Chapter 1. Foreword
In recent years, the mathematical community has become concerned about the talent drain that occurs when new Ph.D.s cannot find academic jobs that match their expertise, or cannot find jobs at all. Edward Aboufadel's "Job Search Diary," published in Focus a few years ago, gave a very insightful account of a new Ph.D. entering the uncertain job market for the first time. However, I have never seen an article that specifically addresses what to expect at the next great hurdle in an academic career, and another point at which a talent drain undoubtedly occurs: the tenure decision. In this series, I would like to remove some of the veil of silence and mystery that surrounds this process, by chronicling my own experience as I sought tenure at Kenyon College, a small liberal-arts college in central Ohio. Although there are many points in the story that are unique to my case, I am making this chronicle public only because I believe that my experience has some valuable lessons for anyone who may be connected with a tenure decision. I hope that junior faculty will learn ways to improve their chances and warning signs to heed seriously. For tenured faculty members, I hope that there will be some lessons on the need to mentor junior faculty and to intervene on their behalf when circumstances require it. Finally, for the mathematical community at large, I hope to provoke some debate about whether the institution of tenure is working in the way that it should, and whether we might be better off without it. In the narrative below, the parts written in italics were written specifically for this article, after all the events recounted had occurred. The parts written in normal text are excerpted from my personal journal, and were written at the time the events occurred. I have removed personal identification wherever possible and have abridged many of the entries, but otherwise the content of the entries has not been altered. I would like to acknowledge the advice and support of my wife, Kay, not only in preparing this article but also throughout the tenure chase. Without her, this story would have been much less interesting because I would have given up too soon!

Chapter 2. Prehistory
After earning my Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1983, I taught for six years at Duke University. I left when it became clear that I was not going to get tenure. At that time, the Duke math department attached a great deal of importance to research accomplishments. Although I had been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1987, this was barely enough to "keep up with the Joneses" in a department where, remarkably, every tenure-track faculty member had outside funding in 1988. While at Duke, I gradually grew more interested in the human interactions of teaching, and my enthusiasm for the more solitary work of research lessened somewhat. But there were no rewards at Duke for a commitment to teaching. When I arrived at Kenyon in 1989, I was pleased to find that the quality of teaching was taken vastly more seriously there.

In rereading my diary from my early years at Kenyon, two things stand out: how little I actually worried about getting tenure, and how much I still judged my success on the basis of research, rather than teaching. I didn't worry about the tenure decision because Kenyon had a very high tenure rate in recent years (according to many people, the second reappointment was the most critical review, and the tenure rate was 100% for faculty who got past that point), and because the mathematics department was clearly very satisfied with me. My attitude towards the relative importance of research and teaching was colored by the prevailing view of the mathematical community, that "success" equated to proving theorems. I was soon to find that this was not the prevailing view at Kenyon. The first wake-up call came when I had my second reappointment review in 1992.

5/11/92: On Saturday I received my evaluation from the provost, on which my reappointment and merit raise were based. It was not what you would call glowing, particularly with regards to my teaching, which he described as "uneven." There were some good points made and some specious ones... provost A observed that "the better the student, the better the evaluation." My first reaction was "Duh... What else is new?" That's the way it always was and always will be. But then he made a comment that got me thinking: "That suggests that you need to reach out more skillfully to the weaker students."... I am still very impatient with students who don't make an effort. My philosophy tends to be (to put it charitably), "They're grown up, I'm not their baby-sitter; if they choose not to work hard, they can live with the consequences." I freeze them out, rather than talking with them. To the extent that I do try to make contact with them, it's definitely not "skillful." After the terrible Math 11 exam that I wrote about on April 17, I let the next class out early and said that I would like to talk with each of the people who got below a C. I talked with half of them (the other half weren't in class), and the conversations I had with those three were awkward, embarrassing, and in two out of three cases, quite unproductive.

Even as I write this, though, I wrestle in my mind with the question of how much of a change I can really make. I shouldn't have to be a therapist or a guidance counselor; there are other people at the college who are paid for their ability in those realms. How "skillful" can I reasonably be expected to be in dealing with students who are at the low end of the motivation or maturity scale? I don't know; but evidently the answer is, more skillful than I am at present.

As you can see, the provost's letter raised anew questions about my own competence as a teacher that I had more or less resolved several years ago at Duke. Not that I had stopped being aware of the difficulty of the job or the fact that my personality is in some ways unsuited to it, but basically I have evolved a modus operandi which allowed me to feel that I had improved and that I had learned to do the job fairly well. I would say that my confidence is now shaken. I should, perhaps, admit that one reason for the strength of my reaction was that the letter also presented (as is apparently required by the faculty bylaws) "grades" on my performance in three categories: Teaching Excellence: B-; Scholarly Engagement: B; Collegiate Citizenship: B-. Back in my student days I never received grades that low on anything, so, as Kay correctly observed, my pride was wounded.

6/18/92: [I met with] the provost to discuss the findings of my second reappointment review. In general, [the meeting] was positive and supportive. One of the main pieces of information I wanted was how to interpret the "grades" that he gave me. He made two relevant comments. First, everyone who was reviewed was "graded" on the same scale, whether they were up for second reappointment or promotion to full professor. It was no surprise, then, that the grades for those in the former group were somewhat lower than the grades for the latter group. For the college as a whole, the provost said, the median should be considered to be around B; for those in the second-reappointment cohort the median would be lower.

Gradually, I recovered from the shock of the "grades," and later events reinforced my impression that they were simply an aberration. There were enough complaints from other faculty members about the grading system, which had just gone into effect that year, that the experiment with grades was abandoned after 1992. Moreover, I received the following news a year later that made me feel as if getting tenure would be a cinch:

6/18/93: ... Good news came in the mail today. I am going to receive the George Polya Award from the Mathematical Association of America, given each year to the two best expository articles in the College Mathematics Journal... This is the first real public recognition I've gotten for mathematics since I got my NSF grant in 1987, and I'd have to rank it with that as a highlight of my career so far. It's certainly the best thing that I could imagine happening to me now, with a tenure decision coming up next year...

If the provost only saw fit to award a B to my "Scholarly Engagement," when the MAA judged a part of it to be worthy of a prize, how seriously could I take his other comments? Unfortunately, I failed to grasp that the important thing in the tenure decision would not be reality but the administration's perception of reality.

Meanwhile, I continued to work on the real and imaginary deficiencies in my teaching that were found in the reappointment review, but not always with success:

9/4/92: I was pretty dissatisfied with both of my calculus lectures this week. Both times I had to rush at the end of class, which was a specific problem I am trying to overcome this year... I need to learn to pace myself and parcel out the time in a planned way. When I am running out of time I simply don't have enough control over events. For example, in Thursday's class I forgot to give the students a handout even though I brought it to class and wrote on my lecture notes: "DON'T FORGET HANDOUT!" Why? Because I was so rushed that I didn't look at my lecture notes in the last five or ten minutes.

