Here I will include occasional updates to activities at Colby concerning tenure or my case.
I have had a chance to meet with Colby's Advisory Committee on Faculty and Personnel Policy to discuss two of my suggestions for improving tenure procedures at Colby. The instructions prior to the meeting were clear: We would spend 10 minutes discussing each of the two suggestions, and we would under no circumstances refer to my particular tenure case. Both restrictions were apparently designed to make sure we did not have as open a discussion as would be possible and necessary to make any real changes. I am glad they are considering some of my suggestions, but also feel that they have not chosen the most important and significant suggestions for their consideration.
I also understand that the Dean of Faculty will finally be holding a forum on December 12 to explain procedures and policies to tenure-track faculty. I see this as an important positive step toward improving the understanding of tenure expectations at Colby. However, once again even this step is being taken in a guarded and backwards manner. The meeting is by invitation only, with invitations issued only to those tenure-track faculty who have not yet had their sixth-semester review. One of the major problems with the tenure procedures at Colby is that there is no consistent understanding of the tenure standards and requirements. Holding a closed meeting for only a few faculty is exactly what the college should not be doing, if its goal is to make this understanding more consistent among the Colby community. So once again I have trouble figuring out exactly what the administration's goal is.
As might be expected, I have been busy with many things, and so have not had the time I would wish to update this web site. However, there have been a few relevant items over the past few months that are worth reporting.
I did eventually have my meeting with the Advisory Committee on Faculty and Personnel Policy.They were “willing to discuss” two of my recommendations for improving tenure at Colby:
After receiving the email stating that we would talk about these topics and nothing else, I sent email to the members of the committee noting that I thought I had made some even more important recommendations. I asked if they intended just to start with these two items, possibly revisiting the others later, or if they had decided the other recommendations were not worth considering further at all. However, I never got a response.
The meeting itself went fine, although the committee ensured it was brief. We spent ten minutes each on the two topics, and the committee members seemed genuinely interested in the possibility of improving things. Mostly they asked clarifying questions, and I answered as well as I could. I had sometimes to refer to “tenure cases that I am aware of”, because of course I was not allowed to talk about my own case. At the end of the meeting I asked if I could have one minute to ask an additional question (it was going to be the same question I had asked by email, which had gone unanswered). The Dean of Faculty said “No” (which was strange in itself, because the Dean of Faculty was not the chair of the committee). So I left and sent the committee members another email, thanking them for their time and asking again about the status of my other recommendations for improving tenure. Still no answer. I eventually received an email from the ACFPP chair saying he would come by my office at some point to talk about this. That never happened.
I continued periodically (maybe 3 or 4 more times) to send email to the ACFPP chair, asking the same question, but for whatever reason I have to this day not received an answer. Toward the end of the semester, I decided to take things into my own hands, drafting a motion to present at a faculty meeting that would compel the ACFPP to consider the single recommendation that I think is most important (this motion actually had very few teeth in it, only requiring the committee to consider and report on this question). Here is the text of the motion I introduced. The motion passed by voice vote with almost no discussion. I was a bit disappointed that there was no discussion, and also interested to not that there were a view “Nay” votes. Now we will wait and see what kind of report the ACFPP delivers in January.
During the 2005-2006 year, Colby opened a search to hire the replacement for me and the person I was job-sharing with. Most of us had assumed this would be a “normal” hire of a junior, tenure-track faculty member who would go through seven years of hoops to a tenure decision, like we did. However, for whatever reason, the college administration decreed from on high that this position would instead be for a senior faculty member; someone who would either be given the job with tenure or would have their tenure case decided within just a few years. My understanding of AAUP guidelines is that the college would not be able to employ me or my fellow job-sharer in a full-time position in 2007 without giving us tenure. But this change in the job description opened what I saw as an interesting possibility of getting around those rules…essentially giving the college an opportunity to correct their mistake (assuming there are people who actually view what happened as a mistake). If they hired us in a new position with tenure, there would be no problems with AAUP guidelines. So we applied as job-sharing partners for the job…not necessarily expecting much, but frankly assuming we would submit the best application they would receive for this position. As it turned out, the department received only a handful of applications for this position that met the minimum requirements for a senior position (plus a lot of applications taking a chance that the department would consider hiring junior faculty). So, in spite of the fact that they received at least one very high quality application :-), the college declared a failed search and will try again in the 2006-2007 year.
