May 12, 2000

Dear Vice-President Gordon,

Thank you for a copy of your March 24 letter to Dr. Cummings and the History faculty; I assume you sent me this copy in response to my questions on much the same subject: standards, consistency, and decision making processes in faculty hiring.

All Truman faculty members have a responsibility for hiring faculty colleagues according to reflective, well developed and articulated policy through carefully, consistently applied practice. As you know, I have a longstanding interest in the character of the Truman faculty in these matters; this I think led you to ask me to be a part of your "Faculty Roles and Responsibilities" Group, which has generated for me particular responsibilities.

I want to focus on your third point of discussion, transcripts, as an example indicative of challenges that we face at Truman and work to be done in clearly articulating our current practices and reflecting and improving on them. Your response will be one element in the discussions that will continue, as prompted by recent events; I will be distributing these remarks widely first in the hopes of keeping that conversation moving, and second so that all faculty may have the best possible understanding of current policy and practice.

Your response had to be carefully formulated, but it stands in need of analysis, in the old sense of that word: there are several voices that need unbundling to understand Truman's current policy and practice. You report your experiences, decisions, and practices as a long-faculty member and as vice-president, but it is also the case that your response needs to stand not only as a description of past decisions in hiring but also as a statement of policy with prescriptive dimensions. In our system, in which the administration plays a heavier role in faculty hiring than in many universities, faculty need to be able to understand your response as indicative of the practice that the administration will follow.

I believe it is fair to your comments on the evaluation of transcripts to say that you describe the process as holistic: that rather than faculty applicants having to meet a certain level on each element that we evaluate, weakness in some areas can be mitigated by strengths in others. I understand you to say that the administration would not reject a candidate for a faculty position based solely on his or her deficiencies in grades in graduate or undergraduate course work.

Let me report to you with confidence that many faculty across the campus will be startled and puzzled by the preceding paragraph and that your description will not be easily reconciled with either their understanding of the administration's policy and practices or their experiences. Faculty in many disciplines understand the policy and practice precisely not to be holistic but rather to be based on a series of components; many faculty report that the administration has rejected candidates precisely and simply because of bad grades, that bad grades are a necessary and sufficient condition for eliminating an applicant from consideration. It has been a frequent and common experience of many faculty that the administration--vice-president and division heads--have rejected candidates viewed as strong or at least viable by the disciplines solely based on weaknesses in grades; perhaps this has been a function of the administration communicating in a shorthand or truncated way rather than with a full account.

For myself, I am not a staunch and implacable proponent of mechanical application of a grades/transcript standard as it has frequently been practiced here; I am very open to reflective deliberation about what our standards should be and the degree of variation among the components of the university. In fact, if we have adopted or were to adopt a more holistic evaluation of applicants, such a policy properly places more of the decision in the hands of the discipline faculty: as a philosopher, I can easily read how many C's are on the transcript of a candidate for a faculty position in painting, psychology, or economics; in the context of more holistic evaluation, I should defer more to the faculty in the discipline. However, the need for deliberation and decision with regard to our hiring policies is clear and pressing, from the single example of evaluation of transcripts: we have drifted to an untenable position when some faculty are operating under the impression that each search committee alone sets standards for performance on transcripts and other faculty are left with the impression that there are University wide standards that are enforced by the administration, which form a context within which faculty are expected to operate.

Variation of this kind and to these degrees will only produce (1) faculty frustration as to why the professional judgment of the faculty is given differing levels of respect and efficacy and (2) possibly inconsistent results across campus in hiring. If current Truman practice has been fixed for some time and a fairly consistent standard applied across divisions then there are fewer questions to be asked, even if one disagrees with the standard. If Truman practice is in development, or there are differing standards across the campus, this necessarily opens pressing questions: what are the divergent standards? Who is making the decisions as to standards and how is the faculty involved in those decisions, both in particular cases and as to standing criteria?

Obviously, with the attention on campus that these and related issues have generated this year, particularly in the context of an already otherwise complicated search, faculty discussions will continue; let us hope that we can put these discussions to work. It is disappointing that "Faculty Roles and Responsibilities" group has completed so little of the preliminary work that I understand you to take as necessary to more concrete discussions; I hope that the next such group to address these issues will accomplish more, so that they or perhaps a committee of Faculty Senate can address the more concrete issues, as a beginning to reconstructing faculty confidence in the hiring process. I have also read a copy of your response to Professor Robinson, who raised a series of related concerns. I have often heard you raise questions of shared vision of policy and consistency of practice across campus; it is disappointing to see you retreat in your letter to Professor Robinson to the "disciplines," particularly when the search in question, when we have no such "discipline" on this campus, probably well illustrates the limitations of our creaky, archaic divisional system for our current mission and faculty.

I hope these comments will serve to keep the conversation going. To that end, I am distributing this widely and posting it to the web site and discussion forum of the Truman AAUP chapter. I do not feel it proper to post the letter of yours to which I am responding; however so that others can judge my interpretation of your letter--and your understanding of our present policy and practice--and continue the conversation I hope that you will post it, via http://members.sockets.net/~susand/

-- Anonymous, May 12, 2000