4/8/93: Only six out of thirteen students came to my calculus class. When I mentioned that to Kay, she thought it was outrageous--both that the students would care so little, and that I would let them get away with it [by saying nothing]. So I did something about it. I sent the seven absentees a fairly stern reprimand by e-mail. But when I brought it home to show Kay, she said that ... I should have written it in a concerned, friendly way. Sometimes I feel that the harder I try to do the right thing, the less I succeed in doing it...

One of the provost's comments when I was reviewed for reappointment last spring was, "You need to reach out more effectively to the weaker students."... This is the first time that comment has made sense to me.

I let students miss class because I hate confrontations. I don't like to do things that someone might consider "mean." I don't like to pry into other people's lives because they might think I'm "nosy." I don't like to ask favors because they might think I'm being "unreasonable." I don't like to insist on being listened to because I'm afraid that my audience just doesn't care!

But my students don't know these things. As far as they can tell, I don't care whether they come to class or not.

But not all my teaching experiences were so discouraging. My wife, Kay, wrote about the following incident in the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin, August 1992:

You've never lived until you've been awakened at ten minutes till seven in the morning by students phoning to say they want to come over and bring your husband a great rhombicosidodecahedron. You've never lived, that is, in a Kenyon faculty household. I met them at the back door, ushering them in with silent gestures and pointing them toward their unsuspecting mathematics professor. They appeared at his elbow at the breakfast table, nearly causing him to choke on his English muffin. Michelangelo himself could have displayed no greater pride than that with which they presented the great rhombicosidodecahedron. Constructed from graph paper and gouts of glue, it resembled a giant, beveled golf ball. It was their favorite of all the Archimedean polyhedra... "Close interaction between faculty members and students." I've heard it again and again, before we came here and during our years at the College. After the math students presented their treasure and departed, that phrase rose before me, suddenly gaining personal importance...

11/1/92: Kay's article for the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin ... has now been reprinted and is being mailed out to all the high school seniors that the Admissions Office contacts about applying to Kenyon! The reason is not for its mathematical interest, but because of the persuasive argument she makes in favor of small colleges... The president [of the college] told us... that the article had also been popular with the trustees, who kept Kay's boss [the editor of the alumni magazine] busy telling them how to pronounce that long word!

As the school year 1993-4 began, storm clouds gathered over the college, presaging a change in the economic and political climate in which my tenure decision was to be made.

9/30/93: ... [A biology professor] and I continued the discussion with [a history professor and a librarian] over lunch. They think that the president's reign has passed through three eras... In the last few years [the third period], ... the president has lost hope of professional advancement and become more fiscally conservative, and the librarian said that she thinks he's even a little bored. The results of this are visible in the zero faculty growth, lack of support for grants, lack of real leadership on the science building, and the remarkable hysteria this year over the fairly modest shortfall in the number of students.

11/12/93: Yesterday the provost dropped the biggest bombshell from the administration that I have heard of since I came to Kenyon. Because of the financial hardship caused by the shortfall in enrollment, they (he and the president? or maybe just the president?) have decided to cut back on the number of faculty next year, in order to save money. This is going to be done by "suspending" several positions temporarily: not hiring replacements for faculty going on leave or retiring.

11/21/93: The decision was swift and unfavorable. On Thursday morning... the chairman of the mathematics department [referred to henceforth as "the chair"] got the word from the provost that the math department will have to make do with five professors next year [instead of the normal six].

That fall also marked the publication of Alma Mater, a book by Kenyon alumnus P. F. Kluge, who returned to campus to teach and live for a year. A central theme of his book was what he called the "every kid a winner" syndrome, the gradual erosion of standards that leads to grade inflation. It also leads, in his opinion, to a situation in which an unacceptably high proportion of faculty members were receiving tenure. Much later, a member of the College's senior staff told me, "I think that book really got under [the president]'s skin."

In spite of the warning signals that this might not be a good year to be coming up for tenure, I remained blissfully optimistic about my chances. In April, the hints became a good deal more direct, and my denial of reality shifted into overdrive. The next entry takes place just after the mathematics department finished undergoing a review by two external evaluators.

4/6/94: ... The chair reported to me separately a minor point that came up in the discussion [between him, the evaluators, the president and the provost]... The evaluators reported on their meeting with the students on Monday night--which, incidentally, was very well attended, with about 25 students. There were glowing praises of three of the other professors in the department but after they were finished the president pointed out that they hadn't said anything about Mackenzie, and wondered if there was any reason for that. The chair said the question surprised one of the evaluators, who replied that there hadn't been any comments either positive or negative about me. I tend to put a fairly neutral construction on this observation and the president's question. There were no comments on me because the meeting was mostly for math majors and minors, and I just haven't taught very many of them this year (only two)... The president asked because he know I am up for tenure and this was another good source of information. Of course, more insidious meanings can also be read into this exchange.

4/11/94: On Friday the chair had a mysterious meeting with the president and the provost. We figured it had something to do with the evaluation, but after the meeting he said it had not been about what he expected, and he was "sworn to secrecy." I have a wild guess. What would the administrators want to tell him about so urgently, so secretly, and so close to Honors Day? My hunch is that either Professor H or Professor S is going to win a Trustees' Teaching Award, and the administrators were letting him know so that he can make sure that they come to the ceremony.

4/21/94: My hunch about Honors Day turned out to be wrong. The winners of the Trustee Awards were... Not Professor H or Professor S. Too bad. I don't know how they determine the winners of those awards, but clearly it's not by polling the math students.

4/24/94: The course of my life over the next several years has already been decided, but I do not know the decision yet. The trustees of Kenyon College had their spring meeting this weekend, at which they decide who gets promotions and tenure. I will receive a letter in the mail tomorrow, telling me either that I have received or been denied "Appointment Without Limit" (the official term for tenure). Until two or three days ago, I did not lose any sleep over the decision, but then it occurred to me that the mysterious meeting [the chair] had with the president and provost may have been for them to give him advance warning that they were not going to recommend me for tenure. That thought caused me to lose, well, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes of sleep. I'm a very sound sleeper.

Chapter 3. The Axe Falls
As you read the following entries, you will read some very negative comments about Kenyon College and its administration, not all of them supported by factual evidence. To be fair to Kenyon, please bear in mind that many of them were made by friends and colleagues who wanted to boost my spirits, and thus could not be wholly objective.

4/26/94: The difference between being guillotined and being denied tenure is that after being denied tenure, you're still alive. However, the sense of incredulity is the same. You mean this is really happening? You mean there's nothing I can do?

Although I had some anxiety about the upcoming decision this weekend, I fully expected to get the letter on Monday morning saying that I had received Appointment without Limit. Kay was even more certain that I could not possibly be denied. We planned to meet at the Post Office after my 9:10-10:00 class so that we could end the suspense together. But right after my class, a very ominous phone call came from the provost's secretary, saying that the provost wanted to meet me at 11:00. At that point I felt certain that something was wrong, and the sense of certainty grew when Kay and I opened the mailbox and found no official letter. "That's cruel!" she said. But there's no way to take away someone's job without being cruel.

