The Promotion and Tenure committee voted 8 to 1 to deny me tenure. The committee is required to give me summary statements justifying their votes. Unfortunately, the summaries I received were woefully vague and inadequate. They also included factual errors about my case. It is also fairly clear that, once they decided to deny me tenure, they went to extreme and absurd lengths to paint a negative picture of my case. It is one thing to decide that my case is not worthy of tenure. It is quite another to support that opinion (presumably also in the official letters sent to the President of the college) with misstatements and exaggerations of fact. I wonder why they chose not to be completely honest in their reports.
There is absolutely no accountability built into Colby's tenure procedures. Member of P&T are free to write bad summaries or use bad judgment with no significant repercussions. In fact, for the most part nobody would be aware of such transgressions because the proceedings are all kept secret. Although we are instructed to have faith that all P&T members take their jobs seriously and are high-quality evaluators and judges, the fact is that they can essentially do anything they want, as long as they follow the vaguely specified and badly organized "official procedures". They also have the protection of being allowed to keep all of their proceedings secret. Combining this secrecy with the shoddily written summaries makes it extremely difficult to verify whether the committee members followed proper procedures and used sound judgment. However, I have been assured repeatedly that they do, despite evidence to the contrary. It seems curious that the faculty at large are willing to accept the mythology that otherwise extremely "human" colleagues become supreme and fair judges when they are anointed to the P&T committee.
The Promotion and Tenure committee's denial of my tenure case was based primarily on their conclusions that I am not an "Outstanding" teacher, although they also asserted that I did not perform enough college-level service (in spite of the fact that the conventional wisdom is that "nobody is denied tenure because of service"). In coming to their conclusions about my teaching, the committee ignored the extremely high student evaluations I received in my most recent courses, choosing to interpret my improvement as some kind of underhanded trick designed to save my tenure case in some illegitimate fashion. One of the committee members went so far as to suggest that the students who wrote me letters of support were not actually being truthful! The student letters I received were unanimously positive and mostly effusive, but this committee member chose to assume that they actually indicated some sinister but hidden expression of dissatisfaction with me.
I did receive one positive vote from the P&T committee, and I have my suspicions about who cast that vote. Of course, I cannot be sure of that, but my working assumption is that I know who the eight are that voted against me. If any of them are on your Promotion and Tenure committee, I would be extremely wary. Additionally, if you are interested in fairness in future tenure cases, I would advise against voting them into the committee in the future. They would probably thank you for doing so, because I understand that serving on P&T is an arduous and thankless job. But preventing these particular people from serving again would almost certainly improve the flawed process in some small way.
I have attempted to communicate several times with the members of this committee, in my continuing attempts to make sense of their decision. However, with some minor exceptions, I have run into the stone wall of secrecy that shrouds all tenure proceedings at Colby and ensures that they will be inconsistent, mysterious, and sinister if necessary. With two exceptions, my requests to communicate have so far been completely ignored, without even the courtesy of a note explaining “I cannot talk to you about this, sorry”. I suspect the view of the college is that this means they are doing their jobs appropriately. I, on the other hand, think it is a shame for a colleague to be treated this way. I used to believe that Colby was a great and "different" kind of place. But it will now be very difficult to find good things to say about it after I have left. One of my supreme fantasies is that some day, maybe decades from now, one of these people will send me a note saying “I’m sorry…we made a mistake.”
Randolph M. Jones
People involved in my tenure case
How (not) to get tenure at Colby College