Measuring up for tenure and promotion at McMaster

Today we had an interesting discussion in our tenure and promotion committee meeting around documentation.

For those of you who know about how secretive universities tend to be, and how much word of mouth tends to rule the roost, you’ll be surprised to learn that universities are moving to a system where less is done verbally and more is done in writing.

What do I mean?

Well, when I went up for tenure and promotion to associate professor in Fall of 2005, I faced a system that was very much based on my ability to guess what was required in terms of putting together a good dossier. This meant formatting my CV the right way, making sure my teaching philosophy statement was understandable and clear, and outlining my research statement and putting my best foot forward in terms of institutional and community service. This was then mulled over by various committees: the departmental (in my case two departments, since I was in a joint appointment at the time) committee, the Faculty of Humanities, the Senate and finally the Board of Governors. In the department, the committee deliberated as a group of equals; at the Faculty of Humanities committee my case was presented by my chair and a companion; at the Senate it was the Dean of Humanities who presented the case. The process was a game of rhetoric and persuasion – very much a case of having good, well-briefed rhetoricians (my chair and my Dean), acting on my behalf. Very little of what I had actually done was written down on paper, other than my statements and the letters from my external referees. Everythings was discussed.

Now things are changing. The process is about to become a lot more paper-driven.

We are instituting a mentor-system, where once a year, a junior or mid-career faculty member, seeking tenure and promotion to associate professor, or simply seeking promotion to full professor, has an interview with his or her chair and assigned mentor. The result of this meeting is a memo outlining the chair and your mentor’s opinions on your progress, as well as suggestions about things you might focus on and others you might de-emphasise.

As well, we are now meant to write up and maintain a teaching portfolio, in which we outline our innovations as educators, discuss our strengths and the way in which we engage students in our research. This is meant to be kept updated yearly and subject to discussion and commentary.

On the surface, these seem like two very good activities to do: being mentored, and keeping a record of teaching approach, both mean that records are kept, best practices can be noted and disseminated.

But there is a transformation underway in the Academy: a move away from collegial trust – the sort of trust you see in a law firm or a public relations firm among the principals, for example. The idea in the liberal professions is that once you become a “member”, that means tenure and promotion to associate professor in Academia, in law or PR firms it means becoming partner, you are a trusted member of a community of equals. In the Academy, it means that you share responsibility for the university’s governance, for its finances, for its image and reputation and for its physical beauty (grounds, buildings, works of art, etc.).

When we move away from the “college of equals” model toward a more bureaucratic one, we diminish the identity of the professoriate. We turn professors into civil servants and highly paid staff of the university. That means reducing the status of the profession, as well as making it less of an “oasis of calm” in a paper-pushing, key-performance-indicator measuring world.

Does this mean that documenting excellence in teaching and guiding junior professors toward productivity in research is wrong? Not at all. I think that official memos and continual mentorship are actually a modern means to promote a healthy exchange of wisdom from an older generation to a younger one. We live in a crazy busy world, and making mentorship and teaching portfolios an “official responsibility” are probably an effective way of making sure that the age-old college of equals is preserved and maintained.

It is however, important to remain vigilant about measurement and reporting. Whenever you leave a completely oral culture where everything is done verbally and informally, and start to adopt “written standards”, you risk having those “written-down standards” starting to count as precedent for things like refusing to grant tenure and promotion. “Sorry, Dr. Jones, we couldn’t grant you tenure and promotion to associate professor because you didn’t listen to our mentorship memos and you didn’t live up to your high-falutin’ teaching portfolio statements.” Taking advantage of the fact that there is documentary evidence of collegial, private mentorship so as to hit someone over the head with it is taking that documentation and turning it into bureaucratic process.

And what makes being a professor in the Academy such a great job is that there is an enormous amount of trust invested in professors. Trust from the parents who send us their children, trust from the tax payer who pay for a portion of our operating budgets, trust from one another to behave in a decent, caring and upstanding way. Trust from our students that we teach them with goodwill, honesty and open hearts – to create an oasis of learning and contemplation for them, that they might grow as people in a secure and peaceful environment.

There are so few secure and peaceful environments in our grasping, loud world. Let’s make sure that any changes we make to the Academy protect what’s great about our universities.

This means reinterpreting old traditions of collegiality, democracy and mutual trust – not replacing them with modern bureaucratic systems that diminish the university for all those who have placed their trust and hopes in it.

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3 Comments

  1. Interesting perspective but I think you are too positive about the oral system. There are plenty of people who didn’t get the right “rumours” about what they needed to include. Or didn’t have a Dean and chair that were skilled rhetoricians or willing to be so for them. And that lack of champion is not always related to any objective measure of the quality of their academic work or even the trust the institution might place in them.

    There are plenty of rumours that circulate in academe that are just plain wrong. Some young faculty are being told they have to do certain things to get tenure by people who do not have a major role in the process and who are not giving correct information. And those junior faculty are not given much information on how to find out where to get accurate information.

    Systems based on tradition, oral decisions, and considerable discretion tend to be highly problematic in terms of equity as well.

  2. Thanks Adam, I am trying to open the doors to the cultural capital that often gets hidden.

    Great comment, Jove. Let me speak to it.

    I agree that oral systems can hide crucial information from people who enter the system lacking cultural capital. In fact, this has been one of the cornerstones of my own practice as an academician – I have striven to “blow the doors off” the privilege and secret of the Academy to make it more open and accessible to people from *all* socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. I myself found the tenure process confusing and daunting and my mother is a professor and a former Master of a College at York U.

    What worries me is that we *completely lose* the oral and verbal component. To me this is so deeply connected to the learning and research community that I want to be a part of in the Academy. Paperwork, memos and bureaucracy build walls between people and can become a cudgel to hit people with.

    I wish there was a way to change our “oral practices” to force more convo and openness and sharing of experiences and mentorship.

    There has to be a way to keep orality central to the system while opening it up.

    For me, losing orality is a big step toward losing the “humanness” of the Academy.

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