At 11:00 I arrived at the provost's office, the secretary went across the hall to summon the president, and he joined us. The meeting was very brief; it was finished by 11:10. The provost informed me that they had not found it possible to recommend me for Appointment without Limit; that he could not go into detail, but the reason was my teaching. There was not much for me to say. I asked if the criticisms of my teaching came entirely from students or if there had been comments from faculty. The provost said that the concern came from across the spectrum. I asked if the financial circumstances or the appearance of P. F. Kluge's book, with its criticism of the College's recent record of tenuring everybody, had "changed the rules" in any way, made them set the standards higher than they had been. The provost said no. Therefore I am left to infer that they consider me not only the worst teacher of the ten who came up for tenure this year, but the worst to come up for tenure in several years...

It seemed as if I spent most of the afternoon and evening talking... First I talked with Kay and the department chair in my office; the chair assured me again that I had been given the department's unanimous support. He gave me a copy of the departmental letter of recommendation, and also told me that in his own recommendation he had called me "the department's best mathematician since Nikodym," a staggering compliment (Nikodym was a world-famous mathematician, and retired--ironically, under pressure from the administration--in 1964)... Another professor in the department said she had gotten an inkling of what was to happen last week, when she was called into a meeting with the president and provost. Since she was the only member of the department that I had not asked for a letter of recommendation (the rules required me to ask for four, and there are five other people in the department), they wanted to find out her opinion. Actually, that shows they may not have made up their minds even as late as last Wednesday. But she said that each time she told them something positive about me, the response was, "Yes, we already know that." And the questions they asked her were things she simply could not answer.

Later I met with a history professor, who wrote one of my letters of recommendation. We sat under a tree in the graveyard (she said, "I hope you don't mind the symbolism") and talked for over an hour. She was a little skeptical at first of my theory that the decision might have been dictated by the financial pressures and extramural pressures for greater "accountability." But the more she thought about it, the more it made sense to her--with ten people, an unusually large number, being evaluated, it may have seemed irresponsible to the president and provost to give blanket tenure to all ten. Of course, this theory is completely unprovable, because they would never admit to it; and, in a way, it is beside the point now. The decision is made.

4/29/94: I've been feeling much better, in fact positively chipper, over the last three days. So many people have told me that they felt the tenure decision was wrong that I have ceased to see it as a personal failure. Kay's boss said it was the "stupidest thing I've heard in ten years." A biology professor brought us flowers and homemade goodies and said, "Of the ten people who were up for tenure I would have put you at the top, not the bottom." An English professor... was outraged because she thought it was due to the new system whereby students can send in their evaluations by e-mail, which makes it too easy for them to say things that they would not say in a normal letter. A co-worker of Kay said, "It stinks and it's rotten." [Five other colleagues] and probably others I've forgotten have all expressed various forms of dismay or bewilderment. It's especially impressive how many of these people have gone out of their way to talk to us and express their support... We've come to see that a lot of people do appreciate us. It's not Kenyon that has rejected us, but two people at Kenyon...

There will be some more interesting developments in the next few days. Today the math department had a meeting (without me) to discuss the decision, and on Monday they will have a meeting with the provost... On Tuesday the science division will have a meeting, at which one agenda item is a discussion of the promotion and tenure procedure. Two biology professors say they don't think there is a single person in the division who is not upset by the decision, because of its implications for all departments: research doesn't really matter, and the opinions of a few disgruntled students (of which there are always plenty in any intro science course) can outweigh the opinions of the entire department...

At this point it may be necessary to explain a few peculiarities of Kenyon's tenure review system. At the time of this narrative, Kenyon was practically unique among American colleges in not having a Promotion and Tenure Committee. The decision on whether to recommend a candidate for tenure at the trustees' meeting was made entirely by the provost and president, based on a dossier consisting of the following: four letters from faculty in the department, a departmental letter, three letters from faculty outside the department, two letters from faculty at other institutions, and a minimum of 16 (remember this number!) letters from students, out of a list of 36 students compiled half by the tenure candidate and half by the provost. Unlike many other institutions, Kenyon does not use standardized student evaluation forms. Finally, again contrary to standard practice at other institutions, the candidate's department has no access to the dossier.

5/2/94: The department met with the provost today and got a few answers, though not very satisfying ones. He did give out some information on the student letters: out of 36 requested, only 16 were received (but this is fairly normal, and enough to constitute a dossier); of these, he said that four could be characterized as "generally positive" and 12 were "generally negative." Those are daunting numbers. To put it another way, my approval rating was only slightly higher than Richard Nixon's when he resigned the presidency. It's difficult to comprehend how this could be. For one thing, it's amazing to think that out of the 18 names I gave to the provost as students who I thought would probably give me a favorable review, at most four actually did. Either I am vastly mistaken as to the opinion these students held of me, or the administration is reading the letters in a most unusual way.

This evening I thought of three things that I could have done to improve my chances of getting tenure, if I had thought I was in serious trouble. I plan to mention these at tomorrow's science division meeting, for the benefit of people who will come up for tenure in the future. First, collect student evaluations, whether this is departmental policy or not. One reason is to find out about student dissatisfaction early enough to do something about it. The second reason is more cynical: so that you can defend yourself if the administration tries to say that you have a 25% approval rating... Second, if there is concern about your teaching, get a senior faculty person to sit in on your course. Again, there is a positive reason--this person can act as a mentor--and a defensive reason--this person can vouch for what happened in the course even if some students say something ridiculous about it... Third, and something that would never have occurred to me before: get out the vote. If the administration insists on treating the tenure evaluation as a popularity contest, then any faculty member will improve his or her chances by contacting individually the 18 students on his or her list, impressing on them the importance of their letters, and urging them to write.

5/7/94: At the science division meeting it was decided that the division chair would write a letter for the division to the president and provost, but it would not be so much a letter of protest as a letter saying that the tenure decision had raised certain questions and problems about the process... I also gave my advice about how to improve the odds in the tenure process. A biology professor made a most interesting response to that. She said that, the year she came up for tenure, she told all of her students about it, stressed the important consequences the student letters could have and told them that anything negative they said could be used as a pretext to take away her job. As a result, she said, "that was the only evaluation where I didn't get any negative letters."

I've set up a lunch meeting with the provost for next Thursday, and made up a list of several more questions to ask him. After that, and after I've seen the written explanation of why I was denied tenure (which he says I should receive before our meeting), I'll decide whether I want to press a grievance. At present I think that I probably will.

According to the faculty handbook, there are two possible grounds for a grievance: I could either claim a procedural error by the administration, or I could claim that my dossier was not interpreted in a reasonable manner. I think that my best case for a procedural error was that the administration did consult with the chair and one other professor when it was apparent that my case was problematic, but they did not consult with them in a way which would have allowed them to respond effectively. Neither of them was told ahead of time what the subject of their meeting was...

Probably my better case is to argue that the dossier was not interpreted reasonably. Here I can bring up the "formula" by which they are supposed to evaluate it: 55% teaching, 30% research, and 15% collegiate citizenship...

The percentages alluded to above were approved by the faculty, in a perhaps misguided attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. Though it would be impossible to enforce them in any precise way, certainly a gross violation of this policy could be construed as a procedural error.

