Sat 21 Apr 2007
Tenure Denial
Posted by eph under Academia, General, Bill Wagner, Faculty, Tenure at 12:59 pm
A disturbing report from the Record regarding tenure denial:
Mladenovic, Whitaker appeal tenure calls
Amanda Korman – News Editor[…]
Whitaker claims that the reasons he was denied tenure were inadequate. “Bill [Wagner] cited that my publication rate for physics was low, but that’s only half of my work,” as Whitaker’s research is two-pronged. While he does do traditional experimental physics research, he has started to collaborate with Joan Edwards, professor of biology, on biophysics experiments.
Since Whitaker came to the College, he has published five papers in both fields, one in the major publication Nature. “Only two professors [in the physics department] have published more than I have in the past six years,” he said.
He claimed that his dual interests hurt his chances because he was not prolific enough in the physics department. “Of course both publication rates were lower than average, of course [the CAP] was able to use this [against me]. They said I didn’t reach their mark of excellence,” he said.
Link to the published Nature article (PDF) and accompanying videos, which garnered a fair amount of media coverage for Whitaker and Edwards last year.
Does the CAS really want to be discouraging such inter-disciplinary collaboration?
Print
• Email
| « Hitler | Not Be Tolerated » |
22 Responses to “Tenure Denial”
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post
If a comment you submitted does not show up, please email us at eph at ephblog dot com. Please note that commenters are required to use a valid email address when submitting comments.
Aidan says:
they don’t hand out Nature papers to just anyone…
April 21st, 2007 at 2:51 pmDavid says:
1) That Nature article was, I would say, not a real article which will generate substantial interest from others. It was a goofy human interest story with nice pictures. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but not the sort of publication that guarantees tenure.
2) I suspect that the key here is teaching ability.
The College does not care if Whitaker’s teaching skills have “improved.” Is he a Williams-caliber teacher or not? Here is the department. Is Whitaker one of the best teachers or one of the worst? How does he compare to the others on the tenure track or recently tenured?
April 21st, 2007 at 3:55 pmRonit says:
In response to David:
1. I think the argument hinges on his total publication rate in both biology and physics not being counted – it seems awfully blinkered and cognitively rigid to discount his inter-disciplinary work.
2. There are four factrak reviews for Prof. Whitaker. The first 2, from 2002, are negative, and reflect his admittedly bad experience with Physics 100 (a gut course for non-majors).
The two more recent reviews, from 2003 and 2006, both speak of him as a fun, smart, passionate but quite challenging professor.
It is almost inevitable that new profs will improve after their first year – first year SCS ratings really aren’t a fair judgment of their teaching ability. I have personally had some horrendous classes from new profs in other fields, but these same profs are now quite highly rated by their current students. It would be most disappointing if the CAS holds these initial low scores against them when they come up for tenure.
A further concern seems to be a lack of transparency in the process:
April 21st, 2007 at 4:40 pmhwc says:
Not if he plays his cards right. All he has to do is wail about how he’s a conservative being persecuted for his political views. He’ll instantly become the darling of the Weekly Standard crowd.
April 21st, 2007 at 7:41 pmRonit says:
That has nothing to do with anything, hwc
April 21st, 2007 at 11:51 pmJocelyn Shadforth '88 says:
There is probably no more opaque process in all of academe than tenure and promotion decisions. Trying to parse out or divine who did what, how, and why is of very limited utility when stacked next to the emotional trauma of rejection and the prospect of getting one’s academic career back on track. Dr. Whitaker’s interests really aren’t served by third-party speculation as to the causes. I admire anyone who has the wherewithal to challenge such an outcome; when faced with a similar circumstance three years ago, I ultimately decided that I just didn’t have the requisite emotional energy to challenge the process and verdict. While my supportive colleagues and students kept urging me to appeal and even sue, I know that I made the right choice for myself, especially as I was able to land on my feet at a better school with better resources and (at least for now) less rancorous psychosis.
That being said, based on the Record story, there are two policy issues that are potentially troubling:
First, if they haven’t already, it is incumbent upon the College to clearly articulate standards for evaluating interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. To that end, it might be useful to add a member to the CAP, either a faculty member or administrator with obvious interdisciplinary responsibilities or an at-large faculty member, chosen by the faculty as a whole to consider interdisciplinary efforts. I would be disappointed if Williams is indeed lagging in its consideration of interdisciplinary work given its increasing importance in higher education. Moreover, I believe that such work models exactly the type of inquiry that students at a liberal arts college should be pursuing.
