Recommendations for Improving Tenure Procedures at Colby

In general the college should institute whatever changes are necessary to ensure the following:

• All evaluators at all stages of a tenure candidate's career should have the same understanding of the tenure evaluation criteria.
• Any candidate whose tenure case is in danger of being denied should be given the chance to respond to reservations about the case, even and especially if the first time those reservations arise is in the P&T deliberations.
• All people involved in tenure evaluations should be held accountable in some manner. There need to be mechanisms to prevent people, as much as possible, from doing a bad job.

• The reconsideration committee procedures should be abolished. Instead, every denied tenure candidate should automatically be granted a reconsideration, together with a chance to rebut concerns that have arisen about their case.
• The college should give the tenure candidate a copy of the department-level tenure committee's report when it is complete, regardless of what the recommendation is. At this point, the candidate should be allowed to prepare a response that will be added to the dossier.
• Instead of giving denied tenure candidates worthlessly brief and vague summaries, the tenure candidate should receive copies of the complete letters that each P&T member writes to the President. Failing that, P&T members should at the very least be instructed to be much more thorough in writing their summary paragraphs for the candidate.
• As with the department-level tenure committee, the P&T committee members should be required to communicate to the tenure candidate any significant reservations they hold about the candidate's case. At this point (again as with with department-level committee), the candidate should be allowed to review the dossier material and the reservations and to respond to them.
• The college should publish the actual objective standards, guidelines, rules of thumb, and evaluation methods that will be used to evaluate tenure cases. Of course this requires standardizing all of those. This is not a request for a "set of rules". It is a request for at least some semblance of coherency and consistency.
• The college should publish relevant information about recent candidates who were granted or denied tenure, so that everybody can see examples of "tenurable" and "untenurable" candidates. This is important because recent candidates provide the standard by which new candidates are measured, but only a small handful of people in the college at any time knows what recent candidates look like. As an example, the college could publish the student evaluation scores (perhaps averages) and comments (redacted to maintain anonymity) for the candidates granted and denied tenure over the previous 5 years. Recent tenure candidates (both successful and unsuccessful) should be encouraged to publicize their dossier information on a voluntary basis. The P&T committee should also use this information in making its decisions about new candidates.
• As much as possible, the results of tenure cases and decisions should be published. The current confidentiality rules are more detrimental than they are helpful. Rather than ensuring that decision makers do a good job, they allow decision makers to do a poor job with no accountability.
• The college should investigate the possibility of allowing every tenure candidate an interview with the P&T committee (but it should not be held against a candidate who does not want to have an interview).
• There should be an (at least) annual forum to communicate to tenure candidates, department and program chairs, and (potential) P&T committee members the current, consistent set of evaluation standards and methods that are used to decide tenure cases. When appropriate, this forum should also focus on how to evaluate atypical tenure cases, such as those involving part-time, shared, joint, or split appointments.
• The college should consider the fact that P&T members are overworked faculty members who may not have the time, inclination, or skills to perform adequate evaluations of their peers. Additionally, reconsideration committee members are generally busy faculty members who have no training in analyzing matters of procedure or law. The college should consider replacing both of these committees with independent trained evaluators and mediators.