On May 11 I received the promised letter from the provost outlining the reasons for the negative tenure decision. The letter summarizes my scholarly engagement (30% of the decision) in seven lines and my collegiate citizenship (15% of the decision) in eight lines, and then contains fifty-six lines of commentary on my teaching. Among other things, the provost wrote:

Looking at student evaluations first, I read fewer than one-fourth that are essentially unqualified in their support of your teaching. All of these are from very able students. That leaves a large majority of letters that are mixed or negative. What are you faulted for? A lack of organization in your presentations, a poor sense of your audience and of their difficulties in comprehending what you are teaching, a tendency to criticize unfairly and thereby to intimidate, a tone of unfriendliness towards many students that makes them reluctant to seek your assistance... In general, students from upper-level courses can find elements of strength in your teaching that in some fashion compensate for the difficulties they write about; students from the introductory calculus sequence tend to be simply unenthusiastic about your teaching.

There can be no doubt that you are bright, no doubt that you are a very fine mathematician. But you are poorest precisely where the department needs strength--in its introductory calculus sequence...

5/12/94: I'm beginning to find out that contesting my tenure decision, even if it's the right thing to do, is going to be a little bit time-consuming. Last night I spent the entire evening typing up, re-thinking and re-typing the questions I was going to ask the provost in our lunch meeting today. The meeting itself lasted close to two hours. Later in the afternoon I met with an art history professor who went through the grievance procedure five years ago when he was denied promotion to full professor. That meeting lasted another hour and a quarter...

The meeting with the art history professor was even more worthwhile than I expected. He expressed the opinion that the provost is really only a front man for the president. He said that I would be surprised how cursorily the dossier is actually read; he believes that most of the alleged "concerns" in the provost's letter are sought out after the decision has been made. He said that the most important part of my defense is to have the department behind me, and their number one question should be why the president and provost overturned the departmental recommendation, which he characterized as a "terrible precedent" and "serious business." The number two question should be whether that has ever happened before. He said that he thought it was likely that I would win the appeal before the grievance committee... He described to a tee the tactics that the provost has used so far; he said that he would try to "scare the department with the prospect of terrible letters" (i.e. portray the student letters of recommendation, to which we have no access, as extremely negative, so the department will not feel as if it has a chance to win), but that the department should not be convinced. He thought that I had some very good arguments that procedural violations had occurred, starting with the argument that worked for him, namely that the provost's "summary" of the dossier was not a summary but in fact a highly slanted rationalization for his own action...

After my meeting with the art history professor, I'm not sure just how important the accumulation of arguments and counter-arguments will be, if the decision was actually made independently, or somewhat independently, of the facts in the dossier. My conversation with him brought me back to one of my first reactions to the decision: that the administration had been looking to deny tenure to one of the ten candidates, and I was the easiest target. As he said, "It's the same way that a mugger thinks." But, of course, such assertions can never be proved, which is why one has to expend so much time and energy trying to catch them in a procedural error.

5/16/94: Driving to Columbus on Saturday gave me some time to ponder the case a bit more. I'm almost sure that I will file a grievance now. That day was the first day that I felt 100% certain that I was in the right and that I ought to be able to win my case before the grievance committee.

5/22/94: The battle over my tenure decision continues to simmer. I had meetings with the chair of the faculty, who thought I had a strong case and should go ahead with a grievance... The chair of the department and the division had an unproductive meeting with the president and provost, during which, as the department chair reported, the president did "90% of the talking."

Kay and I had a friend over for dinner on Wednesday night, a great morale booster because she has a very low opinion of the president and provost... She considers the president to be like King Lear, receiving counsel from all the wrong places and ignoring most of it...

In retrospect, the administration's arrogance at this stage of the procedure was breathtaking. According to the department chair, during his harangue the president said that the decision could not be reconsidered unless they provided "proof of error." Of course, since the department had no access to the dossier, it is difficult to imagine what such "proof of error" could consist of. As we shall see, the dossier did contain proof of error that the president must have known about.

5/25/94: The wheels have been set in motion. On Monday I delivered my grievance letter to the provost's office. Tomorrow I will have a meeting with the chair of the Grievance Committee. I don't know what to expect from this meeting...

Following the advice of the chair of the college's Grievance Committee to be as specific as possible, I itemized six procedural errors and seven errors of interpretation. I argued that the administration had unreasonably overruled the department's professional opinion on flimsy evidence--the minimum allowable number of student letters. Some other possible errors I cited were the meetings with two members of the department who were not given any advance knowledge of the agenda; failure to interpret my mentorship of Kenyon Summer Science Scholars (a summer research program for undergraduates) as teaching; failure to take into account specific ways that I had improved since the second reappointment; and a summary letter from the provost that was not a fair representation of the dossier.

Chapter 4. Grievance
The section of Kenyon's faculty handbook dealing with the grievance procedure is one section I had never thought to look at before April 1994. Kenyon's grievance procedure has three stages. First, there is a relatively amorphous stage called "Informal Consultation," in which "the president or provost will seek to resolve the dispute informally by consultation with the faculty member, the faculty member's department chair and others whose knowledge or experience may be of help..." In essence, this phase had already concluded by the time I wrote my grievance letter. The second phase is "Mediation" by a mediator appointed by the chair of the Grievance Committee. The final phase, which the faculty member may invoke "in the case of failure of other efforts to resolve the dispute," is the appointment of a Hearing Panel consisting of three people from the college's standing Grievance Committee. The panel decides "whether the evidence warrants a grievance hearing," and if so, the case goes to a formal hearing. This last step is not taken lightly by anyone; for the hearing panel, it means hours of difficult and sometimes emotionally charged work. After the hearing ends, the panel makes a written statement of its findings to all parties, and the president of the college is required to accept or reject the recommendation of the panel within one week. The scope of the panel's authority is strictly limited: it is only allowed to recommend a re-evaluation of the tenure candidate, not to conduct its own evaluation, and its recommendation is not binding on the president.

5/28/94: The latest twist in the saga of my tenure review is not an encouraging one. Having filed my grievance on Monday, my next step was to meet with the chair of the Grievance Committee, for the "informal consultation" phase of the process. We met on Thursday, and then he met with the provost on Friday, and was allowed to look at the dossier. Today I got an e-mail from him (actually sent last night) in which he stated that he did not think that the provost had interpreted the dossier "wrongfully." He advised me not to pursue the grievance further, although he added that it was, of course, my choice. I was dismayed not only by his conclusion, but also by the way he drew it. Though he advised me to put as much into writing as possible in my grievance, and Kay and I slaved over it last weekend, it really seems to have made hardly a bit of difference. He barely even referred to it; only in the postscript did he address anything I wrote in the letter... the arguments in my letter have been not so much answered as simply brushed off.

So, sooner than I expected, another crossroads is reached. I certainly don't want to go out just looking like a sore loser, someone who can't face up to reality... It would be foolish to be optimistic at this point about the result of the grievance procedure. But on the other hand, I do think it's reasonable to expect some answers.

Next week I plan to talk with the chair of the faculty again, and see what he makes of it, and whether he still advises me to continue. I may also talk with the art history professor and the history professor again. I think the only certain thing is that if no one advises me to continue, I will not. One reason is that I am entitled to have a faculty advocate in the grievance procedure, and I want someone who's at least somewhat enthusiastic and thinks I can win. I'm pretty sure that the faculty chair is the man I would want for that role... I think it's important to have a more senior, more well-connected member of the faculty who is willing to defend me.

