members claim does not exist. These charts were not part of my tenure dossier, but perhaps they should have been.
- My comments on student evaluations
  - These are also available on the course web page.
  - At the end of each semester I wrote myself a response to the student evaluations I received, to help me reflect on the semester and create plans for improvements in future course offerings. I was advised to include these in my tenure dossier. It seemed like a good idea to me, because it would help demonstrate to P&T my seriousness in taking the evaluations into account and my commitment to refining my teaching strategieis. However, I have since been advised that this was a serious mistake. Some of these comments include remarks that are critical of student work habits, and I have learned that this subject is taboo at Colby. If you attempt to assign any blame or personal responsibility to your students, the P&T committee will see that as a personal failure and lack of commitment in your teaching.
- Student letters
  - The college solicited a letter of reference from every student I taught at Colby. I understand that they typically only expect a fraction of the students to respond, and then mostly from students who have extreme (negative or positive) views to express. I taught only a partial teaching load, and computer science courses are typically small, so I did not have very many students to choose from. It appears that may have been held against me, even though I had no power over that. Note also that one P&T member claimed that the students who did respond were actually lying and did not really believe that I was as good as they claimed in their letters.
    Note that these scans are of the redacted copies of the letters sent to me by the Dean of Faculty after my case was denied.
Research materials
- My dossier included a short article I wrote on how to evaluate scholarship in computer science, because we publish predominantly in refereed conference proceedings, which is not typical in the sciences.
- My dossier also included a copy of every paper I had published to that time, including publications from before I arrived at Colby. I will not include the publications here, but you can see my current list of publications in my curriculum vitae.
- My department review committee solicited letters from three external referees who read my papers and wrote up their thoughts about my research record. I submitted a list of potential referees from which the final three were selected, but I was not told which ones were selected. These are the redacted versions of their reports that I received from the Dean of Faculty after my case was denied.
Service materials
- According to the faculty handbook, my curriculum vitae was supposed to contain a bulleted list of all of my department, college, and academic service. However, when I was asked for "my CV", I did not check the instructions, so I merely submitted my standard CV, which did not contain such explicitly bulleted lists (particularly for my departmental and college service). Nobody pointed out my error at the time, and I was frankly led to believe there was nothing to worry about with my service record, so I was not as careful in presenting it as I perhaps should have been.
- I did include mention of much of my service in my faculty activity reports and cover letter (accessible above). But given the comments I received from the P&T members, it is not clear that all of them read or digested these. Again, there was also service that I did not include in the faculty activity reports because I did not understand that it was important to include them or that my service record appeared deficient without them.
Other materials
- I solicited "friendly letters" from two of my Colby colleagues. I was told that these letters are pretty meaningless, because everybody expects them to be, well, friendly. However, it was pointed out to me after my denial that it may have looked bad for me only to have two such letters. This seems likely since the P&T members turned out to be intent on finding anything negative they could about my case. I did not realize at the time of my dossier preparation that this would be their approach, but it is an important lesson for future tenure candidates. You simply cannot give them anything negative to sink their teeth into, and they will agressively interpret "small amounts of positive" as "negative". So make sure that you have a sufficient number of "friendly letters" in your dossier.
  I also submitted the names of a number of external (to Colby) colleagues to provide "friendly letters" for my dossier. The departmental review committee contacts these people to write the letters. These are scans of the redacted copies of the letters that I received from the Dean of Faculty after my tenure denial.

Randolph M. Jones
How (not) to get tenure at Colby College