A few months ago I submitted my dossier for tenure and it continues
on its journey up the chain of command: external reviewers, department
committee, chair, college committee, dean, university advisory committee
and provost, president, and the board of trustees. I might get good news
around May or bad news before then. Until then, I thought it’d be
helpful to share some of what I learned, and what my dossier looked
like. (The particulars will differ across disciplines and
universities.)
Substantively, your statements are a marshaling of evidence into a
compelling story about your research, teaching, and service. You need to
highlight strengths and frame weaknesses—questions will be asked about
the latter. As much as you might hear about substantive, independent,
and arms-length evaluation, I suspect this is truly about your
reputation and social-network. Consequently, you need to make it easy
for your unit to find folks willing to write supportive letters and
provide the materials that help letter writers do so.
Ambitious universities want external letters from full professors at
R1 universities. Additionally, mine uses a template by which those
reviewers are asked if the candidate would get tenure at the external
institution. Because I’m interdisciplinary (a sociologist is not likely
to say I’d get tenure in a sociology department) and an introvert (who
is poor at schmoozing), this part worried me the most. Nonetheless,
disciplinary service is one of the things you can do so you interact
with senior scholars. You might do service at conferences or
disciplinary associations, or review submissions at journals and presses
where your own work has been accepted. I suspect editors of journals who
have accepted your work make excellent letter writers, or know those who
would be when asked by your chair. Because candidates have the ability
to nominate or exclude a few external reviewers, I created a spreadsheet
of senior faculty, their discipline, professorial rank, university rank,
how I know them, and how they might know me. I wish I had started this
earlier as it would have helped my own sense of where I was positioning
myself and where to submit to and do service.
A feature of contemporary life is that much evaluation is quantified
and relative, so you need to provide evidence of good standing. For
research, this can include:
- impact of publication venues
- citation counts of your work (e.g., Google Scholar)
- your standing relative to peers in your disciplinary cohort
I have concerns about quantification and relative-ranking, and write
about this in my research, but it is a reality. I include the impact and
selectivity of publication venues in my CV.
I did not directly address my citation count and was too uncomfortable
to compare myself to peers, but your letter writers will likely do so in
any case. Candidates do not have access to the external letters, but can
see quotes from external reviewers—designated as “Reviewer N”—in the
chair and department letters.
Much of what I’ve said about research applies to teaching and
service: you need to frame evidence of success and challenges surmounted
in a compelling story, which brings me to compiling the dossier.
My third year review required me to compile a mock dossier according
to the tenure requirements, and so I collected materials according to
that structure, with subdirectories for each of the sections below. (I
further divided some of the appendices for organizational purposes.) I
thought there was a single dossier, but in reality, there were three
that my department chair helped me build:
- the research statement and materials that go out to external
reviewers
- your ~60 pages of material that is in the core, which is
complemented by external letters, and all the letters up the university
chain of command. My university wants this to be no more than 100
pages
- the appendices, which ended up including a lot;
mine doesn’t include all examples of service, but I included examples of
student work and revision, and I added some of the teaching best
practices I’ve developed.
Dossier Table of Contents
D. Curriculum vitae
E. Statements and
supporting evidence
- e-statement-1a-teaching.docx
- e-statement-1b-teaching-TRACE-table.xlsx
- e-statement-2-research.docx
- e-statement-3-service.docx
- oc-syllabus-FA-4.pdf
- reagle-2015-reading-the-comments-ch1.pdf
- 2011-annual-review.pdf
- 2012-annual-review.pdf
- 2013-annual-review.pdf
- 2014-3rd-year-review.pdf
- 2014-annual-review.pdf
- 2015-merit-review.pdf
G. Comprehensive
list of supporting documents
Appendix A. Teaching:
Peer evaluations
- 2012 1-Spring COMM1220 (MCS) Dallimore evaluation
- 2012 2-Fall MSCR1220 (MCS) Goodale evaluation
- 2014 1-Spring COMM1255 (CDA) Herbeck evaluation
- 2015 1-Spring COMM4625 (OC) Dallimore evaluation
- 2015 2-Fall COMM4625 (OC) Noland evaluation
- 2016 1-Spring COMM1255 (CDA) Nisbet evaluation
Appendix A. Teaching:
TRACE evaluations
- 2011-2-fall-comm4622-01-nmc.pdf
- 2011-2-fall-comm4622-02-nmc.pdf
- 2012-1-spring-comm1220-mcs.pdf
- 2012-2-fall-comm1231-orgcom.pdf
- 2012-2-fall-mscr1220-mcs.pdf
- 2013-2-fall-comm-1231-orgcom.pdf
- 2013-2-fall-comm-1255-cda.pdf
- 2014-1-spring-comm1231-orgcom.pdf
- 2014-1-spring-comm1255-cda.pdf
- 2014-2-fall-comm1255-cda.pdf
- 2014-2-fall-comm4625-oc.pdf
- 2015-1-spring-comm1255-cda.pdf
- 2015-1-spring-comm4625-oc.pdf
- 2015-2-fall-comm1255-cda-instructor-report.pdf
- 2015-2-fall-comm4625-oc-instructor-report.pdf
- 2016-1-spring-comm1255-cda-instructor-report.pdf
- 2016-1-spring-comm4625-oc-instructor-report.pdf
Appendix A. Teaching: Best
practices
- Tip: Making sense of concepts
- Rubric: Participation
- Tip: Reading
- Tip: Writing
- Tip: Writing class essays
- Tip: Writing responses
- Handout: Writing Guide
Appendix A. Teaching:
Student examples
- Ad block
- Boston Society of Vulcans
- Circle of poison
- First Church in Roxbury
- Participation self and peer evaluation
- Peer feedback
- Revision changelog
- Web search and evaluation
Appendix A. Teaching: Other
syllabi
- “Communication in the Digital Age” syllabus
Appendix B. Research
- Reagle (2011), CPOV, Wikipedia: The Argument Engine
- Reagle and Rhue (2011), IJOC, Gender bias in Wikipedia and
Britannica
- Reagle (2012), AoIR, Infocide
- Loveland and Reagle (2013), NMS, Wikipedia Production
- Reagle (2013), FM, “Free as in Sexist?”
- Reagle (2014), NMS, Obligation to Know
- Reagle (2014), Routledge, Revenge rating and tweak critique
- Reagle (2015), FM, Following the Joneses
- Reagle (2015), IJOC, Geek Policing
- Reagle (2015), MIT Press, Reading the Comments
- Reagle (n.d.), TBD, Introduction to Hacking Life
- Reviews of Good Faith Collaboration
- Reviews of Reading the Comments
Appendix C. Service
Committees
- Library Policy and Operating Committee 2012-2013
Appendix C. Service
reviewing
- Review for NMS
- Review for JASIST
- Review for Journal of Peer Production
- Review for MIT Press
- Review for MIT Press
- Review for NSF
- Review for WikiSym papers
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