What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?

In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what’s involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher’s performance. ——– Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people […]

Filtering Isn’t the Problem

Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating “social media” alternatives for academic publishing, citing “disastrous consequences” of the “filter-then-publish” model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I’m not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is: The […]

Career Guidance

A comment I made at a meeting yesterday that I think is worth reproducing out of context: A big part of making it from junior faculty to tenure is deciding which bits of unsolicited contradictory advice you’re going to ignore.

Unseemly Self-Congratulations

The final step in the tenure process here is the Very Nice Letter. I’m not sure that it’s an official step, as opposed to an established tradition, but whichever it actually is, at the end of the process, a candidate who passes the tenure review gets a letter from the faculty committee that handles tenure […]

Officially Official

In my campus mailbox this morning: Dear Chad: I am pleased to report that on Februrary 10, 2007 the Board of Trustees approved our recommendation that you be tenured effective September 1, 2007 at the rank of Associate Professor. Woo-hoo! It took about half a second to decide to sign the copy indicating my acceptance, […]

Statement on Teaching

One of the standard elements of most academic hiring and promotion applications, at least at a small liberal arts college, is some sort of statement from the candidate about teaching. This is called different things at different places– “statement of teaching philosophy” is a common term for it, and the tenure process here calls for […]

The MLA on Tenure

Inside Higher Ed had a story on Friday about a Modern Language Association study on tenure and promotion. The study group just released its final report (available for download here. Given that I’m waiting to hear the results of my own tenure case (a decision could come at any time, starting this week), there’s no […]