8. Do you understand there to be any additional issues that contribute to decisions on whether to award tenure at Colby? If so, please describe them.
The issue of "fit" is another nebulous one, and "fit" doesn't necessarily correspond to what you might think. Gays and people of color are probably fine (as long as their membership in these groups doesn't sabotage student evaluations). Someone who has divergent political views might have a problem. I believe it's possible that visible parents are discriminated against and perceived as less committed than people who don't visibly have children, even when performance is objectively the same.
I think the college has an unacknowledged problem evaluating faculty who share a line. It's wonderful that, in hiring, the college supports dual career couples. In practice, we may need to re-examine expectations at tenure time for shared lines. For example, it's harder to show a trajectory in teaching when you have taught half the number of courses as someone who occupies an entire line.
From a scientific standpoint, I'm concerned that the new tenure cases are judged against those most recently tenured. This has a natural effect of raising the bar asymptotically toward perfection. In many cases, new faculty are being held to standards that P&T members themselves may not have measured up to - especially more senior faculty, as newly tenured faculty will tend to be more highly rated based on this standard. My concern would be that there is a limit we are fast approaching, if we haven't already reached it, that implies almost perfect student evaluations are what is required. This is simply not realistic.
In the case of my field, it is not clear P&T would know (COULD know) what a tenurable candidate in the field looks like, simply because only one person has been tenured in this field in the past, a long time ago, and that person did not remain on the faculty after the tenure decision. It is not clear any institutional memory exists in this case.
My field is also a unique discipline in that it is evolving so rapidly. I'm not saying that other disciplines are stagnant, but nothing compares to my field in this regard. Often significant changes occur every 3-6 months! In short, we don't have repeat courses in the same sense that other disciplines do. This is especially true in our introductory sequence, where changes so greatly impact the feel of the course, in terms of topics, topic sequence, and environment. In contrast, other departments' introductory science sequences haven't changed for decades, or centuries!
The point of the last paragraph is that when P&T looks for a trajectory of improvement in student evaluations for my department, what is being compared is often closer to new preps for every course - rather than simply repeating a course.
As in any profession - those who come up for tenure in departments that have a lot of experience getting their own through tenure are fortunate; working in a department without such committed and experienced colleagues is a liability. Relatedly, it is a great advantage to work in a supportive department in which accurate information is given when it needs to be given, and in which it is clear that those who have tenure want their untenured colleagues to succeed. And because teaching matters so much - because teaching evaluations matter so much - untenured colleagues need to be given the best chance to succeed by being free to design courses as they see best, with minimal department interference; and those whose classes are bigger - who, in effect, have more student votes - are in a better position than those whose classes are smaller.