Hello everyone,

An acquaintance associated with Colby was kind enough to forward to me a copy of the "ACFPP Interim Report on Communication with the Candidate During Tenure Review", from January 2007 (I have attached a copy for reference). I would like to offer a few reactions to some of the interim conclusions and recommendations in this report. I would like to do this in part because the report suggests that the ACFPP committee met with me to discuss the tenure matters associated with the motion I introduced last Spring. But that implication is not true, as I will explain toward the end of this message.

To begin with, I am gratified that there appears to be a willingness to tackle seriously some of the concerns and flaws surrounding current tenure processes at Colby. It is apparent that ACFPP has spent significant time and energy on this. I was particularly glad to see the one concrete positive recommendation, potentially to make some changes to how Colby handles the sixth-semester review. I think making this process more rigorous, comprehensive, and careful will likely be helpful. I hope that the college shares with me the opinion that the ultimate goal of any such changes should be to improve significantly the consistency and transparency of Colby's tenure evaluation standards. As indicated by my investigations into the current state of tenure at Colby, perhaps the primary flaw in Colby's approach is that there is no uniform consensus about what the tenure standards actually are. Colby needs to find ways to ensure that the sixth-semester reviewers, the departmental reviewers, and the P&T committee members are all using the same set of standards (or at least significantly closer to the same set as is the case now). If the proposed changes to the sixth-semester review process can move the college this direction, I believe they will constitute a positive change.

In contrast, as you might expect, I was disappointed to see that there are apparently going to be no recommendations to address the problems surrounding the fact that candidates will be denied tenure in some cases on negative grounds identified by the P&T committee that have never been communicated to the candidate, meaning the candidate never gets an opportunity to respond to them either verbally or substantively.

With regard to this type of situation, Colby's current tenure procedures appear to be internally inconsistent. I find myself struggling with why it makes sense to give a tenure candidate a chance to respond to significant reservations identified by the department committee, but not to allow that same chance for reservations identified by the P&T committee. One problem with this is that (as in my case) a tenure candidate can be denied an opportunity to respond as a direct consequence of the fact that everybody (except the P&T members) thinks that the candidate is great (a paradox I still have not come to grips with). The current approach also seems to institutionalize the notion that the department committee is fallible, but the P&T committee is not. I do not think anybody believes that the P&T committee actually is infallible, but then why does it make any sense for the procedures to be set up as if they were? This fact cannot be denied: the current procedures offer absolutely no recourse to a candidate in the case of confusion, judgment errors, or lack of information on the part of the P&T members - the procedures certainly operate *as if* P&T were infallible, when it comes to their judgment. In any event, if the college does not make any changes to this aspect of its tenure procedures, all of you will (again!) have to deal someday with future tenure candidates going through what I had to go through; receiving consistently enthusiastic and positive evaluations until they are ultimately denied tenure, with no chance to clarify or address the surprise that is sprung upon them, even if it is a result of honest confusion, lack of information, or error in judgment.

It appears that ACFPP has identified two primary reasons why they do not find it feasible to give tenure candidates a chance to respond to reservations identified by the P&T committee (reservations, I reiterate, that have not been identified by ONE SINGLE prior tenure evaluator in the candidate's previous reviews). Both of these reasons depend in part on the apparent fact that P&T members commonly (much to my alarm) do not identify explicit significant reservations or even decide what their vote is going to be until the final vote is taken. Consequently, the first claimed problem is that there is supposedly not enough time after this vote to give the candidate a chance to respond. The second claimed problem is that the P&T members probably would not change their minds after this point anyways (as ridiculous as it sounds, this is what the report indicates...I am not making this up).

While I am sure that there is some validity and pragmatism behind both of these concerns, it seems equally clear to me that they both must ultimately be viewed as cop outs. They also indicate a somewhat worrying acknowledgment of just how capricious the P&T committee's deliberations can be, as well as how confused the college's priorities seem to be when it comes to the process of deciding tenure cases.

To begin with, I question the report's assertion that 'there does not appear to be a definitive intermediate point where a “significant negative judgment” can be identified.' It seems to me that we must take for granted that, if a P&T member ultimately votes no, they must have developed at least one significant negative judgment along the way. It is not compelling to suggest that there is so much caprice built into the system that a "no" voter would not be able to verbalize his or her reservations at least by the time the final vote is taken. In fact, this is what the voter is *supposed* to do when writing the letter to the President and the summary for the denied tenure candidate (although we have seen in my case that there is not necessarily any expectation that the summary be written with any significant level of care). It is also not reassuring to hear that it is common for P&T members not to make up their minds until the last minute...I do not find this consistent with the image of the careful and thoughtful deliberations that everybody claims is the hallmark of P&T. However, in addition to these oddities, it seems clear that a denied tenure case must involve significant reservations that *could* be presented to the candidate. So essentially the first claimed problem is that there is just not enough time to complete the appropriate communication, together with gathering and considering a response from the tenure candidate. This seems to embody an assumption that it is more important to meet the arbitrary, self-imposed deadline than it is to give the case the full consideration it is due. This seems to me to be a questionable prioritization of the college's goals with respect to tenure.