Second, to the extent that there have been successful challenges to tenure decisions at other institutions, they often arise from failure on the part of the institution to clearly communicate what type of progress a faculty member is making toward tenure. It is practically obligatory at most schools that annual reviews, such as the Fuqua Letters, contain language that indicates whether or not a professor’s current course will lead to tenure and, if not, what specific steps should be taken to improve one’s chances.
Now, for all I/we know, the College and the CAP does already address these issues and that just hasn’t come across from the coverage so far. I hope that’s the case. In the meantime, I wish Dr. Whitaker the best. There are worse things in life than being denied tenure at Williams, although it’s probably pretty difficult for him to come up with any convincing ones right now.
April 22nd, 2007 at 1:39 amhwc says:
Isn’t it also a zero sum game?
There are only “x” number of tenure slots in a department at Williams. The availability of a slot depends on he projected retirement ages of the existing tenured faculty. So, you could well end up with two assistant professors effectively competing for one slot. They’ve got another guy coming up for tenure in two year.
If they awarded lifetime tenure to every assistant prof, the department would either grow indefinitely or never have young blood coming in.
The downside of the tenure system is that you have to really like a professor to guarantee 30 years of employment.
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:38 amAnother '04 says:
” I believe that such work models exactly the type of inquiry that students at a liberal arts college should be pursuing.”
I agree. If you look at which students from Williams have recieved NSF fellowships for graduate research in recent years — one of the highest merit commendations available to young American scientists — promising science would seem to come from interdisciplinary work.
In this case, I also suspect this professor’s teaching ability was at issue. (Current student comment would be MOST welcome on this point — we alums have no idea).
Tenure committees are non-sensically driven by publication rate statistics. Do good scientists and professors (teachers, that is to say… one hopes at least) demonstrate the highest publication rates? Do a few papers get more citations in sum than the citations of triple that number? Our academic journals today are ballooning with papers that are barely significant. The fever today is for researchers to chop up any large comprehensive project they have into the smallest publishable unit (can we say least common denominator?) in the interest of feeding the tenure file.
And I write this as a graduate student, not as a professor — the fever is ridiculous and unfortunately pervades all corners of science. It is a huge turnoff to working in academia, barring eventually accepting the life of the trveling gypsy (as Professor and fellow alum Charles Dew used to call academia).
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:53 amJonathan Landsman '05 says:
Jocelyn — very well said.
Ronit — before I left, I set Factrak comments to expire after 3 years. How are you seeing 2002 and 2003’s? Are you using admin powers, or has the sunset been changed? I had that feature made and activated it for the exact purpose of retiring comments that became outdated as a professor adapted. If an admin changed the date at which comments disappear, I am upset.
David, I wish you had not said what you did about Edwards and Whittaker’s article. I never knew Whittaker, but I’m quite partial to Edwards and her work. Beyond that, I work in the field of horticulture and I can tell you that the discovery of the fastest plant movement generated a great deal of interest, in fact — perhaps more at the hobbyist, appreciator of plants level, but the quantity of interest cannot be denied.
More to the point, you cannot both praise something achieving publication in Nature and then put it down for being “goofy human interest.” Nature seeks pieces of more broad-interest than do most scientific journals. The revisions they wanted on the Edwards article before accepting it for publication, in fact, were required in such a way as to make it more broad-interest.
This is a case where you commented gracelessly — your “Nothing wrong with that, of course” does not offset “goofy.” If “goofy” was an effort to express the CAS’s point of view, it wasn’t clearly represented so. If by “[no] interest from others” you mean other professors, you did not state this either.
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 amDavid says:
Yes, I meant that. I, personally, thought that the Whitaker/Edwards paper was fun and cool. I love interdisciplinary work. But many people do not understand how some/many/most academics think about these things. I am here to explain that. Big picture, you can divide the work in Nature into two categories: ground-breaking science that would guarantee tenure at Williams and goofy, fun articles with pretty pictures and high likelihood of generating superficial human interest (i.e., an appearance on BoingBoing).. Super fast plant speed is not in the first category. It was, like all publications, a plus for Whitaker, but it was not a big factor to academic evaluators.