This was probably the lowest moment for me since the day I was first informed of the tenure decision. An independent, presumably unbiased reader had looked at my dossier and found nothing to contradict what the provost had written. However, my conversation with the chair of the faculty did much to lift my spirits. I did, in fact, choose him as my advocate. A roly-poly religion professor with thick glasses, resembling Santa Claus without the beard, he was an ideal choice for the role: good-humored enough not to offend anyone but savvy enough to know what the important issues were. While I often became bogged down in a morass of arguments and counter-arguments, he constantly advised me not to be too "legalistic." I will refer to him below as "Len" (not his real name).

For anyone who finds him or herself in a similar position, I cannot overemphasize the importance of finding a senior faculty member to act as your advocate. As my case shows, it need not be someone from your own department.

5/31/94: Yesterday morning, even though it was Memorial Day, I met with Len to discuss the latest development. He also found the Grievance Committee chair's response to be a little bit puzzling, because it wasn't clear whether he was interpreting this phase as the "informal consultation" or the "mediation." In the "informal consultation" phase the dossier is still supposed to be closed, and the chairman of the Grievance Committee is not supposed to be involved. So it seems likely that he was acting as a self-appointed mediator, which Len called "irregular," though not necessarily illegal... He also said that the Grievance Committee chair's reaction seemed a little bit impatient to him... Finally, he said that he felt "no less strongly then before" about the validity of my case, and in addition felt a certain amount of dismay at the haste and cavalier way the Grievance Committee chair had dealt with my petition.

In other words, Len gave me precisely the support I was looking for to justify continuing my grievance...

On June 18 I wrote a letter to the Grievance Committee chair restating the complaints that I felt had not been answered from my initial grievance letter, and requesting a hearing. On June 30 the Grievance Committee replied that a hearing panel would be formed in late August. Over the summer some changes took place in the administration: a new provost took office (however, the old provost would be required to defend his own decision in the hearing), and the president announced his resignation, effective at the end of the following school year, after twenty years in office, the longest term of any active college president in the country.

According to the rules of the grievance procedure, I was not allowed to see my own dossier until ten days before the grievance hearing. On September 12 I finally got to see with my own eyes the evidence that had led the administration to deny me tenure.

9/12: Wow! ... Today, with Len, my faculty advisor, I finally got to view the contents of my dossier in the provost's office. I think it is fair to say that we were both astonished. The student letters, which the provost had led us to believe were mostly negative, were in fact mostly positive; and the faculty letters, which had been portrayed as ambiguous, were overwhelmingly clear in their support of my candidacy for tenure. The impression that we both got from the dossier was so dramatically different from the tone of the provost's letter that it is virtually impossible to imagine any more that the evaluation was conducted in good faith. One would in fact have to read the letters with careful attention to all negative comments to construct a summary as negative as the provost's. A number of writers, while generally praising my teaching, would write their letters with a sentence beginning "His greatest strength is..." and another sentence beginning "His greatest weakness is..." This is only a sign of a person attempting to give an objective and balanced evaluation. But every time, the provost reported only the negative comments and interpreted the letter as showing a "mixed" opinion or worse.

Some more important discoveries: there were at least two blatant procedural errors. First, instead of the minimum of 16 student letters, the provost received only 15, one of which simply said that the student could not provide any information... The provost stated in a letter to the president, in fact, that he "could not secure sixteen student letters." Yet he repeatedly told me, "the dossier is complete and adequate to its purpose," even though I specifically asked about the number of letters received.

The second blatant error is that no letter was received from the faculty member outside my department who was supposed to evaluate my teaching. Since the decision was purportedly based on teaching, one is amazed that the provost and president did nothing to rectify this omission. It's even more amazing in light of the fact that that faculty member says he did send a letter...

In short, the administration's case seems to me quite a lot worse than I even suspected...

9/17/94: On Thursday I talked with the author of the mysterious disappearing letter: his evaluation of my teaching, which he says he sent in early January but the Provost's office apparently never received. The letter itself, as Len observed, is not going to blow the lid off the case... The things that make the letter more important are that it was presumably sent yet did not appear in the dossier, that the administration felt comfortable in making a decision based on my teaching even in the absence of a faculty letter from outside the department on my teaching, the fact that I was never informed that the letter was missing,... and the fact that the provost misled me after the decision by saying the dossier was complete.

Yesterday, Friday, I had my interview with the grievance panel. It lasted about an hour and a half, and went pretty well. There is no question that they are taking the case seriously, and on some points of substance I think they already agree with me. They had already considered and basically ruled out my suggestion that the administration might not have acted in good faith; however, the chair of the panel did say that he felt that after the decision was made, the provost's letter had been constructed in such a way as to justify the decision rather than to reflect the dossier...

There were too many interesting details covered in our meeting to recount them all. I will just mention one more thing. Apparently, when they talked with the president, one of the arguments he had considered most important was as follows: if I turn off students in lower-level courses so that they never took a math course again, then it doesn't really matter how good a teacher I am for the upper-level courses. So one of the panelists asked my chairman to study the validity of the president's hypothesis: do I in fact turn off the introductory students? The chair identified all of the students who have taken me for their first math course, and computed the average number of math courses they have taken after that. For comparison, he did the same thing with another professor in the department. The result was striking: my students have averaged 1.1 more math courses, and that professor's have averaged 0.8. Yet I am the one who is supposedly depressing math enrollments?

9/20/94: Thank goodness the hearing is over. It was just enough to get me heartily sick of this whole tenure controversy again. Having said that, though, I should also say that I think the hearing was quite productive in some ways. Once again, I could write a very long entry describing all the details, but since many of the details will be made moot by the grievance panel's decision, I will try to give a condensed version.

There were two particularly encouraging things about the hearing. First was the testimony from the members of my department. I think the panel had some serious doubts about the strength of the department's support (one panelist seemed to think that their letters were "mixed"), and I believe their testimony should convince the panel that their support was in no way mixed. I think the panel will have to decide whether it is reasonable to believe that there could be a serious problem with my teaching, as the provost and president allege, that no one in my department perceives. This was implicit in a question one panelist put to the president, about how he could account for such an apparent dichotomy between the faculty and student views of my teaching. The president, as he did throughout the hearing, essentially stonewalled the question, saying that they did not perceive a dichotomy. But I doubt that his answer will persuade the committee. (Although, incidentally, I might agree with the president in another way: there wasn't so much of a dichotomy because in fact the student letters weren't all that negative.)

Getting back to the main point, another very helpful part of the department's testimony was that it revealed some specific ways in which the administration misunderstood what they had said. For example, there was a sentence in one professor's letter that mentioned that the class he had observed had "started late" because some students straggled in late (it was an 8:30 class) and I was still collecting homework from them up to ten minutes after the start of class. But the president and provost had interpreted "starting late" to mean that I had actually come to class ten minutes late--which, as the faculty member said, was not true. Moreover, this single comment, the only negative sentence in that letter out of three pages of glowing positives, was the only thing that the provost had cited in his letter to the president recommending that I not be tenured. The professor told the hearing panel that he felt he had to include something negative in the letter or else it would not be taken seriously. Instead, the negative comment was the only thing that was taken seriously.

