By Benjamin Pontz, Editor-in-Chief
It turns out the adage might be true: the third time may well be the charm. At Thursday afternoon’s meeting of the Gettysburg College faculty, the body approved two changes to the language in the Faculty Handbook about tenure and promotion after spending two previous meetings discussing and amending the motions.
In February, the Faculty Personnel Committee, which drives the tenure and promotion process, proposed three motions to adjust language governing how members of the faculty are evaluated for tenure and promotion to full professor:
- The first proposal would allow a candidate for promotion to request that the Provost determine the membership of a departmental evaluation committee if circumstances within the department would “interfere with an accurate departmental assessment.” That motion passed on Feb. 20.
- The second proposal would amend language in the Faculty Handbook about the standards for promotion from associate professor to full professor by removing language that said candidates’ scholarship needed to have gone beyond what they achieved in their initial promotion to associate professor and to reflect “greater maturity” as a scholar. It would also add language suggesting that teaching and advising have value and should be considered.
- The third proposal asks departments to develop standards for all three areas of promotion evaluations: scholarship, teaching, and service. Already, departments are required to have standards about what constitutes a high level of scholarship.
The faculty spent Thursday discussing and debating the second and third motions and ultimately approved them both by wide margins.
While FPC Chair Bret Crawford said that the second motion does not aim to lower the standards of scholarship required for promotion to full professor, Associate Professor of Physics Kurt Andresen expressed concern that the motion does so nonetheless.
The amendments to the Faculty Handbook removed language about the value of “advancing and defending important ideas” in favor of language about “holding leadership roles” in professional organizations, and it removed language suggesting that faculty members need to “attain a high level of maturity as a scholar” and produce scholarship “beyond that required” for promotion to associate professor in order to be promoted to full professor. Andresen objected to the idea that, in the seven years between getting tenure and going up for full professor, one’s scholarship would not have advanced is problematic.
“The idea that someone … that has had seven years to basically produce scholarship wouldn’t have a higher level than the person who just came into college and had to do that all while building a lab is really does a disservice to the untenured faculty because, to me, it is telling them that we are expecting much more work out of our pre-tenure faculty than we expect out of our tenured faculty, which, to me, is the opposite of what it should be,” Andresen said.
Professor of Psychology Kathleen Cain disagreed, stating that, in her view, the motion acknowledges that people’s careers take different trajectories after receiving tenure and that some people, often women and people of color, are asked to do a disproportionate amount of committee work that may limit their time to engage in scholarship.
“There are real inequities in who is asked to do what,” she said. “This motion allows us to see the whole of a person’s contributions.”
The motion passed 91-26-2.
The third motion faced minimal opposition. Director of the Sunderman Conservatory of Music James Day and Associate Professor of Music Avner Dorman expressed reservations about departments being asked to develop discipline-specific statements about what good teaching looks like with Dorman noting that, in the Conservatory, that could lead to extremely segmented criteria given the range of instruction modalities that exist there. Professor and Chair of Art and Art History Felicia Else suggested that, if FPC wanted guidance on what good teaching looks like in a discipline, those faculty members could address that in the evaluation letters they write of candidates seeking tenure or promotion, though FPC member and Associate Professor and Chair of East Asian Studies Eleanor Hogan replied that candidates ought to know what the standards are before they are evaluated on them, which means they should be put in writing. The motion passed 77-29-9.
News and Notes
Associate Director of Multicultural Engagement and LGBTQ+ Life Shantanique Johnson opened the meeting with a short presentation on how faculty members can approach using students’ correct pronouns.
“Pronouns are important because they are a basic way of showing respect for gender identity and gender expression,” Johnson said.
She added that some people struggle with the use of “they” as a singular pronoun, but she noted that texts from the King James Version of the Bible to William Shakespeare and Jane Austen have used “they” in a singular context.
Announcements
- President Bob Iuliano said that the college is paying close attention to the coronavirus and “wondering about the implications it may have to the work that we do here.” He noted that the Campus Emergency Response Team is meeting regularly and that a campus-wide email sent earlier in the week provides guidance for how members of the campus community should respond at this point.
- Academic Program and Policy Committee (APPC) Chair Amy Evrard announced that the college expects to convene a Curriculum Committee to begin working over the summer on proposals to change the Gettysburg Curriculum (the college’s core of classes that all students must take to graduate). To date, a subcommittee of APPC has worked to gather information and will prepare a report by the end of March that will help frame the work of the Curriculum Committee, which will be co-chaired by a member of the faculty to be determined along with Provost Chris Zappe.