The second claimed problem is that, even if there were enough time, it would "be too late in the process to have the effect of causing members of the committee to reach a different conclusion regarding the case." In other words, even if the college were going to give the candidate a chance to respond, the P&T members would not change their minds anyway! If nothing else, this assumption ought to be a forceful condemnation of the caprice and stubbornness of P&T members! How is it that we simultaneously brag about how careful and considered the process is? Hopefully I am not the only person who can see that this is a circular argument. The essential claim is along the lines of "P&T may not have had all the information it needed to make the right decision, but the information is not actually needed because we have decided (without seeing it) that it would not affect the decision anyway." Can we honestly claim (which is what ACFPP is doing here) that every single tenure case (even cases like mine) is so iron clad by the time of the vote that it could not be swayed by clarifying information? If that is *not* the claim, then it seems once again to give a disturbing preference to expedience over making the correct decision.

The report suggests that this is not really a problem, because any concerns should be mitigated by the fact that the members of the P&T committee may "ask for additional information to be included in the dossier up to the time of its final deliberations and voting." However, I must honestly question how often that happens in practice. I base my doubt on the facts of my own case. For example, the report from my reconsideration committee makes clear that one P&T member performed an analysis of my teaching evaluations that he or she did not see fit to share with any of the other committee members. Additionally, when my P&T committee began identifying reservations about my case, it must have been clear that the consensus they were manufacturing was starkly at odds with the previous reviews I had received. If ever a case cried out for seeking additional information to clarify these issues, my case surely must have. But I have verified to the best of my ability that no additional information was sought out in my case, or at least there was no significant effort to attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction in the starkly contrasting conclusions. The P&T committee appears to have merely manufactured their consensus, made their decisions, and ignored the contradictions between their conclusions and my prior reviews and recommendations (all of which, I should reemphasize, were produced by people who had previously served on P&T, and so who ought to be given some level of legitimacy in these matters). It seems clear that if there ever were a case in which additional information *ought* to be requested by P&T, it would be a case where P&T has identified reservations that *nobody* else has previously identified.

Based on these two concerns, ACFPP has apparently decided not to pursue any further this particular proposed improvement to Colby's tenure procedures. However, given the questionable nature of these two supposed problems, I do hope the college will seriously reconsider whether it would be making the right choice by not recommending any changes to this aspect of the tenure procedures. Again, if the college leaves this part of the procedures unchanged, all of you will undoubtedly come across future cases where tenure candidates are treated in the same inappropriate ways I was.

As a final point, I think it was somewhat disingenuous of the ACFPP committee to include the comment "The ACFPP met with Randy Jones," in the context of this report. ACFPP agreed to meet with me only once, and that was in November 2005...half a year *before* the motion I introduced was passed by the faculty. As well, the ACFPP explicitly prohibited me at that meeting from discussing the main topic that was the subject of the motion. I asked repeatedly over the months why this was the case, without a single time receiving a responsive answer. That was the primary reason I felt it necessary to introduce the motion in the first place, because ACFPP was refusing to talk to me about this issue, and they were even refusing to talk to me about why they were refusing to talk to me. I think it would serve the interests of openness and honesty to issue an amendment to this report that clarifies the extremely limited nature of the discussions between me and ACFPP. Simultaneously, I think it would serve Colby well if the committee (or maybe even the president) *would* talk to me about my ideas and concerns. Unfortunately, however, openness and honesty also do not seem to be among Colby's highest priorities when it comes to tenure.

As always, I remain willing and *eager* to discuss any of these issues with anybody who is so inclined. Unfortunately, my experience is that you are all much more likely to ignore my emails, refuse to discus this with me, and even to avoid making eye contact if you happen to see me walking down the street, or in the grocery store, or at the airport. As a consequence, I have yet to to be presented with a single persuasive argument that Colby's tenure procedures are acceptable in their current form or that my particular case was handled fairly and properly. I am right here waiting if anybody would like to take part in changing my perceptions or correcting any of my extrapolations.

Many thanks for your time. Again, I do greatly appreciate the time various people have put into thinking about these issues. Although I know some view me as antagonistic, I hope you can similarly appreciate the enormous amount of time, energy and restless nights I have also put into trying sincerely to improve how tenure cases are handled at Colby.

Randy Jones