Note that the only opinions expressed about Whitaker’s publication record come from, ah, Whitaker. The Record ought to have some, you know, other academic comment (perhaps anonymously). There are many Eph physicists who could give us a good sense of how Whitaker’s publication record stacks up against his direct competitors in the department.
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:09 am(d)avid says:
Here is how the process works at most universities (some places have wrinkles):
The professor puts together a portfolio consisting of:
a) all published materials (and important working papers)
b) all teaching materials
c) a record of all departmental, university, and discipline service (e.g., committees)
d) a letter justifying her/his existence (often one for each section above)
The candidate then puts together a list of potential outside reviewers. The department (and/or Dean — depends upon the school) typically selects a few from the list and solicits letters from people they deemed qualified (7 is a common number of outside letters).
The department then reads the entire portfolio and the letters and comes to a decision. The department crafts a letter justifying its decision and passes it onto the administration (often this consists of two layers: dean and provost/president).
The administration reads over the portfolio, outside letters, and department’s decision and then makes a decision (again, there are often two layers of this).
At a place like Williams, I reckon the most common reasons for denying tenure are:
a) Poor teaching;
b) Substandard/insufficient research
c) Critical outside letters
d) Poor fit with the department (possibly personality, but given the small departments, specific topic area is pretty key).
At public schools, the process is moderately transparent and the candidate receives updates at each step of the process. At private schools, the situation is more opaque (at ND, we don’t hear anything until May — 8 months after putting together the packet). In any well run department, junior faculty members receive feedback every year on how they are doing.
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:41 amRonit says:
Can we at least agree that at a small place like Williams, SCS scores should not be the primary determinant of teaching quality?
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:58 am(d)avid says:
A couple of quick things on the reasoning of tenure committees (and I have no knowledge of the Whitake case or physics in general):
1) Missteps and poor performance in the classroom during the first few years are typically overlooked by tenure committees. What they care about is whether you have become an effective and committed teacher in the classroom. Teaching is a hard skill to learn and no one expects you to be a pro right out of the gate. [Note: Student evaluations are only part of the story. Student evaluations often reward light workloads and emphasis on “fun” activities rather than “hard” activities.]
2) Similarly, committees want to see a research trajectory, so when your articles come out matters a lot. Publications right after being hired are probably a result of grad school and they want to see publishing on your own. Furthermore, knowing how to pick topics and package results in a way that is appealing to reviewers is hard, and you get better at it over time.
3) At top schools, quality generally matters a great deal more than quantity. A person who writes a few smart and important pieces is more likely to get tenure than someone who cranks out a series of articles that are generally ignored. The Nature article was probably weighted very heavily by the tenure committee and outside reviewers.
4) Interdisciplinary work is generally okay, but has the downside that your outside letters are likely to come from people in your main field, who may not see the full value of the work.
5) What is a bigger problem is splitting topics. When you go up for tenure you want your outside letters to say, “Professor X is a leading expert in Y.” If you are splitting your time between two or more topics, then it is harder to be deemed an expert in Y and/or Z. In some cases, you might need to double your workload.
Glancing over Whitaker’s website and a few other Williams professors, the most glaring thing to me is that a tenured associate, Aalberts, already does work on biology and physics. In a department of 8 (not counting administrative staff and emeritus) that doesn’t make tenure impossible, but it makes it more difficult.
As I said, I know nothing about the specifics, but I thought I could shed light on how these processes generally work.
April 22nd, 2007 at 11:05 amJLev says:
As a current student I would say that I am a big fan of professor Whitaker’s, and am very disappointed to hear that he did not receive tenure. Several friends and I have found him to be a better professor than some other members of the department, and found him very helpful in an advising and mentoring role. As for his research, since his arrival his primary avenue of research has been investigating a novel new technique for creating Bose-Einstein Condensates, a very cool (literally and figuratively) state of matter, where matter macroscopically behaves like a wave. But he only first created one last spring break, so the amount of research he’s been able to publish using it has been minimal, with much of his prior results based on descriptions of equipment and collaborations with others on other projects. So while his primary avenue of research has yet to bear significant fruits, it has the great potential to do so in the near future.
