Readers are invited to offer their thoughts to Douglas Bass, blogger and soon-to-be-former University of St. Thomas computer science professor, on the subject of life after tenure denial. Bass explains his circumstances on his own site, summarizing his career trajectory, recounting the reasons he was given for his denial, and describing the kind of position he would like to find now. He welcomes readers' advice, the more discipline-specific and institutionally astute, the better.

Comments, both broadly philosophical and minutely practical, are welcome.

I was wondering, Doug, if you could give a little more detail about exactly why the council thought your teaching evaluations were inadequate. You mention on your site that it was the comments on the evaluations that the council had a problem with; that's reassuring, because surely the council wouldn't terminate somebody's employment on the basis of numerical responses to two exceedingly vague questions. (I think one could argue it's the evaluations themselves that are inadequate... can you really expect questions that broad to convey actionable information?)

Was there some trend in the comments over time that the council had a problem with? Did they tell you about it beforehand? Did they tell you about it now, or did they just say that your evaluations weren't good enough?

Unless you were given some info that you didn't blog about (which would be understandable), the whole situation just doesn't add up, IMHO. Seems like you have an admirable research and service record, and course evaluation numbers that are likely on par with other faculty in the university. People like that shouldn't get denied tenure unless there's something they're not telling you.

I'm up for tenure this next year myself and am blogging about it; what I keep in mind is that I'm doing the best I can in terms of service, teaching, and scholarship... and if that's not going to be good enough for my school, then I wouldn't be happy working there in the long run anyway. So keep in mind God can take a situation this bad and turn it for good in the end.

First, 3.38 and 3.43 aren't so good. And though, as Robert points out, these are vague questions, they are standard. My school asks similar questions (they ask others, but those two are the only ones anyone looks at). You need to get into the fours, Douglas, especially in a teaching university; grade inflation plays both ways.

Second, connecting a couple of dots:

http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2005/05/perils_of_acade.html

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm>
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm

One more thing -- the numbers on vague questions like Doug's evals are especially meaningless. If all you do is ask students how they liked the course and the instructor, and have them rank each on a 1-5 scale, you will have some profs getting 4.5+ for all kinds of reasons completely unrelated to the actual academic quality of the instructor or the course; and you'll have profs getting low marks because they are trying to push their students and challenge them in the classroom. If Doug's classes are challenging, hard work -- and half the students in his class praise him for it and the other half rip into him for it -- you'll and up with something around a 3.0, and this number conveys no information about the quality of his teaching. Not, at least, without some kind of supporting question that delves deeper in to the structure and conduct of the course. (Which is why I was wondering about the comments.)

How successful were you in attracting research grants? Admittedly, I have little knowledge of the computer sciences area vis-a-vis the amount of grant money that flows through any given institution, but more often than not the adage "bring in the dough or out you go" increasingly applies to all branches of science. The Academic Council (why is that academics are incapable of rendering decisions as individuals?) could have very conveniently used the teaching numbers as a smokescreen for this kind of activity. It happens all of the time in the health professions.

I’m not sure Doug is getting much advice here. . . . my first thought is that he should discover whether there is some mechanism at St. Thomas for getting more detailed information about the reasons for denying him tenure. “Your teaching evaluations aren’t high enough” is something, but not much. What were the specific student complaints? Or rather, which complaints did the tenure committee find most troubling? Though the deliberations of the committee are no doubt confidential, surely a dean or some other academic officer could summarize the key concerns. If Doug could phrase his request for information in terms of wanting to improve as a teacher, and wanting to position himself better for future job opportunities -- rather than seeming to want revenge or wanting to argue -- then he might stand a better chance of getting a useful answer.

(I also find myself wondering how much warning Doug got that he was in trouble, specifically as a teacher. It is very rare for institutions to turn people down for tenure without leaving a paper trail of warnings that improvement was needed. Another thing: Doug mentions being a good institutional citizen as though he expected that that would count in his favor, which makes me wonder about the quality of advice he got in preparation for going up for tenure. Being a good institutional citizen has probably never helped anyone get tenure, anywhere; even being a bad one is rarely decisive, though it can be used as an extra stick to beat someone with if that person is deficient in some more important way.)

More generally, Doug seems to be in a bind. Losing tenure on the grounds of poor teaching makes him an unlikely candidate for another teaching-centered institution; but he does not seem to have the publication record for a position at a research university, especially since he would be looked at not as a new PhD but as someone who would have to have a tenure decision coming up again soon. In light of all this, I think Tim Burke’s suggestion (on Doug’s site) that he look for something other than a professorial position is a good one.

