Digest of General Announcements, Natural Sciences Faculty   
Wednesday, August 16 2006

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In this issue:

    Miscellaneous
      Goodbye

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Date: 15 August 2006 12:04
From: "Randolph M. Jones" <rjones@colby.edu>
Subject: Goodbye

(For some reason, the system is only letting me send this to Natural Sciences Faculty...if someone would be willing to forward this to the All Faculty General Announcements, I would greatly appreciate it.)

Hello all, and goodbye...

I may not get a chance to say a proper goodbye to all of you.  I gather Colby doesn't throw going-away parties for people who have only been here for eight years.

However, for the forseeable future I will be remaining in Waterville, working out of my home.  My new email address is rjones@soartech.com, and my phone number is 872-6720.  We new web site is at http://www.quagmeier.net/~rjones/

If you haven't yet had a chance to review my thoughts on the Kafkaesque things that have happened to me at Colby, you will still be able to do so at http://www.quagmeier.net/tenure/

You can get the full story (well, my side anyway) there.  But I'll leave you with these thoughts:

You, my colleagues, are discarding me without telling me why.  You need to understand how frustrating and depressing that is.  It's one thing to aim for a target and fail.  It's quite another to do so while blindfolded, and while someone is deliberately moving the target.  I have also been stonewalled at nearly every turn in my attempts to learn what really happened to me and to improve things for future tenure candidates.  I hope some of you who really do care about the values of a liberal academic institution will put your energies into making sure promotion and tenure practices at Colby become much more open, consistent, and fair.

1. Every committee member on every one of my evaluation committees had served at some point on P&T, suggesting they ought to be intimately familiar with Colby's tenure requirements and practices.
2. Until my promotion and tenure committee decision, not one of these committee members, nor the Dean of Faculty, identified any significant problems with my case during my career at Colby.
3. In spite of that, 8 out of 9 members of P&T decided there actually were significant problems with my case, indicating that there is no clear or consistent understanding of tenure requirements at Colby.
4. Rather than clarifying this paradox, the reasons these colleagues of ours gave me were in turn vague, inconsistent, inaccurate, and absurd.
5. The culture of secrecy, lack of consistency and openness, and misplaced sense of institutional allegiance at Colby has prevented me from discovering the real reasons for my dismissal.
6. As a result, I still do not know why I was denied tenure.
7. If you think this is an appropriate, or even acceptable, way to treat people, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

If any of you at any time find it in your heart to shed even a little light on what has happened to me, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks!  I'll miss teaching at Colby.

Randy

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Colby College General Announcement sent to 
General Announcements, Natural Sciences Faculty   
by "Randolph M. Jones" <rjones@colby.edu>
via http://www.colby.edu/info.tech/services/notices/
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End Digest of General Announcements, Natural Sciences Faculty   
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