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Speaking of the Senate by John Queen, Academic Senate President |
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If I had to choose one word that summed up the most important issue for this academic year it would be “evaluation.” Whether it be administrators or faculty, the issue of evaluation kept coming up all year long. PRESIDENTIAL SURVEY Of course, the most attention around evaluation was the Senate’s survey of the superintendent/president conducted in the fall. Technically this was not an evaluation of the superintendent/president, since that function is reserved for the Board of Trustees. Rather, it was a Senate straw poll providing feedback to the superintendent/president about faculty perceptions. (The administration itself has distinguished the evaluation of administrators from a feedback mechanism they are proposing to use, known as the 360° survey. So I am not totally splitting hairs by distinguishing an evaluation from feedback.) The survey was controversial, but until some satisfactory avenue for faculty input into the Board’s official evaluation is provided, the need for the survey will persist. ADMINISTRATOR EVALUATIONS Much less visible was an ongoing discussion between the administration and the Senate and Guild presidents about how administrators beneath the level of the superintendent/president should be evaluated. There is a policy already in place dating to 1999, whereby a three-person evaluation committee consisting of an administrator, a faculty member appointed jointly by the Senate and the Guild, and a classified representative appointed by CSEA conduct an evaluation. For a while, the administration was proposing a new 360° model, in which the administrator would choose a number of faculty, administrators and classified to give feedback to him or her. This would have amounted to a major change to the evaluation process, and the Guild and Senate raised concerns about the administrator choosing the faculty representative(s). As alluded to above, this proposal was shelved as a formal evaluation but will probably be used as a feedback device in non-evaluation years. Another issue that has just arisen is a proposal that the faculty representative in the existing process be restricted to his or her direct experience with the administrator. Thus, talking with other faculty members or administrators about the performance of the administrator would not be permitted. Discussion continues on this, to say the least.
TENURE REVIEW COMMITTEES On the faculty side of the house, evaluations have come up in a couple of contexts. The first has to do with the tenure process. The issue here was tenure review committees lagging in the completion of their annual duties. To some extent, the calendar is the source of difficulty, since the tenure-track timeline was created before the calendar was compressed (i.e., before we introduced the 15½-week semester and the intervening winter intersession.) Some lateness in the annual committee report is due to this, and the Senate is currently considering an alteration to the timeline to bring it into conformity with our current calendar. But a more troubling problem is the failure on the part of some tenure committees to complete their annual duties. The committee’s role is generally understood to be that of a gatekeeper, i.e., to make sure that the probationary faculty member is performing to the college’s standards and, if not, to deny tenure. This is certainly true, but I think we all also generally understand that the committee’s role is also to nurture good practice and help the faculty member achieve his or her full potential as a professor. Less obvious, but at least equally important, is that the tenure committee records evidence of the successes of the faculty member, so that a complete record of his or her performance is available to counter criticisms from whatever quarter. So the tenure committee is the probationary faculty member’s mother, cop and lawyer, all rolled up into one. It is thus imperative that all of us make sure that these committees function well and in a timely manner. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS & EQUIVALENCY Another aspect of faculty evaluation is the minimum qualifications determination that occurs when a candidate for a faculty position first applies for a job, whether it be part-time or tenure-track. Each application must be reviewed to determine whether the applicant meets the minimum qualifications for the position as determined by the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges and Glendale College. (You can find the list of minimum qualifications at www.glendale.edu/community/employment/pdf/MinQualsList.pdf) Usually this is pretty straightforward: for most positions, the applicant must possess the appropriate Master’s degree for the discipline. But in some instances applicants will argue that they have the equivalency to the Master’s degree in question. Further, some of these applicants will claim that the basis for their equivalency is due to their work experience. In actuality, an equivalency in the vast majority of cases must be based on equivalent course work to the Master’s in question. Most equivalency claims based on something other than equivalent course work will fail. Thus, when faculty review applications that make an equivalency claim, they must carefully review the application and the college’s policy (www.glendale.edu/community/employment/pdf/Equiv%20policy%2008-05.pdf). In any case, any decision to grant an equivalency must be immediately reported to the 1st vice president of the Academic Senate (who is presently Mike Wheeler). If the vice president disagrees, the equivalency is not granted. The decision can be appealed to the Senate Equivalency Committee, whose decision is final. (A division’s decision not to grant equivalency may also be appealed to the Senate Equivalency Committee.) The minimum qualifications for noncredit courses may differ from credit courses in that a Bachelor’s or Associate’s degree may satisfy the minimum. But even here if equivalency is argued, it too must be equivalent course work. To sum up then, healthy, functioning evaluation processes are vital to our mission. Evaluation can be looked at as just another chore in the ever-expanding list of our duties. But the reality is that evaluations promote and guide good practices throughout the college in a comprehensive and fair fashion and protect all of us from potshots and hearsay in this Rate-Your-Professor era. & |
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