I am frustrated

Things are just not going very well this week.

Today I was looking forward to our dept. committee voting on allowing me to send my tenure case up to the divisional committee in December. I had double-checked with my mentor to make sure that everything was in place and it was on the agenda, and he assured me it was. I was nervous because he's traveling today and so couldn't be there in person to argue for them passing this. (I personally am not allowed to do it, he has to do it for me in his role as my tenure committee chair).

Then today I found out that they actually didn't vote on me at all. I hadn't made it onto the agenda. So I asked my dept. chair what was up. She said, "Mentor didn't prepare the materials! I gave him the checklists and so forth but he didn't prepare them!" I reminded her, "This is for next year in December, not this semester." Then she seemed a little confused and said, "Oh, actually the department doesn't really have to vote on that. You and Mentor just have to make sure that everything is in place for that to happen at the right time." And I said, "Oh, I thought the dept. did have input on timing especially in years when there is more than 1 person going up in order to spread the work around and maximize the chances for everybody to make it." And then she paused and said, "Hmm -- I'll email Mentor about this."

My fear is that we'll be working to prepare my case for December, I'll be mentally prepared to have this over in December, and then in the fall in Sept. or Oct. the department will then decide that actually it's better to put me up in May in order to make it easier for the other candidates to have success (there are 3 of us going up next year). And I think I will lose it if that happens, because I'm already on the edge and I just can't wait any longer at this point. That's why I want a vote on it now, to get it on the record that the dept. said I could go up in December.

I am frustrated that nobody really knows how the exact process works, that the process is different from department to department, that the rules and requirements are different depending on who you are and what the "tradition" is, and that there is no transparency at all to this process.

Here is another example. It used to be the case that for all of your co-authored articles you had to submit letters from your co-authors detailing the percentage effort breakdown that each of you contributed to the conceptualization, the data collection and analysis, and the writing portions of the paper. You had to do this for every co-authored paper no matter how far back (for instance, I have some co-authored publications from 2002, and we would have to get letters from my co-authors on these papers).

However, this turned out to not be very helpful or informative so the divisional committee did away with this rule. There were too many discrepancies and how do you know which story is the right story? BUT. They are telling me I still need to do it. There is a perception in our dept. that this is still the rule. So I showed them 2 cases from last year from two of my colleagues in related departments, and how their cases didn't have this information, and they did get tenure. The divisional committee did not require this information from them. But apparently it doesn't matter -- Mentor said, "Well, I guess this is how we do it in our department", so they are making me do it. That makes no sense. Is there a consistent set of criteria or not? (Obviously not).

In many ways I wish that preparing a tenure case was simply the responsibility of the candidate alone. Nobody is going to care about this as much as I do. Nobody is going to be as on the ball about it as I am. I can't make other people do things in a timely manner, avoid procrastination, or be as careful as I would be about it. But the case has to be written by my committee, not by me, and this means relying on other people to be responsible and careful about the whole thing. There are some obvious flaws in this system.