In the unfortunate case that your tenure case is denied, there is really only one hope offered to you by the Colby procedures. You are allowed to submit a request for reconsideration of your case. In order to do this, the college will provide you with summaries or redacted versions of most of the material in your tenure dossier. You will also receive the all-too-brief summary statements from the P&T committee members. With this material, you must make at least one of three cases:
After you have prepared your request for reconsideration, it goes to a reconsideration committee, composed of the most recent three faculty members who rotated off P&T, your division chair, and one tenured faculty member of your choosing (total of five people). They are allowed to consider any aspects of your case, and they are supposed to be allowed access to any information they deem releveant (although the college will refuse some of this information if it is considered "confidential"). They are not supposed to "substitute their judgment" for the judgment of the P&T members. But again there is no accountability here. So if they feel you have been wronged and care to give you a chance to respond, they ought to be able to find a way to award your reconsideration. You need to receive at least three votes out of the five to be awarded a reconsideration.
If your reconsideration request is denied, then your procedural avenues at Colby are at an end. The only avenues remaining to you are to accept the decision or contact a lawyer (you should probably contact a lawyer and the AAUP as soon as you are denied if you feel the decision was wrong for any reason).
If your reconsideration request is granted, you get one chance to convince the P&T members of the error of their ways, including an interview with the committee. But remember that you are trying to change the minds and votes of people who do not have any vested interest in admitting to an error. And again there is no accountability involved. I have heard that there have been successful reconsiderations, and I imagine in those cases the problems must have been egregious. I have also heard that when someone was granted a reconsideration on particular grounds, the P&T members started making up new reasons why the candidate should not receive tenure. I have heard that at least one person got more "no" votes from P&T after the reconsideration than they had received in the original tenure denial. In this case the P&T members demonstrated once again that they are only human, and that they will circle the wagons in order to avoid admitting an error.
The main thing to remember after your tenure denial is that the college is not going to go out of its way to try to help you. You are going to be substantially on your own. The college provides no resources to support you at this point. You might think that the college would honestly want to try to help discover whether anything happened incorrectly, and they will offer to help because they are supposed to. But the college has its interests, and at the point of tenure denial you become an adversary to those interests in the college's eyes.
You should talk about your case to as many people as you can to get information about how to proceed. You should particularly find those members of the faculty who are not "defenders of the institution" but rather will help you agitate against the institution. The most aggressive, persuasive, and experienced person of this type that you find is the person you should consider using as your representative on the reconsideration request committee. At the same time, you should latch on to a best friend or two who will be willing to listen to your ranting and venting for a few months (at least), and learn to start getting by on lack of sleep and other symptoms of depression. You are about to go through a process of intense depression, frustration, confusion, disillusionment, and anger.
My own sense is that the most important thing to try to do is to come out of this process happy with yourself. All the other goals and pursuits should be in the service of that. If you can end up with tenure, that would be wonderful. If you cannot, then you need to position yourself to get whatever you might value out of the process, whether that means maintaining (or destroying) friendships, getting retribution, pursuing justice or compensation through the legal system, moving onto a new academic position elsewhere, or anything else.
Most of all, this is a time to be selfish, because you have been slapped in the face and nobody at the institutional level is going to look out for you any longer. If you think there may be legal issues involved in your case and you can afford one or two thousand dollars for the initial consultation, it probably makes sense to get in touch with a lawyer when you are denied, just to keep your bases covered. They may also be able to help with the preparation of your request for reconsideration, although my experience is that you will get more meaningful assistance from some of your sympathetic colleagues on the faculty. Talk to them about the various issues surrounding your case, try to get from them a sense of whether you were evaluated fairly, and bounce ideas off them about which strategies might be most effective in your request for reconsideration.
The Dean of Faculty will probably offer to talk to you, and will likely offer to help you understand the procedures for how to proceed, but for the most part you should ignore the Dean's advice or at least take it with a large grain of salt. At the point at which your tenure case is denied, your relationship with the college (and the Dean as its primary representative) will change from one of collegiality to one of antagonism. The Dean's job will no longer be to protect, support or advocate for you. On the contrary, the Dean must shift into a mode where you are now a disgruntled employee who poses a potential threat to the college and may ultimately decide to sue them. When the Dean offers assistance in understanding the options and procedures available to you, you should be prepared for the possibility that he or she will do so in a way that attempts to limit the actions that you will consider appropriate to pursue. Under no circumstances should you accept anything anybody tells you at face value. Instead, you should read and re-read the faculty handbook to find every technicality that might be used against you and every technicality that you might exploit. My own strategy was also to ask questions every time I had them. I only rarely got answers, but even forcing people to refuse to answer your questions will hopefully get through to some people how awful the current state of affairs is at Colby.
In particular you should adopt a policy of forcing people to say "no" to you. This is not a good time to be shy or passive, although it is also important to remain as polite as you can. Ask everybody you can for information about your case, including the Dean, your departmental reviewers, and the P&T members. Many or most of them will refuse to tell you anything meaningful. However, you might get lucky and actually get some information. If you get a pattern of negative responses, then that could possibly prove useful in the future as bad publicity for the college or for a potential legal case. In particular, you should ask the Dean of Faculty for every kind of documentation you can think of regarding your case. Force the Dean to say "no" or to give you clarification on the issues. The more people tell you, the more likely they will slip up and actually give you some information (which is one of the reasons they will be so hesistant to talk to you). It would be best to carry out as much of this communication as possible via email so you have it on record, although many people will tend to be more candid in person.