Another miscommunication was apparent when the second member of the department testified. The chair of the panel asked her to clarify her "now famous comment" (only to the panel, of course) that she agreed with the administration's decision--something that was cited by both the president and provost when they met with the panel. She was shocked, and said that she had never said such a thing. What she had meant was that they had access to the dossier and she didn't, so she could not know what was in it, but if indeed the letters from students were as negative as portrayed by the provost then she could understand the decision. That's a lot different from agreeing with it! The third department member's testimony was also helpful. We discussed the fact that he had essentially written the department's letter of recommendation. The chair of the panel asked him the question I had wanted to ask but didn't quite know how: did the strength of the department's letter have something to do with who wrote it? The poor guy thought and thought and finally said, "Perhaps I understate things." His comment was so ingenuous and so... well, understated, that I do not think he could have possibly given a better answer...

Len didn't say a whole lot, but what he did say was very helpful. While the administration kept harping on negative student letters, he reiterated that he had not found the letters to be negative at all, and that he personally would have been happy to come up for tenure with such a dossier. I think the panel has to take it very seriously when a respected senior faculty member like him says that and means it. He also provided one of the few moments of comic relief, when he asked the president whether anyone actually has a dossier with no negative letters at all. The president said yes, and Len asked, "And you believe them?" Everyone laughed, but I think that part of the reason for the laughter was that it was a point well made.

9/22/94: Some of the suspense ended today... In a very well-written and well-reasoned letter, the hearing panel gave me virtually a complete victory. They argued that the administration had not followed the proper procedures by failing to notify me that my dossier was incom-plete; that this may have adversely affected the quality of my dossier by depriving me of a chance to solicit letters from students; and that the student and faculty letters in the dossier had been misinterpreted. Accordingly, they recommended that I be re-evaluated for tenure.

This victory means a lot to me, both as a moral victory and as a decision that will wipe the "black mark" off my record if I apply to other institutions for a job. Now, instead of giving my personal opinion that the tenure decision was misguided, I have an official determination from a faculty committee that was able to examine all the evidence.

Some of the passages from the Grievance Panel's report were quite tart, and I read them with a great sense of vindication. A few of them are given below:

The Faculty Handbook states that during the evaluation for appointment without limit: 'By January 31, the Provost will inform the faculty member which materials and letters from the evaluators chosen by the member have not been received.' By the Provost's own admission, one faculty letter and several student letters remained outstanding at this time. Yet Mackenzie was never informed; and the dossier remained incomplete when the decision was made.

It must be emphasized that all persons evaluated deserve at minimum a dossier compiled according to our basic regulations. That the rule regarding notification is routinely ignored, as the Provost testified, does not in any way excuse this lapse... The failure to notify was particularly serious given that the missing items related specifically to teaching, the area where deficiencies proved decisive in the review...

The central reason for denying tenure to Mackenzie was his performance in teaching introductory Calculus, and the main evidence for his inadequacy in that area was the student letters. But the Provost's interpretation of that evidence... seems to us in several respects an unreasonable representation of the student letters. The provost claims that 'Students from the introductory calculus sequence tend to be simply unenthusiastic about your teaching.' We found however that some of those students were in fact extremely enthusiastic. The provost writes that there is 'a large majority of letters that are mixed or negative.' Although there clearly are letters that are mixed or negative, they do not in our view constitute a majority, let alone a large majority...

Whatever strengths [students from upper-level courses] saw were wrongly interpreted by the Provost as mainly or merely compensation for weaknesses. On the contrary, our sense was that in the main the advanced students saw Mackenzie's teaching as exceptionally positive...

Given the administrators' acknowledgement of the standards and candor of the Math faculty, it is particularly disturbing that the Chair... was invited for a critical meeting without knowledge that the subject concerned an impending negative decision on Mackenzie. This ignorance was intended, the Provost states, to prevent [the Chair] from somehow making inappropriate preparations for the discussion. As a result [the Chair] felt he inadequately defended Mackenzie's record, and the administrators incorrectly inferred that he did not significantly dispute their conclusions...

9/30/94: [In] my mailbox I found a letter from the president that was as welcome as the letter that I waited for in vain on April 25. In five terse lines, the president acknowledged the grievance panel's recommendation that I be re-evaluated for tenure and said that he accepted the recommendation.

To return to the guillotine metaphor I used last April, I guess I feel now like someone whose head has been sewn back on: giddy with relief, but still in somewhat precarious health.

Chapter 5. Double Jeopardy
After accepting the results of the grievance hearing, the president wrote another letter outlining the procedure that would be followed for my re-evaluation. Since the administration did not dispute my qualifications in scholarly engagement and collegiate citizenship, the new review would focus exclusively on my teaching. And the scrutiny would be more intense this time. Every student whom I had taught in the last two years would be asked to write a letter, and the faculty in my department arranged to attend several of my classes, where in past reviews they had only attended one or two. I entered the new review cautiously optimistic: cautious because I knew the review would be conducted by the same president, but optimistic because it would be conducted by a new provost (a physicist this time, rather than a historian), and because I felt that my department's support would be much more clearly expressed this time.

One complication that arose in the fall was the department's use of a new "reform" calculus book, Calculus in Context. As we expected, the new and radically different approach to calculus drew a lot of criticism from students (in fact, the department abandoned this book two years later); however, my colleagues pledged to keep student criticism of the book as separate from their evaluation of my teaching as possible.

Here are a few of my teaching experiences from that fall.

9/23/94: There were two interesting points in today's class. First, when I discussed reaction rates as an example of exponential growth or decay (reaction rate is proportional to the concentration of the reactant), one student said, "That's not the way we do it in chemistry!" But then he thought about it a bit and said, "Wait a minute... there's something about taking the logarithm... maybe it is the same thing!" He said that in the chemistry course they just learn a rote technique for finding the reaction rate, without learning why it works. Now he might understand why!

The second point came up when we were discussing inverse functions. As usual, this provoked a certain amount of confusion among the students. I think my way of explaining it is partly at fault. The book has a very nice way, which I will try on Monday. Anyway, another student came up to me after class and started explaining how he learned about inverse functions in high school. To paraphrase: "An inverse function is... you switch x and y, and then you solve for y."

To me, this was another perfect example of how students are taught rote procedures for getting the right answer, without really understanding the concepts involved.

11/11/94: One of my colleagues has started sitting in on my class, and the experience has already been beneficial to both of us. First, she really liked the way I used DERIVE to explain why an unbounded region can have such a narrow "neck" that it has finite area. When you plot a function like y = (1-x)^(-1/2), DERIVE cannot even show the asymptote... the neck is so narrow that the computer can't even "see" it. My colleague said she will always introduce improper integrals that way from now on...