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:55 pmJames McAllister says:
Just a minor comment on this thread. Ronit’s argument that SCS forms should not be the primary determinant of teaching quality is dead wrong. What are the alternatives? You could have professors determine teaching quality, but in this case I suspect many professors would be tenured or denied tenure simply because of how their colleagues view them in the classroom. What professors view as good teaching is likely to be substantialy different than what students view as effective teaching. In fact, the entire incentive structure would lead professors to teach in a manner designed to impress fellow profs than it would be designed to impress students. I can understand why professors might prefer this system, but why students should advocate such a system is beyond me. There is a reason why places such as Harvard have some brilliant researchers who are terrible teachers–their fate does not depend at all on students. Why would we want Williams to adopt a system in which professors would not have any interest in how students assess their teaching?
As Morty likes to say, anecdotes are not evidence. Even the worst professors at Williams have their defenders and the best their detractors. Without the SCS forms, tenure would become a process in which such anecdotes become all important. What the SCS system does is to quantify individual assessments into meaningful numbers that can be used for real comparisons.
The last point I would like to make is that many people seem to feel that profs can game the system by awarding high grades and giving students little work. As anyone who has ever seen SCS data would verify, Williams students generally punish professors who are not demanding in their expectations. The other thing to note is that the SCS forms capture such efforts. A prof who has great teaching scores, but is getting them on the basis of inflating grades and not assigning work (that does happen)is not fooling anyone. If a professor was unable to get good teaching scores without high grades and substantial requirements that would be duly noted in any review. It is also true that it would be noted if a professor received somewhat lower teaching scores but was a tough grader and had high standards.
No one would deny that there are problems in all forms of teacher assessments, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill on democracy, it is the best system of all for both students, profs, and administrators.
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:28 pmMax Gutman '08 says:
As another student, I also wish to express dismay at hearing of Whitaker’s plight. I took Foundations of Modern Physics with him last spring, and found him to be an intelligent and engaging lecturer. To me, he seemed very able to hold the interest of the class and express often complex ideas in a way we could understand them. While the material was often very difficult, Whitaker did his best to give help to students who needed it, whether through group problem sessions or holding open office hours, which I regularly attended. I think that if Whitaker did get negative reviews after his first year, it must have been a combination of the difficulties of teaching for the first time, and the nature of the average Physics 100 student, often looking for an easy A for their Div III requirement, and unprepared for what can be challenging material to understand. Since I’m not a physics major, I can’t compare him very well to the rest of the department, but judging by JLev’s comments he seems to hold up well to other professors.
In addition, Whitaker has truly tried to make himself a part of the Williams community. He is very involved in the Outing Club, and can frequently be found at the open hours of the climbing wall. Several of my friends who are non-physics (and non-science) majors are sure to be disappointed when they hear they won’t be able to count on his presence on climbing outings anymore. Whitaker also served as part of the first batch of “faculty associates” for the cluster housing program, a position that the article notes was turned down by many other professors due to the time commitment. For him to show this dedication to Williams during the tenure process is truly admirable. In addition, while doing a brief Record search, I found this article describing Whitaker’s work on the physics department website. I know David has frequently talked about trying to bring the college more into the open through efforts such as these, so it seems especially disappointing that a professor like Whitaker is being denied tenure.
I suppose the main point of my rambling is to question how much work outside the classroom counts towards tenure. While I certainly understand that Williams wants the best professors academically to teach their students, I feel that efforts to become a part of the community as a whole should also have an effect. It seems Whitaker has been highly dedicated in attempting to engage students outside of the classroom, in addition to his substantial teaching and research responsibilities. I know that I and many of my friends will be disappointed at Whitaker’s departure from the college.
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:00 pmRonit says:
Thank you for your response, Prof. McAllister.
Why not evaluate written comments (blue sheets) rather than the average score of bubbles?
It might mean more work for the committee, but they could look at a random sampling of the comments instead of all of them. If handwriting is a concern, then have students submit the written comments online.
A large number of such anecdotes might carry more value than a mere statistic – a statistic, moreover, that does not control for responses from majors vs. non-majors, or engaged vs. indifferent students.
