TenureProcess

Faculty Council Meeting Reminder

Just a reminder that our first FC meeting of the spring will be today at 4pm in room 1046. All are welcome and invited.

The first item of business will be a discussion of the proposed changes to the Tenure Review Process. If you’d like to see the current state of the proposal, you can go HERE to get the details of what’s being proposed.

(As I’ve said before, this is a project that is near and dear; it was almost four years ago that I first drafted a proposal for changing the tenure process and showed it around to people, a few of whom said, “I like it, but it’ll never happen.” Others tried to make something happen. It took awhile, but here we are and it looks like something may actually happen. So for anyone who says, “Nothing ever changes,” I say, “Voila.” I say it very, very slowly, but still…)

Michael Maltenfort, one of the architects of the proposal, will be joining us for questions and discussion.

See you there, we hope.

 

 

Tenure Process Proposal Feedback

As I mentioned yesterday, this semester’s Teaching and Learning Reinvention team is working on the tenure process, and as many of you may remember, this is an issue that is near and dear to my own heart and it’s come up a few times in the last couple years, too, like here and here and here and here.

Jennifer Meresman (English) is working on that team and wrote asking if I could post the following for her (which I’m delighted to do):

As part of Reinvention, my colleague Michael Maltenfort posted a “conversation starter” about tenure to the Reinvention blog. We are in the process of fleshing out the plans created by last semester’s task force, but we have left the questions very open ended to allow people to share any general (or specific) thoughts. We would love to hear more voices from the HWC community.
If anyone would like to share thoughts with me directly, please feel free to email me: jmeresman@ccc.edu
I look forward to hearing from the HWC community!
Jeni Meresman
And that’s not the only place you can and should give some feedback–the Provost’s blog is featuring a discussion on the tenure process, too (along with discussion about the Post-Tenure process) and there are five comments already, as of Thursday afternoon.
I have met a lot of people who have been associated in one way or another with our tenure process, and I have never heard anyone, not ANYONE describe it in even mostly (as in 51%) positive terms, and typically people had five to six negative things to say to any ONE positive and the most common positive comment was, “It’s over.”
This is a great opportunity–Alicia Anzaldo (Wright) and Franklin Reynolds (Truman) did a great job putting together an initial proposal with lots of really great stuff in it, and Jen and Michael are undoubtedly capable of improving further upon their fine starting point. So please, I’m begging now, take a minute to talk online about your own (or someone else’s) experiences going through the process or making some suggestions about what the process could look like. This is a real chance to change something about our work life that was awful for almost all of us and is awful for many of our current colleagues (faculty and administrators alike), and will be awful for future colleagues unless we seize the chance to change it.
Please do.