Promotion, tenure process will change with contract ratification

In the aftermath of the University of Alabama’s faculty shooting involving professor Amy Bishop, questions arose about tenure policies in higher education. However, before the shooting, promotion and tenure were already in the alteration process at Keene State College.

According to the Keene State College Education Association’s chief negotiator and sociology professor Pete Stevenson, promotion and tenure were two aspects of the new faculty contract that will change pending ratification by the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees on April 29. Stevenson said under the new contract all members of a Department Peer Evaluation Committee (DPEC), which reviews all new faculty, will be tenured faculty members as opposed to a mixed group of faculty in previous years.

“They [DPECs] are evaluative, but they’re also supposed to be developmental and point out weaknesses and strengths,” Stevenson said of the committees. “We look for faculty to be reflective of what they’re doing.”

KSC Provost and VP for Academic Affairs Emile Netzhammer said he understands the change.

“I think promotion and tenure is first and foremost a peer review process that comes with a lot of responsibility and if someone is secure about their own job I can understand why we’d want that to be a responsibility of a tenured faculty,” Netzhammer said.
Netzhammer said in addition to DPECs the timetable for promotion and tenure will be slightly altered.

The promotion and tenure process, outlined in the faculty handbook every year, is a comprehensive approach to evaluate and advance full-time faculty at KSC.
According to the handbook, the process may take either five or six years to complete, beginning with the appointment of an instructor or assistant professor to the faculty. Faculty are expected to keep meticulous records of their academic experience as well as be subject to a series of reviews by DPECs. Records include student evaluations, self-evaluations, DPEC evaluations and evaluations from their dean.

The handbook states, when applying for tenure, faculty will use the materials collected throughout the first five years of employment to construct a final portfolio based upon three subjects: teaching, scholarship and related activities and service to the college.
Associate biology professor Kristen Porter-Utley was granted tenure in May of 2009, along with ten other faculty members. She said her own portfolio consisted of three two-ring binders worth of material.

“I spent a tremendous amount of time working on my tenure portfolio,” Porter-Utley, who spent nearly two months preparing the document on top of her normal workload and research, said. “The hardest part was writing the narratives and organizing it all. It’s hard when you have six years of student evaluations to go down to two binders.”
Porter-Utley said she filtered her work to fit into the concentration areas for tenure and promotion.

 She submitted a four-year grant she wrote, work her undergraduate students accomplished in conjunction with her research, thank-you letters from committees and organizations, copies of her published works, assessments of her own classroom experiences and materials for courses she designed.

Portfolios are evaluated and recommended by the DPEC, Faculty Evaluation Advisory Committee (FEAC), which consists of all tenured faculty members and the dean.
The portfolio then makes its way to the Academic Affairs Office to be reviewed by the VP of Academic Affairs and the president, who, if approved, sends the portfolio to the USNH Board of Trustees for final review and approval. The journey, lengthy as it may seem, is worth its benefits.

Promotion equates to financial gain. Stevenson said a promotion to associate professor yields a $10,000 raise and a promotion to full professor yields a $12,000 raise.
However, tenure remains an important moment in the professional life of an educator. Receiving it is, in its most relatable definition, instant job security while being denied is an automatic ticket to unemployment and a permanent scuffmark. If tenure is not given, the faculty member must leave the institution at the end of the semester. However, the answer to tenure at KSC is genuinely ‘yes.’

“You’d really have to screw up,” Stevenson said.

Netzhammer said it has been a number of years since the last professor was denied in the USNH. He said it’s a result of the college’s focus on professionalism.
“Either they’ve improved and we’re happy to tenure them or they haven’t and left of their own accord,” Netzhammer said.

Stevenson said faculty members who receive tenure usually become more vocal about their departments and the way the college functions because the job protection allows them to discuss things “people may not find politically expedient.”
Porter-Utley agreed and said the biggest difference between her career before tenure and after tenure was her confidence.

“I feel like I have the freedom to voice my opinion more strongly,” Porter-Utley said. “The point of tenure is to allow for innovation and when you are innovative sometimes you take risks.”

The KSCEA and college both provide services for incoming tenure-track faculty to assist in tenure portfolio preparation.

Susan Castriotta, the director of the Center for Engagement, Learning and Teaching (CELT) said she organizes a few programs throughout the spring semester for those looking to receive tenure.

Castriotta said she brings in the FEAC committee and later the deans to answer questions and advise faculty members on what to include and how to include it.
“I bring in people who can explain what’s going on,” Castriotta said. “Some of it is demystifying the process…  doing everything we can is critical.”
However, Castriotta said because of the upcoming ratification of the new contract, programming is currently stalled until a proper session with all the latest data can be put into place.

“We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place,” the former computer science professor said. “We want to do what’s right, but it’s not solid information until the trustee vote.”

Biology professor Renate Gebauer, the KSCEA’s faculty mentor, said she makes herself available for faculty who are compiling their portfolios. However, she said the number of faculty who utilize her services are relatively low, averaging at about three or four faculty members every year.

Porter-Utley said her departmental support combined with the sessions provided through the KSCEA were sufficient to complete her portfolio, which is fairly normal according to Stevenson.

“The way most of us here learn how to put together their portfolio is to ask someone else how they did theirs,” Stevenson said.
Porter-Utley said she thinks most departments provide the same kind of support for newer faculty.

“If faculty want to make each other better it [support] is a great thing,” Porter-Utley, who currently is letting another professor use her portfolio as a guide, said. “We get trained every year to make our files better and better.”
In terms of further improvements to the promotion and tenure system, some faculty members said only minor alterations would be best.

Gebauer said hearing student feedback is a great indicator of professor performance, but said student evaluation forms were not the most accurate representation and would rather see another, more direct method.

Porter-Utley said the only thing she would change is to have the size of the final portfolios reduced because the college already keeps track of newer faculty on an annual basis.
Netzhammer agreed and said many times faculty up for tenure and promotion make “a census of their work,” including all materials. He said the portfolio should be a selection of the best work in a faculty member’s career.

Stevenson, who said he has knowledge of other institution’s promotion and tenure practices, said KSC’s system is highly accepted because of its intentions.
He said larger institutions may be more critical of how much research a professor produces or how many articles they’ve published and even set numerical criteria.
Conversely, he said the biggest reason a faculty member at KSC would be denied tenure is because they couldn’t teach well.

“Student’s perceptions a few years ago were that faculty didn’t take it seriously,” Stevenson said. “I’ve been other places and this place takes it really seriously.”

Corey Smith can be contacted at csmith@keeneequinox.com.