Tom Petty Was Right

The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance to respond.

I’m not quite sure what I would object to in this, as it’s a really sketchy outline of what they did, most of which is directly determined by the official procedures spelled out in the faculty manual. It’s a part of the process, though, so I read it over, and sent my official acceptance in this morning.

If you’re curious about what’s involved, here’s a condensed version:

• They read the file box full of research and teaching materials that I gave them in September.
• They found three people at other institutions to review my published work, and a fourth to come to campus and look at my lab.
• They interviewed the eight other faculty in the department who are on campus, and got a letter from the one person on sabbatical.
• They got letters from the chairs of the college committees that I served on, plus one unsolicited letter from an administrator about my interaction with students (which sounds ominous, phrased that way, but I also got a copy of the letter, and it was good).
• They interviewed twenty current students chosen from my class rosters by a random algorithm, and received letters from three recent alumni.

Whatever you might think of the tenure process generally, you can’t say they’re not thorough.

And now, all I can do is wait. I hate waiting.