A Faculty Guide for Succeeding in Academe by Twale Darla J.;

Author:Twale, Darla J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1221464
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Adam's Business Contracts and Tenure

Adam was one of a kind but probably not the kind well suited to academe. His claim to fame included a consulting business through which he established a consortium of small liberal arts colleges and served as their outsourced institutional research person. He contracted with 30 colleges and charged each of them a $2000 fee to compile their annual fact books. With that money, he hired a few graduate assistants and purchased equipment to facilitate his contractual arrangement. Even with his assistants and a two-course teaching load per term, he still had little time for publishing, attending program/curriculum meetings, or devoting time to his teaching and course preparation.

Very much the gadabout, public relations schmoozer, Adam saw the campus faculty/staff health club as a place to win friends and influence high-level campus administrators. In his ‘spare time,’ he aligned himself with the vice president of finance, the faculty senate president, and a dean or two. When tenure and promotion time came, Adam believed that these connections would help him secure tenure, especially if his department colleagues proved to be less than generous with their votes.

When his tenure year arrived, Adam placed a very lengthy document in the department office for all his tenured colleagues to review. Once the smoke cleared and mirrors darkened, faculty saw the real spirit of the dossier. The department expected at least 10 publications in refereed journals with Adam as senior or sole author on a majority of them. Likewise, conference presentations of those papers at national and regional conferences would be the precursor to their publication. Disappointed, the faculty realized that Adam did not have 10 publications nor was he the sole author on any of them or first author on most of them. Some of them dated to before his arrival at the university. He listed in page after page each fact book he had compiled for the last five years, however, as fulfilling his service commitment. Adam's teaching evaluations and peer reviews indicated that he had made little progress in his time there. He had also struggled to maintain average teacher evaluation scores. His syllabi changed little from year to year or from course to course.

When Adam talked to faculty about his work from the time he was interviewed for the position, he indicated that the data he gathered from the liberal arts colleges would be used to further his research agenda. In fact, he boasted that there was so much data, that other faculty could have it to generate articles and presentations of their own. Several faculty members aligned themselves with Adam with the hope that this data would assist them in their own quest for tenure and/or promotion. Adam welcomed their presence as affirmation for his work and a positive tenure vote.

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