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Subject: Parting thoughts |
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From: " |
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Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 01:07:34 -0400 |
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To: William Adams |
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CC: jboulos@boulos.com |
Dear Bro and Ed,
As I leave Colby, I find there are still a few things
that I would like to communicate to you. At the top of the list is that I
hope you will both do everything you can to improve the tenure procedures at
Colby. Why anybody is content with a process that is so opaque and
therefore guaranteed to be wildly
inconsistent continues to mystify me. I hope you will make every effort
to make tenure procedures at Colby more transparent and more consistent.
I understand that many institutions do a much better job at this than
Colby. We all have to accept that a process like this will never be
perfect, but at the same time I think it is important for the college to
acknowledge that Colby's procedures are not even close. Even an imperfect
system should never treat anybody the way Clare and I have been treated...that
type of treatment should never be allowed to happen again. I sense that
there are people at the college who would like to improve things, and that
makes me happy. But I am also concerned that there does not really seem
to be any sense of urgency about improving things. It seems to me that
the college in general has the attitude that what happened to us is not likely
to happen again, or that it would really not be so bad if it did.
I also have a couple of more personal comments.
Ed, among all the things I have gone through, I must at the very least
genuinely thank you for the time you spent answering my questions and listening
to my complaints, particularly for that three-hour session in your office.
It was obvious that at times you were doing this quite grudgingly, so I do
greatly appreciate your time and attention. I also believe you have made
some odd and unfortunate decisions about what it means to "defend the
institution" of tenure at Colby, which has in turn led you to make
comments and adopt positions that, upon reflection, I think even you will
eventually realize are somewhat absurd. I think, for example, of your
insistence that "there is no such thing as 'a little bit confidential'",
which is a false assertion on its face. Every institution, including
Colby, defines which aspects of a decision it will hold in confidence and which
it will not, and Colby has gone overboard on this to an extremely unhealthy
degree. Be that as it may, I suppose I will always wish you had found it
in your heart to do more for me and to be more forthcoming with information,
but I sincerely appreciate all the time and energy you did spend at my insistence. I will also always wonder if, on
a personal level, you really did feel I deserved tenure at Colby (I really can
find no other reasonable way to read your summary of my sixth-semester review),
and the rest of this has been the act you feel you must play as the dutiful
corporate officer.
Bro, in contrast to Ed, you refused to give me any of your time or attention to discuss my case or my thoughts on
how tenure at Colby could be improved. I can imagine some of your reasons
for adopting this position, but in the end I do not find them compelling.
When it comes down to it, you have shown me a great deal of disrespect by
refusing to meet with me. If you ever change your mind, I would still
value immensely a frank and open discussion with you, as uncomfortable as that
would be for both of us. I hope that in the future, you and the rest of
the college will learn to treat denied tenure candidates as humans with
legitimate concerns and valuable opinions (I'm really not this much of a jerk
in person, you know). I suspect that a primary reason you have refused to
meet with me arises from an institutional fear of being sued. I have no
plans to sue the college, but if this is part of your reasoning, I think that
you should consider the strong possibility that you make it more likely for the institution to be
sued when a disgruntled employee feels they have no other way to be
heard. My understanding is that doctors under threat of malpractice suits
make this same mistake all the time. They never bother just to sit down
and talk (and maybe even apologize) to the disgruntled patient.
*****
Finally, I have a set of questions to which I think you and the college owe me and the greater Colby community
answers. I am sure I could come up with many more questions, but I feel
these touch on some key issues that are not clear but ought to be. I
think it is a travesty that the answers to these questions are not already
obvious, which means that the institution is essentially being dishonest with
its employees and prospective employees. Frankly, I do not expect that
you will ever give me the answers to these questions, and my suspicion is that
the answers to some of them may not even exist. But I would like to
stress my opinion that the college ought to have answers for all of these, and
the answers ought to be publicized. I hope you will prove my expectations
wrong by answering these publicly. Or just give me the answers...I will
be happy to publish them. But failing that, I hope you will consider
these questions for yourselves, and judge whether I am right that Colby's
current policies are unclear and potentially dishonest.
1. Are the service requirements for tenure and promotion quantifiable?
I have been told by many people that none of the
tenure requirements can be quantified, nor is it desirable to do so. However,
I am confused by the multiple passages in the faculty hand book asserting that
service expectations will be pro-rated for Category III part-time
appointments. To be quite clear, it is impossible to pro-rate anything that cannot be quantified.