When you prepare your reconsideration request, you have to be careful about organization. I will note again that I am giving advice here about a process in which I failed (my reconsideration request was denied 3-2). However, I still think my approach was the right one. The faculty handbook says that the reconsideration committee can identify reasons to grant reconsideration that you do not even raise in your request, but you should not expect this to happen. They are going to be so busy and overwhelmed (and likely resentful of having to take on this extra duty) that they are not going to go looking for any extra work than what you give them. This means that you have to force them to consider every possibility you can come up with, implying a smorgasbord approach to the request.
You need to identify every possible technicality on which the committee might grant reconsideration, because you can not be sure what is going to resonate with them. If you get a "friendly" committee, they will find a way among the reasons you listed to grant your reconsideration, so make sure you give them lots of choices. If you get an "unfriendly" committee, you are likely simply to be out of luck. But the more you throw into the request, the more possible it will be that you will find some technicality on which three of them actually agree with you.
However, you also must make sure that you make the request palatable to the committee. My approach was to begin with a description of the issues and my confusion about my case, followed by a concise outline of the grounds on which I requested reconsideration. I followed this with a number of pages providing expanded reasons and evidence for the grounds I identified. I then included an enormous number of appendices containing every argument I could think of supporting my case. The reasons for this were twofold. First, I realized that if I was denied in my request for reconsideration, then I would not be given any other avenue for presenting information or arguments about my case. As in my case, the reconsideration request may be the final opportunity you have where members of the college are forced to read what you have to say (and listen to you, because they are also required to interview you). Second, by preparing this material at the time of your request, you will be in a much better position for presenting your arguments if your request is granted.
If your request in granted, the college may attempt to rush things along as much as possible. Presumably this is partly to try to get things wrapped up in a timely manner (which is also to your benefit), but it also puts you at a disadvantage by giving you little time to prepare for your P&T interview (if your reconsideration request is approved, P&T is obligated to interview you, and you need to take full advantage of this interview). In response, you should insist that the Dean of Faculty give you sufficient time to prepare (particularly since the timing of this will likely be somewhere near the end of the semester), but you should also be as prepared as possible ahead of time.
If you are granted your request for reconsideration, consider yourself lucky. But you unfortunately have to keep in mind that the odds are still stacked against you. You are going up against nine people who have made their judgment against you and are not likely to want to admit they may have made a mistake. Additionally, these are likely nine people who have fully subscribed to the sanctity of the tenure procedures at Colby, and who are much more likely to want to defend the institution and their own reputations than to defend you.
One thing to understand is that the reconsideration of the P&T committee is not required to have any relationship whatsoever to the grounds on which your reconsideration is granted. And, as in every other aspect of the tenure procedures, there is no accountability built into the system. It would be reasonable to expect that the P&T members will "circle the wagons" and do whatever they can to defend their original decision. Even if you have identified some valid complaints with the original decision, they can and will reexamine every aspect of your case, even introducing new concerns that have never previously been mentioned, in order to find a way to deny you tenure. You need to be prepared for this eventuality by anticipating every possible new argument they might try to bring against you. I would advocate bringing ample written material (graphs, notes, etc., maybe even some powerpoint slides) to have ready responses to any concerns that are raised.
However, you can also possibly use the ill-defined boundaries of the reconsideration to your advantage. Do not feel that you have to limit your topics of discussion to those issues identified or approved by the reconsideration request committee. Rather, you should make your case thoroughly and persistently. Hammer on every point that highlights the strengths of your case. Do not be afraid to do this in a biased way. The P&T members are going to look for every negative point they can find, so there is no reason for you to be "fair" and help them do that. Instead, do everything you can to distract them into focusing only on the positive aspects of your case as you see them. You should also prepare documents to hand out to the P&T members so they are forced to consider new information on your terms.
If your reconsideration request is denied, be prepared to deal with an additional bout of anger, depression, and confusion. At this point, you should return to the idea of being selfish, figure out what types of actions will satisfy you, and pursue them. This may mean simply fading into the background and eventually disappearing. It may mean going back to that lawyer and pursuing legal action. But it may be most productive overall to make sure you "get in the face" of everybody who has just rejected you. Remember that there is no accountability built into any of the tenure procedures. The people involved will be most comfortable if you just disappear and they do not have to think too much about the consequences of their actions. You should continue going to Colby events so people have to deal with you...some of them may even express some remorse and friendliness, which could give you some kind of catharsis. Others may feel uncomfortable having to deal with you, but after what you are having to go through, they ought to suffer at least some discomfort as a consequence of their actions. Also return to the strategy of making people say "no". Ask questions. Try to get clarifications and explanations from all of the people involved. Maybe you will actually get somewhere. Maybe someone will actually admit (even if only to themselves) that they might have made a mistake. Maybe somebody will put a chink in that armor of secrecy and actually give you some insight into what happened. But if not, you can at least force them to say "no", and hopefully thereby to face the fact that they are a willing participant in an unfriendly and corrupt process.