The Tenure and Promotion Process

I recently had a conversation with a good friend and colleague at a Research I institution about all of the frustrations she was experiencing with the tenure and promotion process. Even though she was already the author of three books with outstanding university pressess in her third year at the University, and even though she is an outstanding teacher, she still has to worry about getting tenure, because she is required to publish a book within a year of the time she is up for tenure. In the meantime, she has had to justify whether books published by Ivy League presses are sufficiently well reputed to meet the standard of her university.

Until recently, I felt quite fortunate not to be in her situation. WestConn is a Master's level teaching university. Our primary function is to be the best teachers we can possibly be. And WestConn professors (if any students ever read this blog, you may be surprised by this, but trust me that it's true) work incredibly hard on improving their teaching. Not to mention that we teach a 4-4 load of courses every year. But for a lot of us, this is extremely rewarding. We know that we are teaching a lot of first-generation college kids and that we have a real chance to make a difference for people. At least for me, teaching at WestConn is very much preferable than teaching at a place where all of the students were born with silver spoons in their mouth, because at those places the students will be fine anyway, since if they fail out mommy and daddy can always get them a nice job at daddy's multimillion dollar firm.

But the shenanigans of this year have caused me to think twice about my opinion. In the interest of decorum and people's privacy, I can and should only talk in general terms about this.
(In retrospect, this is precisely the reason I decided that this blog should be anonymous, even though I'm convinced I'm writing to myself and no one actually reads it). Suffice it to say that there is a prevailing campus opinion that the University's Promotion and Tenure Committee made a number of highly political and random decisions about promotion and tenure this year, denying some of the best professors tenure and forcing them out of their jobs on the slightest pretext. In many ways, it is a shame that these professors and the AAUP simply lie down on these issues, because if the students knew more about who was on that committee and who was denied, they would raise a major fuss.

Why did this happen? The truth of the matter is that the reason that the Promotion and Tenure committee can reward their friends and act punitively toward those that aren't their friends is because WestConn doesn't have the kind of promotion and tenure standards that my friend at a Research I university has. Since no one has any idea what is really necessary to achieve promotion and tenure at WestConn, the P and T is free to make it up, horse trade, and make subjective decisions, and the rest of us are left to scratch our heads. The fate of scores of university professors is left, in essence, to what faction of faculty wins a faculty popularity contest every year.

Without discussing individual cases, this is an absolute travesty. There should be concrete standards for promotion and tenure at WestConn so that faculty can protect themselves against P and T members who have an axe to grind. The truth of the matter is that if the P and T members applied their standards to themselves, most of them would not have received promotion themselves.

WestConn's students and administration are great, as are many of the faculty. The worst thing about this university is the continued prevalence of cliques and backroom deals among the faculty. This problem needs to be addressed in a systematic way.