TPM material because???
Single-point approval/denial always has problems. Why exactly is there a committee?
On a side note, at many medical schools, where clinic billing and research grant money are the only real measures of your worth to the university, “Tenure” is just a title. It is not related to job security. Presumably, the clinicians make enough to offset the insecurity (gotta stay productive!). But the PhD researchers are fully constrained by whether they can get government grants. Since the Second Gulf War all federal funding for medical research has been in the toilet (can’t stay productive without grants…!).
Click bait.
…that apparently works.
It’s TPM’s version of “News of the Weird”.
And is this guy doing this from his safe space?
Why exactly is there a committee?
Typically, such committees are “advisory” in nature. The final decision on hiring/tenure/promotion always rests with the dean and, ultimately, the president. Most of the time, the administration will concur with the faculty recommendation, but they occasionally go rogue…
It’s an interesting story because personality conflicts in business and education determine more than objective standards.
The man has been there for 8 years, and NOW it’s decided he doesn’t teach well?
Racist garbage.
Score!
As jte noted, they are advisory, but usually their advice is accepted.
Once in my department, the department voted that a member should get tenure, the university committee voted against, and the president ended up deciding to slow it all down and replay next year. The faculty member did get tenure the next year. The whole chain of decision making is supposed to generate more objectivity than the department alone would have in its decisions.
I can’t say what is going on in this case, but the response leads me to conclude that the president made the right decision here.
The committee makes recommendations to the administration, the administration makes decisions. Wise administrators follow the recommendations unless they can point to something specific in the record to justifies overruling the recommendation.
This is a real problem for medical schools: they have sucked on the NIH teat to fund their teaching faculties. Granted, relative to the teaching load in a college of arts and sciences it’s a small load, but they’ve reached a point where they are having to use start-up funds to assist mid-career faculty when their NIH/NSF funding evaporates.
Part of the problem is that life-science and chemistry departments in non-medical schools discovered the NIH teat and they’ve latched onto it too. The last time I looked, the NIH grant funding rate was under 5%. In the 1960s-70s it was more like 40%. When the funding rate is 40%, if you don’t get a hit on your R-I this year, there’s next year. You revise and improve and go again. If you’re any good you’ll get a hit in three years.
When the funding rate is 5%, either a lot of what’s being submitted is crap (it’s not) or a lot of worthy proposals are going unfunded (they are). What happens is that researchers are looking for funding outside NIH/NSF, and they are finding it with the pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers.
With all that said, we are underfunding medical research (and basic science research as well), but good luck getting the Republicant’s to understand that research funding is an economic stimulus.
Actually, it an important topic. Not so much about the process of tenure in the humanities – the awarding of which is critical to protecting scholarship – but the whole question of teaching, how we expand knowledge and what we accept as valuable, “true”, useful. How such things are vetted, and – so important – how we teach the importance of that process. Also, in a changing culture, how we challenge our defaults. The process at the highest levels is never a place for shortcuts. What is actually required ( --oh, say, to be a historian of late antiquity, for instance) is rarely understood or appreciated.
But at the undergraduate level, we’re at a crossroad. The same one we’re at in our Democracy.
Alison Byerly comes from a strong traditional and unquestionably informed academic background. She is also at the vanguard of bringing academics into the digital age.
How do we make use of our expanding toolkit in developing and stimulating student’s critical thinking? How do we expand without also possibly dumbing down? (Here, I’m thinking of cognitive off-loading https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160816085029.htm – which I know has been rotting my brain.)
I see innovations using social networking as a course tool. Example: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/december/digital-age-classics-121313.html
I’m also looking at tools like Office’s Research Editor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMnD47lnFQk A great time saver for research, sure, but does it help a developing scholar? What a possible recipe for censorship – as in limiting diversity, creativity… Doing papers is about learning process, exposure to a range of opinions, a study in the humility of seeing how much you don’t know, can never know, shaping perspective and forcing you to ask your own questions. Why is this information here, who created it, who does it serve – all the question we need to ask of any resource. Teaching is about trying to impart these lessons.
But yes – I think this topic belongs on TPM.
I guess the kids said he was “boring” on Rate My Professor.
If that’s actually relevant here, it should have been included in the article, or at least a wider context provided. As it stands, I read the headline as “Teacher denied tenure, throws tantrum.”
Bad click bait at that.
Sounds worse than in the Humanities!
Well put. Just automatically concurring with a department vote is problematic in two ways: some departments just love a candidate on a personal level and are willing to overlook teaching and scholarship problems because he/she is a good colleague. Other times, department votes are hijacked by one or two assholes who have it out for the candidate despite their stellar achievements and that needs to be scrutinized higher up the chain as well.
Guess I’m dragging around my own toolkit here.
from the article:
college President Alison Byerly denied his tenure, saying he didn’t exhibit “distinctive” teaching abilities.
Hunger strike (especially a faux one like this) is a stupid way to try and get attention. But whenever a college president (who is by definition at some remove from individual faculty work) says that someone’s work isn’t “distinctive” enough, that’s a red flag for me. (Perhaps because when young I saw a bunch of tenure decisions made with similar phrases; oddly enough, all the people whose work was “important” were white guys with elbow patches on their sports jackets, and all the people whose work was of high quality but just not important enough…)