"Last stonghold of fairness" was yet another of my feeble attempts at sacrcasm. I have to work on that. Sorry.

I think Alan's points should be taken to heart.

The student opinion surveys are dodgy as well with written comments. However, at least here, the chair has access to all the metrics including the written complaints. If they used the written comments to bring things to bear against you, they must have been some seriously heavy comments and those would have been part of you and your chair's/chairs' discussions during your yearly evaluations.

I'm rather miffed that both you and your chair seem to have been broadsided on this. A well- trained chair should have a feel for what will fly in committee and what will be a problem. Normally there's a heads-up during the PREapplcation process as well as an informal departmental review in advance (I'm not even tenure-track faculty and I had it with my chair, dean and director, and I go through this with my staff when they are being promoted so that we can set up a winning portfolio that will put them through with no problem).

I gotta ask... Is your chair new? Also did your Dean endorse you? If what you say in your blog is true, there seems to be a problem at your school with faculty development. Declines of tenure are normally telegraphed in advance unless there is tenured-teenager action going on (which you shouldn't assume right off).

As far as what you are going to do... *IF* you want to be a prof, AND if you *DO* have serious teaching deficiencies that are enough to show up in a review, you could consider getting a position as a reserach scientist/associate at a university and make use of the faculty development resources there, and from there gradually transfer the position into a professorship (if that is still where you want to go) as your pedagogic skills improve.

And one more thing. Remember that any promotion hinge on not what you have done to earn the promotion -- but how well you will operate at the promoted level. It's true for the way we put our MS and PhD students through their defenses as well as how we prep our people for promotion. As an associate candiate you should be able to demonstrate that you are in a postion to be an associate prof both for the written and [especially] the non-written job description.

This includes

o Secure funds for not only yourself (as needed) but also for your department’s support staff.

o Manage the department as an interim or full time chair.

o Defend your department’s empire in committee meetings and university negotiations (without making TOO many enemies).

o Represent your unit to the board of regents (or similar external body, including review boards and legislators).

o And much MUCH more...

It's not just about teaching, research and "service" isn't just about being on the right committees...

Off-topic: Like your weblog site updates here. Looks nice.

I have an extended reaction here.

Interesting to read the blog and the comments. I'm sorry you got blindsided, curious about the comments (like everyone else) and wonder what the norms are. I thought your field was one of relative scarcity.

Wish you luck.

Allan said that being a good or bad citizen didn't matter in tenure. That may be true in his school, but it was not in the university I taught at for several years.

We lost two excellent teachers because one of the teachers, in a field where we had a hard time hiring teachers, was seen as a bad citizen because he disagreed on a political issue with the president of the university. He was told to cease and desist his editorials to the public newspaper if he wanted to remain with the university. He told the president that he had free speech rights.

In his case, his chair, the dean, and the VP all argued for his tenure. But the president said no.

Yes, I know he could have sued. But that would have been even worse than being denied tenure when he tried to secure another job.

We lost two good teachers because his wife also left when he was denied tenure.

Several times a teacher who was not quite high enough up in either teaching or research was judged on what they had been doing on campus. Were they in the faculty senate? Were they preparing to be the next chair?

This was a smaller university, 4000-5000 students, but being a "good citizen" mattered there.

To Robert: The Academic Council gave very little elaboration as to the comments they didn't like. In Spring 2004, I taught Computer and Network Communications for the first time, and it didn't go all that well. It got significant better in subsequent semesters, but the Council was not amused.

To Erica: While 3.38 and 3.43 may not seem so good, I was consistently told that 3.00 and up was acceptable.

I read Ivan Tribble's piece on bloggers when I was visiting the Chronicle's job site.

To Dan Grant: I haven't brought in any grant money, but that wasn't a problem for St. Thomas. I plan to write some grant proposals this year, because many of the job listings of places I'd like to be say something about having a history of successful grant application.

To Alan Jacobs: I received a review at the beginning of my third year, which told me I had to improve my evaluations. My average course evaluation before the third year review was 3.21, and my average instructor evaluation was 3.28. My average course evaluation in the time between the third-year review and the tenure application was 3.49, and my average instructor evaluation in that time was 3.54, so I thought that I did what was asked of me.