The existence of these passages in the faculty handbook
therefore imply that service requirements are quantifiable. But
everyone I have spoken to, including the Dean of Faculty, say they are
not. Which is true? If service requirements are not quantifiable, then
I think the college would be well advised to change the language in the faculty
handbook concerning partial appointments. What can it possibly mean to
pro-rate an expectation that cannot be quantified? It is dishonest to
imply that the expectations can be quantified if in practice they are not.
2. If the service requirements for tenure and promotion are quantifiable, what
are the quantified requirements?
3. Are the service expectations for people sharing a tenure-track faculty
position also required to be pro-rated?
The faculty handbook only mentions the pro-rating of service requirements with
regard to Category III appointments. Everybody I have asked, however,
assumes that the pro-rating also applies to tenure-track job sharers. The
Dean of Faculty also told me this more than once. But in an email I
received from the Dean of Faculty last August, he changed his position.
He wrote "...there is no requirement to evaluate pro rata a candidate in a
shared appointment's service." Is this truly the policy of the
college? Because if it is, I and everybody else have
been lied to, or at least misled. If this is the policy, it would
be extremely dishonest and underhanded of the college not to inform job-sharing
candidates of this fact during the job interview. It would also be
ridiculous not to make this policy known to people in a position to advise and
evaluate job-sharing tenure-track faculty, or not to make the full-time service
expectations clear to the pre-tenure faculty members.
4. Are P&T members expected and instructed to take job-sharing into account
when evaluating a candidate's record of teaching performance?
Again, this is something I have been told repeatedly is the case, including by
the Dean of Faculty. But the tone of some of the Dean's
emails suggest a difference or change in policy. It is not clear
to me at all now whether this is in fact the expectation, although I was
promised upon hiring that it was. If P&T members are not required to
evaluate a job-sharing teaching record differently from a "normal"
teaching record, an honest and open institution would make this policy clear in
the faculty handbook, and it would not lie to candidates upon being hired or
during their pre-tenure careers.
5. If P&T members are required to take job-sharing into account, are they
instructed on how to take it into
account?
If there is no institutional policy on how to adjust evaluation procedures for
job sharers, then it means the adjustments are entirely up to each individual
P&T member. This would make the "requirement" completely
vacuous. If P&T members are not instructed how to do this, then this
fact should be made clear in the faculty handbook. If they are instructed
how to do this, then the instructions should be publicized.
6. Is there any existing institutional policy on how the evaluation of job
sharers should be different from "normal" situations?
If there is, it should be published. If there is not, then that fact
should be published.
7. Are there any conditions under which egregiously poor or incorrect judgment
on the part of a tenure evaluator could be considered a violation of Colby's
tenure evaluation procedures?
Denied tenure candidate are only allowed to be granted reconsideration on
procedural grounds. Thus, if there were a case of egregiously bad
judgment, it could not be remedied unless such bad judgments can be cast as
procedural violations. If bad judgments cannot be viewed as procedural
violations, then it really is the case that there is no accountability for
tenure evaluators (including P&T members, the Dean of Faculty, or the
President himself)...they can make their decisions and evaluations any way they
see fit, with no recourse for the tenure candidate. If this is true, an
open and honest institution would make this fact clear to prospective tenure
candidates. If, in contrast, it is possible to consider egregiously bad
judgment to be a violation of procedure, then the institution should publish
the conditions under which this can occur.
8. Is there any recourse for a tenure candidate to respond to poor or incorrect
judgment on the part of one or more tenure evaluators?
It seems clear to me now that the answer to this is "no", but I would
never have suspected that until I went through this ordeal. If the answer
to this question really is negative, then an honest institution would proclaim
this fact in bold letters in the faculty handbook.
9. Given the shroud of secrecy that Colby actively encourages, why should
anybody have faith in the decision making that goes on entirely behind closed
doors? It would behoove the institution to publish its arguments for why
anybody would rationally conclude that these secret proceedings must be
consistent, fair, and reasonable. Because it is clear to me that there is
no requirement that they must be consistent, fair, and reasonable, and no recourse to the tenure candidate if they
are not. If my assessment is correct, an honest institution would
publicize this fact. But my assessment should not be
correct. Especially at a supposedly liberal college, faculty personnel
decisions should be as transparent and consistent as possible.
Many thanks (again) for your time. I welcome
your responses.
Randy Jones
rjones@soartech.com
http://www.quagmeier.net/~rjones/
http://www.quagmeier.net/tenure/