Confidential evaluation files tend to feature more misinformation and disinformation than evaluation files that evaluees may inspect and police.
At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].
Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.
Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].
Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.
Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?
And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?
Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts
4 comments:
Nothing you include suggests that the professor restricted himself to closed files in tenure cases. Is there a chance that the professor wants to close all files?
Who knows?
One or more colleagues have cherished the dream of closed files for 30-40 years, I imagine.
Snipers and score-settlers love closed files, as do timid souls. Any or all might favor surreptitious evaluation.
One irony of the open-closed issue is that most sniping and score-settling becomes known and attributed eventually. If one slides some misinformation or disinformation into one's letter, the departmental deliberation may devote some time to correcting the record. Hence, vulnerable or craven faculty are sometimes lured by closed files into exposing their views almost as much as an open file would. Nyuk!
Nonetheless, closed files do afford cover for observations fair and unfair. If I am the only peer in a classroom on a given day, I may largely claim whatever I please. The only person equipped to question my "observations" is forbidden from perusing my letter. The departmental summary will usually cover the "observations" generally BOTH because the summary is a summary and not a transcript AND because a detailed summary would out me as the only person who saw the evaluee lecture on that topic or raise that point. Neither my peers nor the evaluee need be in any position to answer my claims. My claims are then absorbed into decision-making beyond my program, department, or school. Nyuk! Nyuk!
Interesting that the former FAC member did not even offer more than one anecdote if your description is exactly correct.
Please do not take the singularity of "anecdote" literally. I am certain that the speaker would claim to have more than one "observation" behind his disquietude. Alas, no sensible colleague may credit such claims.
When inferences masquerade as observations, we cannot know how reliable, valid, or comparable each "datum" or "instance" might be. Faculty in sciences or social sciences usually do not regard such assertions or insinuations as data at all.
Was this FAC veteran referring only to tenure files? We do not know.
How many tenure files have been open and how many closed since the change in the code? We do not know.
By what method did one or more members of the FAC ascertain what was going through the mind of this or that vulnerable colleague as she or he wrote? We cannot know.
The speaker hoped to validate his disquietude as data through unctuousness and inside information. He said that he seconded the motion to allow candidates for tenure to choose open files. This pious pronouncement will move no reasonable, skeptical, systematic thinker. Worse, he presumed that whatever a member of the FAC asserted counts as a fact. The FAC routinely treats the impossible and the improbable as facts then cowers behind confidentiality -- a confidentiality that is so far from fact that in the very first entry in this blog I lampooned it as "The Confidentiality Con."
Confidential "information" presented in an affected manner is not factual. It is FACtual: a premiss presumed true because it advances the goals of an FAC speaker and encourages credulity among non-FAC listeners.
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