To Bill: My department is being run by two interim directors, Dr. Bhabani Misra and Dr. Saeed Rahimi. Bhabani has been on the faculty since 1988, and has been one of the interim directors since Fall 2002. He presented my cause before the Academic Council. I'm the first faculty member up for tenure since he became the interim director. The Executive V.P. went a mile and a half out of his way to assure me that Bhabani did a good job of presenting my case.

Bhabani and Saeed report directly to the Executive V.P., so Bhabani functions like a dean, and attends Deans and Directors meetings.

Thanks for your pointers.

I responded to John Bruce's extended reaction in a comment on his site.

To Stephen M (Ethesis): If you read this post on tanking undergrad computer science enrollments, you'll see this is not the case. I was in a graduate department which has also experienced a significant decline in enrollment since 2000, due to the dot-com implosion, and much tighter controls on immigrant student visas since 9/11.

To suzi: It should be noted that I never, Never, NEVER said one crosswise word about the University in my blog. The only times I wrote about the University was when there was something in the paper about it already, such as the death of Terrence Murphy, who had been president of St. Thomas for 30 years, or the agreement with the neighborhood groups on campus expansion.

Thanks for the pointer about the drop in enrollments. You can tell I'm not current.

Doug...one thing that seems important is to think out what kind of things you like and don't like to do. Do you get more satisfaction from teaching or from research? Do you like involvement in departmental administration, or do you hate it? These things may determine what you'll be best off doing next.

Also, what kind of students have you had in the CS courses at St Thomas...are they theoretically-oriented pure math types, vocationally-oriented certification seekers, or classical engineers? There's probably a big difference in the teaching approach that works best for each of these kinds of people.

Bhabani has been on the faculty since 1988, and has been one of the interim directors since Fall 2002.

That is just shy of 3 years. Why has there been no full time director over that time? Intrim directors that are on point for 3 years may be seen as managing a sinking ship. I'm also looking at yuor comments on how your teaching skills were gradually improving with respect to your evals (including your course from hell - which we all get when we start teaching).

Long-term interim directors. Profs being denied tenure (what is the current attrition rate in your department?). I have to ask you frankly: is your unit/department being RIFed out?

Douglas, I feel for you- I'm a molecular biologist who went through a somewhat similar experience a little over a decade ago at a college I won't name here. Today I am extremely happy in my second career; I'm in charge of DNA analysis at a county forensic lab in the Cleveland area (which for my tastes is a very attractive place to live), working almost strictly 40-hour weeks, well-paid and treated royally as the highly valuable professional that I am. I know it doesn't seem that way right now, but there IS life after academia and it's very likely to be a better life. Hang in there! You're a well-qualified professional and should do well. Someday you'll look back and shake your head, wondering why you didn't escape from the dubiously attractive groves of academe sooner.

I'm surprised they didn't give "baseline" comparison numbers.

And I'm kind of shocked they consisted of 2 questions - our evals are about 20 questions, covering things like usefulness of the textbook, fairness of grading, workload in the class, etc. Not that they're always helpful - there are always students who fill in "c" for everything because it's fastest - but at least it tries to be less vague.

I'm also curious about the comments - after coming off a particularly stinging set of comments last semester (mostly "You're working us too hard!") Student evaluations can be hard to deal with - and they seem to change on a dime, from semester to semester, regardless of the fact that you don't change your teaching. (I do think students are becoming more demanding, in the "entertain us but don't tax our brains too much" vein)

I guess tenure really isn't a certain thing - I'm surprised you received no "warnings" about not making sufficient progress. (I remember being told pre-tenure on my reviews "as long as you continue in this track you should receive tenure" I did, but I still spent a worried and stressed eight months going through the process).

I guess my only pieces of advice are these - first, I operate under sort of a reverse-Groucho-Marx principle: I don't want to be a part of any group that doesn't freely want me. And second, isn't industry a more appealing place for computer folks? The usual lament our computer science department makes is "we can't hire people who are any good, you have to give us more money so we can pay in line with what industry offers"

Maybe, just maybe, they did you a favor? I was asked to leave a school years ago, and when I look back on it, I see it now not so much as a failure but as a push I needed to go in a better direction with my life.

