The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance to respond.
I'm not quite sure what I would object to in this, as it's a really sketchy outline of what they did, most of which is directly determined by the official procedures spelled out in the faculty manual. It's a part of the process, though, so I read it over, and sent my official acceptance in this morning.
If you're curious about what's involved, here's a condensed version:
- They read the file box full of research and teaching materials that I gave them in September.
- They found three people at other institutions to review my published work, and a fourth to come to campus and look at my lab.
- They interviewed the eight other faculty in the department who are on campus, and got a letter from the one person on sabbatical.
- They got letters from the chairs of the college committees that I served on, plus one unsolicited letter from an administrator about my interaction with students (which sounds ominous, phrased that way, but I also got a copy of the letter, and it was good).
- They interviewed twenty current students chosen from my class rosters by a random algorithm, and received letters from three recent alumni.
Whatever you might think of the tenure process generally, you can't say they're not thorough.
And now, all I can do is wait. I hate waiting.
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Let's do it the HR way,
1) Will he be a decent drinking buddy?
2) Will he reliably generate funding streams subject to overhead charges?
3) Do we need diversity hires to fill jackbooted State compassion quotas?
Godspeed on making it with objective competence. Nobel Prizes don't fund the Department of Brythonic Poesy (said faculty being absolutely fantastic drinking buddies).
Wow! That is REALLY thorough.And very professional.
I once got screwed by two out of a department committee of 3.
Do you have any evidence that they didn't perform a body cavity search while you were asleep at night?
He sleeps very soundly, but I don't, so I think we can rest fairly well assured on that one.
The real question...
...did the commitee avail itself of blogsearch.google.com?
...and how does Technorati Rank get mixed in with h-number?
-Rob
At our shop, tenure decisions can only be appealed (in principle) on procedural issues, so this kind of a document is a standard "we did what we wuz supposed to do...CYA" kind of document. Not really meant to have any real information in it!
Good luck man!
Good luck!