At the time of my tenure decision, Colby had a vibrant, friendly, collegial, and (in my opinion) very high quality undergraduate computer science department. There were five of us contributing to its success: I and my job-sharing partner, another junior faculty member, a very good temporary visiting faculty member, and the department chair (who has been around for a very long time and was the only member of the department with tenure). My understanding is that the visiting faculty member really liked teaching at Colby and had aspirations to fill the position that would be vacated by me and my fellow job-sharer. However, when the college changed the search to be for senior faculty members, this eliminated the visitor as a candidate, so this person will be moving on to a different position at an even more highly ranked liberal arts school than Colby. At the same time, the other junior faculty member was getting very nervous about the potential future at Colby, in large part by watching what was happening to me and my job-sharing partner. So this faculty member, too, went out on the market and will begin the 2006-2007 academic year at another even more highly ranked liberal arts school than Colby. From my understanding, this other school actually talked in detail about tenure standards during the job interview, makes the dossiers of successful tenure candidates publicly available, and in general just has a much more open and encouraging attitude toward tenure than Colby does. In any event, the computer science department at Colby has been decimated. Of those five vibrant, friendly, and highly competent people, only one remains. If the secret reasons underlying my denial of tenure actually have to do with a decision by the college to eliminate or deemphasize computer science, then they have been remarkably successful.
Another Colby colleague was denied tenure during the 2005-2006 academic year. From what I hear, this was another case where the candidate received positive reviews until being ambushed by the P&T committee. I also hear, however, that the summary paragraphs this person received were longer than the ones I received. I suppose we should cherish our victories, however small they might be.
My employment at Colby College officially ended at the end of August 2006. To commemorate this, I sent a couple of “goodbye notes”: one to the Colby faculty, and one to the President and Dean of Faculty. In the meantime, a handful of people from various colleges and universities have contacted me, asking to be able to use my website to educate graduate students who are interested in going on to academic careers (at liberal arts schools, in particular). Of course, I am happy to help any way I can. If other people want to add information about their own stories of tenure, I will consider expanding this web site. Of course, I would also be interested in some positive examples and clear explanations of what it takes to get tenure at various places…especially Colby. If you have any questions, comments, information, etc., please contact me: rjones@soartech.com
At the end of January, the Colby Advisory Committee on Faculty and Personnel Policy (ACFPP) issued their “Interim Report on Communication with the Candidate during Tenure Review”. They released this report in order to comply with the section of my motion that required them to deliver an initial report by January 2007 (they delivered the report on January 31, 2007). It is interesting to note that they discussed in this report more aspects of the tenure process than they were required to by the motion, and I was particularly happy to see that there was at least one positive change they seem to be considering to the tenure process. However, when it comes to the principal change recommended by my motion, they basically have nothing but excuses, and apparently plan to stick with the status quo. This disappoints me, because I think the change I have proposed here would be the single most important change they could make (that is, if they were only going to make one change…certainly many things need changing in the long run). The report also annoyed me a bit, because it contains a misleading claim about the ACFPP’s discussions with me. Here is my response to the interim report, which I sent to the ACFPP members, as well as a number of other people who were involved in my tenure case. We will see if anybody takes this opportunity to respond (but I’m not holding my breath...there has still been no response).
If you read my previous update (from August 17, 2006), you will see that the Colby CS department failed in their 2006 search to replace me and the person I shared my position with (even though they had at least one eminently qualified application from me and my job-sharing partner :-)). So for the 2006-2007 academic year they tried the search again. We applied again, but they offered the position to someone else. If you can imagine, they did not even interview us (in fact, they never even had the courtesy to inform us officially that the search had ended). I suppose we can only speculate at which level of the process our application was deemed unfit to consider further. Anyway, I wish the new faculty member luck and success. I hope this person can help return the computer science department to the friendly, collegial, and successful department it once was. There is something else interesting going on, however. This year, the Colby CS department has also been trying to find a new junior tenure-track faculty member to fill the position vacated by one of my good friends and colleagues (who left Colby in part because of what happened to me and my fellow job-sharer...this person is doing extremely well and as much as we miss each other it is clear they made the right choice by leaving Colby). This search also failed, so they had to try again the following year. And what do you suppose was part of the college’s response to this failed search? Well, usually when a faculty member leaves the Colby CS department, the department has made it a tradition to leave that person’s name, email address, and a link to their web page under the heading “faculty alumni”. There used to be a link to my personal web page there (which of course is just one click away from these tenure-related web pages). However, someone associated with the college decided that my web pages must be partly to blame for their hiring failure (I verified that this was the reason), and so they removed the link to my web pages. Unfortunately, this seems completely in line with the college’s tendency to want to try to ignore these problems and sweep them under the rug, instead of facing them and openly discussing them. All I can say is that if I were a newly hired tenure-track faculty member at Colby, it would disturb me greatly to learn that the college had deliberately tried to deceive me by making this information harder to find, as opposed to tackling the tenure concerns head on and responding to them. If a faculty candidate is going to succeed at Colby, they ought to be given the courtesy of knowing what they are heading into. Otherwise, they are going to head into this process as unprepared as I was, and I fear that this will greatly increase the chances of future tenure candidates facing the same kinds of unpleasant surprises I have had to face.