It is indeed difficult to know what a 3.5/5 average on student evaluations means without seeing stats for the whole university. What T-scores or percentiles are you landing in? Our institution has students rate on a similar 5-point scale, and 3.5 would be low here. Most successful tenure candidates here would be 3.8 or above on average; many are well into the 4's. We're a teaching-oriented place, so teaching gets the most weight, a minimum of 50%. Having chaired a committee similar to your "academic council,"(made of faculty members, no?) however, I doubt that the members fixated on the average alone. Sometimes you see faculty members who do OK in small, upper-level classes but are absolute disasters in intro level classes. Big universities can sometimes deal with this by not assigning such professors to intro classes; keeping them can be worth it, especially if they are good researchers/grantsmen. At a smaller place like St. Thomas, this is often not possible. It is demoralizing for some faculty to constantly be assigned enormous intro sections, while the "mandarin class" enjoys small classes from which the non-serious have been mostly weeded out. If your department has declining numbers of majors or overall enrollments, it gets even more difficult to justify keeping people who consistently score low in large intro classes.

It is good to be careful when using student ratings--they should never be relied on solely as a measure of professors' teaching skills. That being said, in my experience, they are far from meaningless. In general, students are capable of recognizing very poor instructors and very good ones--say, the lowest and highest 25th percentiles. They do not do so well with the ones in the middle. People who claim that their consistently low ratings are the result of being "tough graders" or "enforcing high standards" are usually blowing smoke. At this place and others I am familiar with, many of the most popular and desired profs are also notoriously among the hardest graders. It is simply not true (at least in the semi-competitive liberal arts & sciences universe that I inhabit) that giving all "A" grades and having low expectations automatically leads to high student ratings. You may get a few "5"s in gratitude from the slugs, but you will anger the good students, and they will not hesitate to zap you, both numerically and in the comments.

Tenure at most institutions is effectively a multi-million dollar decision. When you are in doubt about a candidate, you are NOT in doubt about a candidate.

Suzi: if you'll look again, you'll see that I didn't say that institutional citizenship doesn't matter. What I said was that being a poor institutional citizen is "rarely decisive" -- by which I mean that if someone is a brilliant researcher and an excellent teacher, she is not likely to be flushed for failing to serve on enough committees. Conversely, someone who has a mediocre or poor record as a teacher and researcher is simply not going to be rescued by virtue of being on lots of committees.

I raised this issue because Doug listed a number of examples of his service to the institution as though he was under the impression that they should have counted significantly in his favor -- forgive me, Doug, if I read you wrong -- and in my experience such service almost never makes a real difference in tenure decisions.

Also, when I (and, I think, most people) talk about "institutional citizenship," I am referring to committee service, doing unpaid and often unnoticed work for one's department, being "collegial" (forgive me, K C Johnson), and so on. Suzi's example of somewhat who got flushed for being a political activist raises a different set of issues, I think.

And thanks, Doug, for the further information about your evaluations. I suppose your insstitution would say, if pressed, that your improvement was not significant, or not significant enough. It's hard to know from here what they expected.

I question the usefulness of those evaluation questions and the way they are assigned points. If I were a student, I would expect my instructor to know his material, present it in an organized fashion, be responsive to questions, and administer appropriate tests. A "good" teacher would get a 3 from me. A teacher would have to be outstanding to get a 4, and knock my socks off for a 5. So as long as the average score is 3 or up, I can't see that being a problem. If it is, they need to find a new way to evaluate.

Notice that the university carries these averages out to two decimal places (as did my college.) Anybody really want to argue that that second decimal place is significant? To me that practice gives off a strong whiff of a cargo-cult approach to statistics on the part of the people interpreting these numbers.

In my case I can answer the question some commenters raised above: the evaluations (in my half of the required intro genetics course) which attracted adverse comment, were not only every bit as good as those of the tenured colleague who taught the other half of the course (and who, anong with other departmental colleagues, strongly vouched for the quality of my teaching), but were _as good or better than anyone had ever gotten_ in that course.

Discussing the value or the reliability of student evaluations, or the legitimacy attending Doug's not being granted tenure isn't the issue.

Doug's being out of work and looking for a job is. Good advice is what leads to a successful job search, not suggestions on what might have (or should have) been.

To that end, since my previous advice to take down these blog entries didn't fly, I'll try again with suggestions minutely practical. (As one who has worked in both industry and the academy, 35 years altogether, about evenly divided, I may be able to help a little.)

Fair or not, adequate as candidate evaluation or not, effective in recruitment or not, perception is everything. Doug, stop and ask how you want potential employers to perceive you. Dedicated teacher? Applied researcher? Long hauler? Dutiful? Innovative? Entrepreneur? Tactician? Strategist?

Now compare that to how you actually do present yourself. Start by googling yourself:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Douglas+Bass%22&btnG=Google+Search

Try to look at what you find through the eyes of a hiring manager. What does this guy think of himself? What’s he got to sell? What’s he proud of? Does he know how to promote himself (and by extension how to convince a search committee, promote a product, make a sale, garner a grant)?