If teaching is a battle for souls, I won one and lost one this week. (Perhaps.) One of the students who has been most critical of the Calculus in Context approach wrote in his journal that he had been thinking about some other subjects over the weekend, and suddenly this approach started to make sense to him after all. He was very vague about it, and wrote, "I will have to think more about this," but that was a very encouraging sign indeed!

The setback occurred this morning. One of my students asked if she could have 5 minutes after class to do a little computer work for one of the problems on the take-home exam, because she hadn't had time to come to the computer lab last night. I said no, and explained, "You're supposed to make time to come to the lab." She got upset, said, "You shouldn't say that, because I worked on this test for nine hours yesterday," and stormed out of the classroom in tears.

There are so many aspects of this incident that I can second-guess myself on. Was it unreasonable to deny her the five minutes? No. A deadline is a deadline. Another student had the same problem on the last test, and lost several points as a result. I have to be consistent. Was my comment insensitive? I don't know. At that point I couldn't have known how much time she had put into the exam already. Some students need a little lecture like that to get the message. Was the exam too long? Apparently most of the students took a very long time to do the first problem. I was very surprised, because the book shows, step by step, how to solve this kind of problem (a logistic equation) and even gives a formula for the solution. BUT... there was only one homework problem on the logistic equation, and it had a typo that ruined the problem, so I didn't count that homework problem. And so, the students, minimizing effort as students always do, may have thought, "Well, the homework problem didn't count, so we won't be responsible for this on the test."

11/16/94: I felt lower than low after this morning's class... I guess I should have stayed away from the [problem] that caused all the emotion on Friday. One student had gotten an unrealistic answer and seemed puzzled about it, so I had written next to it, "Garbage in, garbage out"--meaning that because the equation he had plugged some numerical values into was wrong, the output was also wrong. But he interpreted it, I think, as a comment on his whole solution, and started telling me how long he had worked on it, etc. I got pretty flustered, partly because I knew I had set myself up by writing a comment that could be so easily misinterpreted. Ordinarily I would have patched it up and moved on, but after all my tenure struggles I have gotten so paranoid. "Is this where I lose the student forever? Is this what he's going to write about in his letter to the provost? What are [the two math professors attending my class] going to think?" For about 15 minutes I felt as if my brain was disconnected from my mouth, as I babbled on about that problem...

Every semester has to have a worst class, and I hope this morning's class was it.

Perhaps I was right to be so paranoid: one of the two professors in attendance told me, months later, that this class had made a big impression on him. As for the student, my apprehensions were wrong: I didn't "lose" him, and perhaps he even forgot all about the incident. The last time I talked with him, over a year and a half later, he commented on how much he had learned from my class.

12/1/94: ... Another highlight yesterday was my morning calculus class, which was visited by the chair of the math department and the new provost. I started the chapter on dynamical systems... The timing was fortuitous, because dynamical systems is an area of mathematics the provost knows a lot about, and I think he was probably pleased to see it covered in a calculus course. The chair was also very excited about my class, particularly about the way I pointed out that the computer's drawing of trajectories "slows down" as they approach equilibrium points. He thought it was neat that you could actually get information not just from the curves themselves, but also the way that the computer draws them. Funny, it seemed sort of obvious to me, but I guess it wasn't. Moreover, it wasn't obvious to the students either, since we had never talked about parametrized curves before. One of the students asked me to explain what the chair meant [and why it was so exciting]. Once again, it was a case where having another faculty member attending my class was a help to me and my students and the other faculty member.

12/29/94: [A former student whom I visited with during Christmas break] paid me a compliment that I never expected to hear. She said that, as she was preparing for her student teaching, she looked over her old tests from the calculus course she took from me, and appreciated for the first time the creativity and wit that went into them.

1/29/95: Friday was the day that the student and faculty letters of evaluation for my tenure review were due at the provost's office. The provost's secretary reported to me on Friday afternoon that they had received 36 student letters and all the faculty letters. Quite a change from last year! Lack of information should not be a problem this time.

As I awaited the outcome of the review, an interesting subplot played itself out: the faculty debated and finally adopted a proposal to create a tenure and promotion committee--too late, ironically, to have any effect on my case.

3/31/95: Three people have told me this week that they were glad that I spoke up in the faculty meeting on Monday... I was the first person to speak in the debate on the tenure and promotion committee. I said that I had a unique perspective on the current tenure system, having become the answer to the trivia question, "Who was the last person to be denied tenure at Kenyon?" Then I talked about my view that the departmental input was not great enough, and asked how the proposed committee would affect that; also, I said that a paramount consideration should not be whether more or fewer people get tenure, but whether more or fewer mistakes will be made. I don't think that my little speech was very eloquent, but I guess some people may have thought it was brave for me to identify myself as a person who didn't get tenure.

Finally, four days before the trustees' meeting, I got a hint of the way the wind was blowing.

4/17/95: Once more the same nightmare? Only a nightmare the second time no longer makes the pulse race quite as much... I got a call from the provost's secretary, who had been told to set up a meeting for me with the president and provost on Thursday. The agenda: my tenure decision. Naturally, two possibilities crossed my mind. One was that they may have decided, out of sympathy, to end my suspense and let me know before the meeting that they were recommending me for tenure. However, that doesn't seem likely, as sympathy is a foreign concept to bureaucracies. The alternative explanation is that I am being denied again. Further support for that interpretation came when a German professor met me in the copier room a few minutes later and asked if I had gotten a call to meet with the "diumvirate." I said I had and, with my hopes momentarily rising, asked if everyone who was up for tenure was getting such calls. She said they definitely weren't. So it almost certainly seems to be bad news for both of us. She was distraught, and looked just the way I remember feeling last year: like a tree uprooted. I felt a lot calmer, since I've been through it before and was somewhat prepared.

4/21/95: After all the surprising turns that my tenure saga has taken, one more shocker awaited me on Thursday morning. As I expected, the president told me that I would not be offered tenure. But there was one huge difference from last year: this time the mathematics department recommended that I not be offered tenure. Once I heard that, the wind went right out of my sails. All that I battled for in the grievance procedure last year was the right to be judged by my own peers. Now that has happened...

Since Thursday morning, I have talked with each of the members of the department to find out what caused them to change their minds. I think that [one of them] expressed it best. She said that she went into the re-evaluation determined to find the answers to two questions. First, was there a problem with my teaching, or was it a figment of the administration's imagination? And second, if there was a problem, how could it have escaped the department's observation for so long? She said that after sitting in on eight of my classes, she felt that she had the answers. She saw patterns in my teaching that, in individual classes, had not seemed like serious problems, but when they were repeated she could understand why the average to weaker students were dissatisfied. She commented, for example, that I would give a beautifully prepared lecture with nice examples, get to the end, and she would think, "Great, now all he has to do is tie this up"--and instead I would go on to the next topic. She also commented that when students ask questions, she always tries to figure out what it really is they don't understand--which is not always the same as the question asked, because students often don't realize quite what they are confused about. But she said that too often I would take the question too literally, and answer only what the student asked. Another criticism she had was that, because of my mild-mannered demeanor, it was hard to tell the central points of the lecture apart from the minor points. They were all presented on an even keel. Another colleague saw some other problems, such as my not getting all the students equally involved. Also, he pointed out that I would often ask a question, get a right answer, and then go on with the lecture without making sure that everyone understood the answer.