I think written comments might highlight those professors who really engage their students as opposed to those who leave students indifferent.
It is difficult for me, as a student, to distinguish between truly inspiring and merely competent professors based on an arbitrary scoring system between 1 and 7.
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:40 pmDavid says:
Special thanks to all for participating in this thread. Explaining and discussing complex, multi-dimensional problems like tenure denials is one of the central purposes of EphBlog.
I second James comments on the importance of considering SCS forms. However, I expect/hope that Ronit is not so much denying the usefulness of SCS as pleading for other considerations as well. For example, back in the day, the Economics Department interviewed every senior major about his experiences in the department and sought his opinion on each faculty member he knew. This was a huge time commitment on their part but did a good job, I think, of capturing a different aspect of student opinion. For example, I might have thought that, say, Professor Ralph Bradburd was a tough SOB in teaching microeconomics. Perhaps I gave him poor SCS ratings. But, by senior year, I had come to appreciate how hard it is to teach micro well and how much I had benefited in my later courses because of the training that Bradburd had given me.
I still remember sitting in Mike McPherson’s office, somewhat surprised that he (department chair!) would take so much time to find my opinions on each professor. If memory serves, he even asked me to rank them 1-9.
Another thing that Williams does/should do is solicit opinion from graduates. As an undergrad, I did not fully appreciate what an amazing professor Laszlo Versenyi was. If he had handed out SCS forms, I would have marked him low. But that was less a product of his objective teaching ability than my immature judgment. A few years after graduation, I came to realize what a wonderful experience his classes had actually been.
Does the College solicit the opinions of graduates? It ought to. I was asked my opinion of Professor Alan White a year or two after graduation. Now, Alan’s was a special case, up for tenure in a department that had lost many of its senior people. But I always appreciated the fact that Williams would seek out my thoughts.
So, the College ought to keep using SCS but do more, ask seniors for their opinions on all the professors in the department, ask seniors for the names of 2 or 3 professors outside their major who have had the most positive influence on their college experience, inside or outside the classroom, ask alumni at reunion to name the professors most important to them. This ought to be a College wide policy, albeit allowing departments to tailor the details to their own needs.
The more information you get from students about teacher quality, the better.
UPDATE: I wrote this before seeing Ronit’s comments directly above.
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:41 pmfrank uible says:
I don’t recall that during my term as a student about 50 years ago I was ever asked, formally or informally, by anyone, who, directly or indirectly, represented or might have represented the College administration, what I thought about any of my professors at Williams. The same applies to Michigan a few years later.
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:07 pmJames McAllister says:
I can’t speak for other departments, but in psci we do have “white sheets” that have student comments and we take them seriously. They almost always correlate very well with the numbers so in that sense they reinforce the SCS rather than challenge them. We also do exit interviews to gather the type of info that Dave suggests is important; what do you think months or years after the class. They are helpful, but in my experience students are understandable reluctant to fully open up in a negative sense in these interviews. I can totally understand why a student would not want to criticize one of my colleagues openly despite all the real and valid assurances we give that such interviews are confidential. Again, this is why the SCS system should be the cornerstone of the evaluation process. It is in the best interests of all that evaluations be based on the hardest data possible rather than sources that can be distorted and/or manipulated very easily.
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:19 pm'10 says:
Students are explicitly told when filling out “blue sheet” comments that only the professor will see them, so they couldn’t legitimately be used for tenure proceedings unless the prof voluntarily submitted them.
However, I think a lot of departments have their own systems for soliciting student comments. I know that the math department calls up students who have recently taken classes from untenured professors and interviews them about their teaching performance.
April 22nd, 2007 at 11:13 pmAnonymous says:
In so many ways students may be the LEAST qualified to determine how good a job a professor is doing of conveying information, of doing his or her job. And as others have alluded, it has been quite clearly shown that student evals can pretty much directly be correlated to work expected and grading rigor. I think student assessments should play some sort of role, but they often are the most important in assessing a professor’s teaching, and I’m not certain that’s the best way to determine how well a professor teaches.
I will say that Williams students might be a bit more insightful than a lot of students, and upper-division/upperclass students more so than freshmen. I honestly do not even think that students ought to be able to evaluate profs in freshman level surveys.
dcat
April 24th, 2007 at 6:19 pm