The top link goes here:

http://www.artima.com/profile.jsp?user=20741

That profile is more than a year old. Update it.

It in turn links here:

http://beliefseekingunderstanding.blogspot.com/

My university deluges us with statistics about evaluations, and it almost feels like yours was leaving something out if they didn't.

But, at least for my CS department, 3.43 on a 1-5 scale would be entirely insufficient.

We have a 7 point scale. On the 'Overall Rating of Instructor' scale, my CS department's BOTTOM QUINTILE is 5.38. The university's BOTTOM QUINTILE is 5.17.

There's severe inflation in these numbers, at least where I am, which has me worried about my own tenure - but that's a few years off yet.

To David Foster: Thanks for your suggestion. John Bruce said something similar, to do what Richard Bolles calls the "life-changing job-hunt." My students were primarily adults already working in the field who wanted to augment their skills. Our department made a concious decision a long time ago that we wouldn't be a certification shop.

To Bill: Part of the deal regarding having an interim director for three years was coincidental. We had an interim Vice-President of Academic Affairs from 2001 to 2004. When we got around to hiring someone, the Executive V.P. left to become president of another school, so their responsibilities were divided between two people. There was a search for a director that was unsuccessful.

A stealth RIF? I don't believe so, but on the other hand, if it was, it's not like I would be told so...

To Steve LaBonne: Thanks for your encouraging words. It reminded me of that Hall and Oates song where they sing "Believe it or not, there's life after high school." :)

To ricki: The department does have more detailed evaluations than the university. In the period after the third-year review, I improved in every one of the metrics used by the department. I showed that in my appeal presentation.

Steve LaBonne had a similar comment about the possibility that maybe they were doing me a favor.

To DaProf: Yes, our Academic Council is made up mostly of faculty members, with the President and Executive V.P. as ex officio members.

I've also noticed the lack of correlation between student evaluation scores and reputation for difficulty.

To Alan Jacobs: University service is usually considered about 10 to 15% of the total package, and I knew that going in. I'm not saying that it should have counted more than it did. The Academic Council was happy with that part of the package.

To Laura: I'm right there with you.

To Erica: Thanks for the practical advice. The blogspot blog was two URL's ago, so that definitely is something to change.

To Tom Hudson: When I taught a class as a Ph.D student at UT Dallas, I did receive statistics on the evaluations that compared how I did with the rest of the department.

While Erica is right that Douglas' primary concern is what to do now rather than what happened, but understanding what happened may be useful in thinking about how he presents himself to a prospective employer. Also, while it may be too late to help Douglas, it may be useful to others out there.

So Douglas - It sounds to me like they told you to improve your teaching evals without doing a very good job of explaining what they meant...or that the meaning of improvement was interpreted differently at the different levels. As an outsider, I wouldn't interpret the changes you report as meaningful, even if they are statistically significant. If the culture at St. Thomas is to score faculty the way Laura would, then I'm way off base...but I think most places have some grade inflation in the faculty evals too.

Similarly, I'm wondering who told you 3 and up would be acceptable and what they meant vs. how you heard it. Clearly the scores you got weren't viewed as sufficient. Acceptable might mean the range where they don't see a reason to grant tenure, but not low enough to trigger action that could lead to intervention for a tenured prof, or to short circuit the normal time to tenure for an Asst Prof. Or someone might have been just saying that they can imagine a situation where scores like yours would not result in a denial. Or whoever told you that didn't know what they were talking about.

I can imagine promoting someone who gets poor average evaluations in a class like the one Steve LaBonne describes, where part of the job is to tell aspiring students that becoming an MD isn't in the cards for them. But for that to happen, I'd be looking for comments from a subset of the students who think that the course is great and the majority are whining. I'd also expect much higher ratings in other courses. And as I tried to express on my blog, there are other sources of data that should be considered before jumping to conclusions about teaching quality...especially when someone's future is on the line.

But what I can't really tell from your blog or your comments here is how you self-evaluate your teaching relative to where you wanted it to be, as opposed to what you think should have been acceptable. If I'm a prospective employer that would bother me because I would worry about how you'll improve in response to critiques and evaluation in my shop.

In this sense Erica is right that you should think about whether the blog posts project what you want them to. But I don't think you should take anything down. That horse has left the barn, and you're better off elaborating on what you have than if a prospective employer Googles, finds hits, and then thinks you took them down because you didn't want the world to see something.