The FAC has issued a cry for help. Will you answer?In its annual report dated 5 May 2009, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has implicitly admitted its cognitive disarray:
"As we noted last year, a continuing concern of the Advancement Committee is open file reviews. The participation of all tenure-line colleagues in departmental and program reviews is a long-standing and highly valued practice at Puget Sound. Evaluees have long had the option of open or closed files for evaluations other than the tenure evaluation. The recent vote by the faculty to extend the option of open files to tenure evaluations has raised the salience of the issue of junior faculty participation in all open file reviews. Since the vote to extend open files, FAC members have observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty though also by some senior colleagues, and a general reluctance by some to weigh in on change of status evaluations."The FAC's deployment of the
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy disappoints. It is too bad that the FAC featured no social scientists or scholars familiar with logical validity or cogency.
Can commenters help out?
Please supply arguments that the FAC would advance if members of the FAC cared to be taken seriously.
Please assist your challenged colleagues.
8 comments:
These remarks, like those that senate heard last year, constitute a masterwork of misdirection.
I laughed last year when the Senate chair interrogated the FAC represenatives about the illogic of their position.
I laughed anew at a faculty meeting in the Rotunda when a former member of the FAC raised this "concern" again. He was embarrassed by a colleague who asked whether the speaker was familiar with the distinction between anecdotes and data. The former FAC member than made it clear that he was not familiar with the distinction.
With due respect to the skeptic who took the FAC member to rask, the views expressed in the Rotunda were less anecdote than apocrypha.
To the best of my recollection,the members of the FAC, with one notable exception, joined the FAC after the opening of files. This calls into doubt many claims to know what colleagues letters looked like before the change versus after the change.
Two members of the FAC may claim that they had served on the FAC previously. However, such a claim would posit an extravagant recollection.
That is why the claim that two or more members of the FAC could have OBSERVED before and after behaviors on the FAC is not persuasive.
The only member of the FAC who can claim plausibly to have perceived differences never seemed to me to support opening the files.
More generally, how many of the members of the FAC who "observed" this decline in candor supported opening the files? Self-fulfilling prophecies and stubbornness do not become the FAC.
How many members of the FAC have backed the claim anyway? If this bogy haunts two members of the FAC, then the claim is not even a majority view on the FAC.
"Since the vote to extend open files, FAC members have observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty though also by some senior colleagues, and a general reluctance by some to weigh in on change of status evaluations." How many members of the current FAC served on the FAC before the vote for open files? Two? The rest have not seen files from across campus to provide the before-and-after perspective that's implied, so even before we get to anecdotes, data, and post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc, there's a "methodology" problem. And of course, the FAC can't cite evidence because of "confidentiality."
You may be correct. I suspect, however, that the FAC is explained less by confidentiality than by confidence. The FAC routinely makes arguments in cynical, serene confidence that no one except the president will be able to pin the FAC down and make the FAC defend its decisions, claims, and arguments. The members wrote to the Faculty Senate; they had no reason to suppose that the president would learn of their blather.
As I reconsidered the responses to this entry and its immediate predecessor, the methodological flaws in the FAC's argument have proliferated.
As noted in multiple posts on my blog [12-9-08; 11-22-08; 11-21-08] the FAC confounds tenure with non-tenure evaluations despite the fact that tenure files were no longer closed by the code. In methodological terms, the FAC "observes" effects in tenure and non-tenure files alike. If the independent variable -- the change in the code -- is associated with changes in the dependent variable -- guarded evaluations -- whether the independent variable is zero or one, the FAC is making a puzzling case.
Moreover, no one on this years FAC may plausibly claim that he or she "observed" anything. Two members of this year's FAC were rookies. They cannot have great experience of letters in closed files even WITHIN their own departments of programs, let alone OUTSIDE their departments or programs. Those two have no "before" to contrast to "after." One hopes that the rookies did NOT agree with the "observation" of the FAC.
Another member of this year's FAC was completing her first stint on the Committee. All of her observations post-date the change in the code. Even if she had access to letters in a closed file WITHIN her department, she likely could not contrast those to letters WITHIN her department during her sojourn on FAC -- she is recused from the FAC for her department's evluations.
If any of the three veterans of pre-change stints on the FAC wants to claim that he or she recalls individuals' degrees of openness or unguardedness from his or her stints prior to the rceent changes, then he or she purports to remember letters from 1990 or 1999 or 2002 at the latest. Whatever!
Now it is true that the Dean straddles the change. Is it plausible that she has "observed" guardedness in letters that she may reliably and validly relate to changes in the code?
Even if we believe that the Dean is capable of such impressive recall and analysis, the Dean is but one member of the FAC. I have served with multiple colleagues who in effect gave the Dean additional votes, but never have I served with anyone who gave deans additional voices.
FAC prose, how can it be both specious and precious? And with each pronouncement more specious and more precious than the one before? How do they do it?
While all blog commenters make good points about the illogical nature of FAC 'observations' to the Senate, you all miss a point laden with irony. Here we have the FAC wishing to close files because, it chides, some faculty old and new are unable or unwilling to write with CANDOR, to accept responsibility for their decisions, in short to have the COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTIONS. Wait? Can this BE the same FAC that elected themselves 6 co-chairs of the committee because they feared that a single chair might be held responsible for their decisions? Or was it that a single chair might occasionally commit candor? It is sheer buggery for the FAC to moan that some junior, and ALAS even senior, faculty do not have the COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTIONS to write in an open file honest appraising letters while the FAC themselves flaunt the Faculty Code and hide behind 6 co-chairs.
So much for the so-called 'culture of transparency' at Puget Sound.
In my previous sojourn on the FAC, I noted that some open and some closed files, some contentious and some uncontroversial files lacked clear or cogent recommendations and even more lacked evidence, even anecodotal evidence. I took these omissions to mean that:
1) Many faculty do not understand the importance of their letters.
2) Some faculty do not give a rip.
3) Several faculty are blithely unaware of what is required in a good letter to support a colleague. (Indeed I saw one potential scholar go down in flames because colleagues who apparently meant to be in support damned the tenure evaluee with faint praise.)
4) A few faculty members cannot write cogently in English.
5) More than a few appear lazy and shirking of the responsibility inherent in colleague evaluation.
6)A very few seemed to purposely hedge for political reasons and this seems to be what is of concern to the FAC, if their prose can be accepted at face.
7)Two guys consistently wrote what could only be termed rants that bore no discernable relation to statements made by the files' authors or content of observed class sessions. (Of these, one also personified item #4 above.)
Given the variety of reasons I was able to surmise for frustratingly inadequate letters, and the already noted limitations of overlap in FAC membership and in departments with candidates in a given FAC term, there is absolutley no logical basis on which to draw comparisons. So the FAC should stop mystifying its audience with faulty pronouncements.
Certainly secrecy in tenure and promotion evaluations will bring us more unfortunate decisions to toss perfectly good scholar/teachers (who almost always go on to get better jobs)and lead to more of what my blogging friend calls 'false positives', the underserving hacks who persist among us and are occasionally given endowed chairs. Moreover,keeping as many files closed as possible will perpetuate our cloak and dagger culture of "confidentiality." See my blogger friend's earlier blogs on how to take the con out of confidentiality.
The FAC's observation is not methodologically or logically compelling, as others have observed. I nonetheless believe that the FAC probably can back up its claim. "Guarded" is such a slippery term that I'd be surprised if some letters have not become more guarded. Slanderers have probably toned down their letters, for example.
"Another FAC Veteran" makes a fair point: Why is guardedness bad?
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