Maybe none of these problems individually was decisive, but taken all together, they made the department too uneasy to recommend me for tenure. My reaction to them was that all the criticisms had some validity, but it was a shame that no one had brought them to my attention four years ago, or even two years ago. It was a fault that we all shared. I did get a warning, in my second reappointment review, that I should find a mentor to work with me on my teaching. The chair and I talked about having him attend my classes, but we never quite found the time, and I don't think that either of us really believed it was serious enough to warrant the effort. We have all learned that attending each other's classes and talking about them should be a routine part of our business. It should start the first year that new faculty come in, and it should continue even with the senior faculty, because they, too, have to deal with the same kinds of classroom challenges the junior faculty do.

In the above entry I portrayed the math department's change of heart in probably the most favorable light. Other people, including my wife, were not so charitable in their opinion of the department. My wife found support from a somewhat surprising source.

5/6/94: Kay went to the college's ombudsman to talk about my tenure decision and her anger over it. Surprisingly, even though the ombudsman is in the administration, she agreed that I had been badly treated. She had also talked with the German professor who was denied tenure, and agreed that the secrecy of the meetings between the administration and the departments was a serious problem. As the German professor commented on Saturday night [when she visited our house for dinner], the secrecy works completely against the tenure candidate, by depriving that person of the ability to defend him or herself before the decision is announced. I have also commented before that the fact that the department cannot view the candidate's complete dossier was a critical factor in my case. If the department had known how exaggerated were the administration's claims about the number of negative student letters in my [previous year's] dossier, they might have reached a different conclusion.

Incidentally, my colleagues in the mathematics department were also very distressed about the secrecy issue. In mid-January, when they made the decision not to recommend me for tenure, they had intended to inform me immediately, but the provost directed them not to. This resulted in three very awkward months for them.

Was the department's change of heart justified? I have talked with colleagues who called it "criminal" and "immoral" to support me one year and recommend against me the next, without giving me a clue until the day I met with the president and provost. A year after the decision, Len told me that the department's flip-flop was, to him, the most surprising aspect of the whole case. One could, of course, put a very simple interpretation on it: when my colleagues actually took the trouble to attend my classes, they found them unsatisfactory.

On the other hand, from my previous experiences I have learned that things are not always so simple. The jury's decision depends on the charge given to the jury (in this case, my departmental colleagues). In this case that charge was (to paraphrase): we have already found Mackenzie's research and collegiate citizenship to be satisfactory, but if his teaching is not up to snuff then he should not be recommended for tenure. Moreover, crucial information was withheld from the jury: the actual contents of the student evaluations. Only one person in the department, the chair, ever heard Len's crucial comment that the letters were positive enough already for me to get tenure, and that he himself would be happy to come up for tenure with such a dossier. The rest of the department was left with the belief that the students were very critical of my teaching. (Note that they also did not get to see the grievance panel's finding that the administration had misrepresented the student letters.) Even the chair never got to see the students' letters, and may have dismissed Len's observation as a rhetorical flourish. Finally, although the mistakes made in the first evaluation were the administration's, it was I who was subjected to increased scrutiny of my teaching. One time this scrutiny clearly affected my teaching was the dreadful class I described on November 16. To summarize, I believe that the unavailability of key evidence, the changing of the rules of evaluation, and the shifting of the burden of proof were more than enough to cause fair-minded people to make the wrong decision.

I will end with the story of another individual who was forced to turn his back on a career he had given his heart to.

5/10/94: When Michael Jordan decided to return to basketball this winter, after spending the last year as a minor-league baseball player, his basketball coach, Phil Jackson, said, "Michael Jordan didn't fail baseball--baseball failed him." I can say the same thing about academia. The only way the analogy breaks down is that I can't go back to being the world's best basketball player, as Michael Jordan can!

Chapter 6. Epilogue
The German professor mentioned in the last two entries won a more satisfying victory than I did. After the "informal consultation" phase of the grievance procedure, the administration offered her a re-evaluation similar to the one I underwent. In the re-evaluation, which was conducted this time by the brand-new Promotion and Tenure Committee as well as a brand-new president and provost, she received tenure. She benefited not only from my experience, but also from having a well-organized team of faculty advocates from other departments. Again, this shows the importance of having someone else to argue your case. At a liberal arts college, it may be harder for a mathematician to mobilize this sort of support, since there are fewer other disciplines that "speak the same language."

Len, who did such a marvelous job as my advocate and taught me that a few well-chosen words can be more effective than pages of arguments, received one of the two Trustees' Distinguished Teaching Awards in 1996. Ironically, a mathematician won the other one--a vindication for him, as he had been distressed by receiving criticism on his second reappointment review (in 1993) quite similar to the criticism I had received on mine.

Chapter 7. Conclusion
For the person facing a tenure decision or the person, like me, in the uncomfortable position of challenging a tenure decision, here are some final words of advice.

Long before the tenure decision, you should make a concerted effort to receive mentoring from other faculty in your department, and to find out what their expectations are. If there is no mentoring system in place, appeal to individuals to help. Also, suggest that department ought to implement a regular system of mentoring and evaluation.

Remember that the actual reasons for the tenure decision may be different from the stated reasons; and remember that the perception of reality by the decision-makers is more important than the reality. If there are honest and ethical ways for you to tilt that perception in your favor, by all means do so.

Do not assume that administrators know their jobs well, even the purely administrative parts. If they are capable of bungling a decision, they are also capable of bungling the procedures that they are ostensibly supposed to follow.

If you fight a tenure decision, expect it to cost you a great deal of time and emotional energy. And then expect it to cost even more than you expected.

Do not venture into the fray alone. You need an older, wiser, and better-connected advocate. In a small college, this may mean going outside your department.

Watch out for changes in "the rules of the game," whether overt or hidden. If the new rules are set by the administration, they are unlikely to favor you.

Watch out for excessive secrecy. Some secrecy is, of course, required to protect the confidentiality of evaluations. But too much secrecy serves as a cover for incompetence or worse. It never serves you, the faculty member being evaluated. Also, question the need for any secrecy that is imposed on you personally. For example, I believe that it was a mistake for me not to show my colleagues the text of the grievance panel's findings, even though it was marked "Confidential." The result was that the administration's interpretation of the dossier was the only official version they ever heard.
Do you know a colleague who was just denied tenure? It's one of the most shattering experiences one can have in academia, and your colleague would greatly appreciate any words of support you can offer, even if you don't know anything about the specifics of the case. Don't treat that person as if he or she had a contagious disease. Also, unless you know something about the case, go lightly on the "Those bastards, they don't know what they're doing" type of comment. Try to accentuate your colleague's positives rather than the administration's negatives.

Are you conducting a job search, and have applications from people who were denied tenure? In today's competitive job market, I know that there is a strong temptation to pass over any candidate who has any negatives on his or her record, such as an adverse tenure decision. Try looking at that candidate differently: this may be your chance to profit from another institution's huge mistake. You may be getting a very experienced professor who just didn't fit in that other place, or who was denied for reasons having little to do with his or her qualifications.