Troubling Issues Surrounding My Tenure Case

It would presumably be extremely depressing and unsettling to be denied tenure even if I were able to convince myself that the college had made the correct decision. However, in my case there are a number of questions and unusual elements that make the denial all the more baffling and frustrating. It is largely because of these elements that I have been digging into Colby's tenure processes to try to find out what is really going on.

Here are some of the more disturbing aspects of my case:

• The negative conclusions of the members of my Promotion and Tenure (P&T) committee stand in stark contrast to all of my previous performance reviews at Colby. I received positive feedback in my peer reviews, my sixth-semester review, my merit review, and my department-level tenure review. Additionally, all of these reviews involved people who have served on the P&T committee, and so ought to be more familiar than most with the tenure requirements at Colby. Certainly, positive reviews are no guarantee of tenure, but it is extremely curious that the P&T objections to my case would be so strong, without having even a hint of any significant problems in my prior reviews. This extends even to the Dean of Faculty, who gave me a positive sixth-semester review summary. The lack of even a hint that my tenure case might have been in trouble is extremely troubling.
• The statements I received from the P&T members summarizing their denial of my case are extremely brief and vague. Among other things, there is no clear description of the standards I was expected to meet or how my case was measured and compared. We are supposed to have faith in the tenure system primarily by believing the repeated claims that the P&T members do a strenuous, thorough, and high quality job. But the summaries unfortunately provide no evidence of this high level of industry and quality.
• The P&T summaries contain glaring gaps. Most prominently, in my case it is essential for the evaluation to take into account my job-sharing situation. But only two of the nine P&T summaries even mention that situation. The summaries also neglect to mention that my first two years at Colby were spent in visiting positions, which imposed constraints on my teaching, research, and service opportunities. I am supposed to have faith that the P&T members thoroughly considered all of these aspects of my case, but to take the summaries at face value these aspects had negligible impact on the P&T decision making.
• The P&T summaries contain misstatements of fact. There are only a few of these, and some are relatively minor. But they assume a prominent position in the otherwise extremely brief and vague summaries. They go a long way to damage the faith I am supposed to have in the thoroughness and care that went into the process.
• The P&T summaries go to absurd lengths to paint as negative a picture as possible of my case. For example, the weakness of my college service is overstated (and misstated by some of the summaries). Other summaries comment on the high quality of my most recent teaching evaluations, but express "skepticism" about my ability to sustain my efforts, as if I somehow was able to cheat the system and fool the students for a few courses. One summary goes so far as to mention that all of my student letters are positive, but that the P&T member who wrote the summary does not trust that the students are being honest about their opinions of me. The summaries in general give the impression that the P&T members felt it necessary to grasp at the most tenuous of reasons to justify their denial of my case.
• The college appears to have little success evaluating the records of atypical canidates, especially including those with joint or shared appointments. Note that four of the candidates denied tenure in 2004-2005 were job-sharing candidates. Similarly, only one person has ever been tenured in the computer science department at Colby. There is no evidence to suggest that P&T members are given any significant advice or instructions on how to evaluate these unusual cases.
• The college rules allow reconsideration of a denied tenure case only if there is evidence of discrimination, violation of academic freedom, or violations of procedure. It is arguable whether it constitutes a violation of procedure for the P&T members to hold my case to full-time evaluation standards or whether that falls under the purview of "P&T judgment". However, the very fact that it is arguable means that my reconsideration committee could easily have justified giving me the benefit of the doubt by awarding my a reconsideration. My committee voted 3-2 against me. I take this as evidence that the three majority members either did not agree or did not care that the P&T committee did not evaluate my case in an appropriate way, particularly with respect to job sharing.
• At nearly every step in the tenure process, the tenure candidate is given a chance to respond to any reservations about the case. This extends to the department-level tenure committee; if they declare "significant reservations" with the case, they must describe those reservations and give the candidate an opportunity to respond to them. However, there is no similar requirement for the P&T committee. Paradoxically, because my department committee had no reservations about my case, I was never given a chance to respond to the reservations raised by the P&T committee. There is not even a requirement for them to describe their reservations to any level of detail.

The complaint that pushes me over the edge from frustration and depression to action is the first one, concerning the disconnect between my P&T evaluation and all of my other evaluations. The unavoidable conclusion is that either the P&T evaluations were wrong or the prior evaluations were wrong, and that fact is extremely frustrating to me. The alleged explanation for this kind of inconsistency is essentially, "It was just a difference of opinion. This is a subjective process, and that's the way the faculty here want it." However, just chalking this inconsistency up to "a difference of opinion" is (or ought to be) an unacceptable cop-out. The college owes it to itself and to the tenure candidates for the tenure evaluations to be consistently applied across all phases of a candidate's career. This obviously did not happen in my case.

In response to this, I have tried to pin down exactly what the requirements are to receive tenure from Colby, so I could get some sense of where the mistakes occurred. This pursuit has left me even more mystified. There is no consistent and detailed understanding among faculty at Colby what the requirements are for tenure. This is just as true for the upcoming tenure candidates as it is for the tenured faculty and even for people who have served on the P&T committee. If you ask the people who are most familiar with the process, they are in fact unwilling or unable to give you any straight answers. It is no wonder that tenure candidates receive inconsistent feedback and evaluations when the people doing the evaluations themselves cannot give you a clear answer on how they evaluate tenure candidates. And for the most part, those who indicate they might have something useful to say invariably refuse to, citing the commitment to secrecy in the tenure proceedings. I find this state of affairs extremely troubling, and I would have thought that others would, as well.

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