Changing rules for tenure

by | Monday, March 31, 2008

I discovered a blog on academia called Lumpenprofessoriat. It links to some cool videos made by supporters of Barack Obama, but more importantly it has some thought-provoking postings and links to other blogs around the issue of academic tenure. One of the most interesting postings had to do with something that I had mentioned briefly in an previous posting (see here), the idea of alternative routes to tenure. It appears that Western Carolina university has done just that. From now on, the university will use “broader definitions of scholarship” “in hiring decisions, merit reviews, and tenure consideration.” Scholarship in this context encompasses “the application of knowledge, the engagement of scholars with the broader world, and the way scholars teach.” This does not do away with external peer review – which is still required.

Of particular interest to me as a scholar of educational technology, is the following:

John Bardo, chancellor at Western Carolina, said that a good example of the value of this approach comes from a recent tenure candidate who needed a special exemption from the old, more traditional tenure guidelines. The faculty member was in the College of Education and focused much of his work on developing online tools that teachers could use in classrooms. He focused on developing the tools, and fine-tuning them, not on writing reports about them that could be published in journals.

“So when he came up for tenure, he didn’t have normal publications to submit,” Bardo said. Under a trial of the system that has now been codified, the department assembled a peer review team of experts in the field, which came back with a report that the professors’ online tools “were among the best around,” Bardo said.

The professor won tenure, and Bardo said it was important to him and others to codify the kind of system used so that other professors would be encouraged to make similar career choices. Bardo said that codification was also important so that departments could make initial hiring decisions based on the broader definition of scholarship.

So to reiterate something I had said in the previous blog posting, “How soon will a professor receive tenure for maintaining an influential blog?”

Topics related to this post: Politics | Publications | Research | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #10, May 2011

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #10: May 2011 Welcome to the tenth edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you, our...

Children & the Internet

Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children's Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this...

Design & the Creation of artifacts

I just discovered through the PhD-Design list an online book titled "Design: Creation of artifacts in society" by Karl T. Ulrich. Ulrich is a professor at Wharton School. The book is entirely available online and is licensed under the Creative Commons license. I have...

iSad

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) To all of us who value creativity and design the passing of Steve Jobs is the passing of an era. I know my world changed when I first saw the Macintosh. I was a freshly minted electrical engineer who was trying to get out of engineering...

AI writes book reviews

AI writes book reviews

Here is the title and abstract for a book review that was just published in the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning Preparing Ourselves for Artificial Intelligence: A Review of The Alignment Problem and God, Human, Animal, Machine Abstract: In this article,...

Another New Year’s card

We just created another New Year's Card / Video. Check it out: Shreya's Magic Touch [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOrRsXaFE3o[/youtube]

The intangibles of teaching

Jim Garrison and A. G. Rud have a wonderful article on TCRecord on Reverence in Classroom Teaching. Though, reverence may be "too exalted a word to associate with the practical and often mundane activities of teaching," it appears to me that ignoring these deeper...

Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton

Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton

"un-creativity" design, invariant under rotation by 180-degrees In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Chris Bilton, Reader at the Centre for Policy Studies at University of...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *