By the Numbers, Please

By James M. Lang

Visitors to my office this past summer had to tiptoe carefully in order to avoid the dozen or more piles of paper I had scattered on the floor, each stack of printed white pages topped by a single sheet of yellow legal paper scratched with my handwritten notes.

Each pile represented a piece of evidence in my tenure case: I had piles for each class I have taught in my five years at Assumption College; piles for all of the conference papers I had given; piles for the articles and essays I had published; a pile consisting solely of my two books; and piles of random achievements I thought might be relevant for one reason or another, such as the copy of the baccalaureate address I had given, or copies of the student literary magazine for which I had served as the adviser.

I kept those piles of paper scattered around the floor of my office because I wanted to have my academic accomplishments visible to me at a glance as I put together the main component of my tenure case: my self-evaluation.

I've been hearing about the tenure self-evaluation for the past couple of years, paying attention to what people have said about its nature, its scope, and its length. As someone who regularly writes freelance pieces for magazines and newspapers -- and thus who is accustomed to writing to a very specific word count -- I paid particular attention to that last one.

How long was your self-evaluation? I asked my tenured friends.

"Eight pages," an economist told me. "Single spaced."

"Thirty five," said the head of my English department, "double-spaced."

Accounting for the spacing differences, and for the fact that English professors are probably more prolix than economics professors, that still meant a possible variation of 20 double-spaced pages.

"But," as I heard again and again from my tenured colleagues, "you can copy lots of it from the self-evaluation you wrote for your third-year review. So it's not as bad as it seems."

That sounded like a time-saving idea at first, but when I sat down to write the self-evaluation for my tenure case, I felt about that third-year review the same way I felt about my dissertation for the first year or two after I filed it: I'd rather quit my job than have to read that stupid thing over again.

Self-evaluation. Even the phrase sounds boring. I hated writing one the first time, and -- as I tell students in my creative-writing class -- if you weren't excited about it while you wrote it, nobody's going to get excited about reading it.

So I started my new, equally boring self-evaluation from scratch. To help me, I had a four-page set of guidelines that I had received at the end of the spring semester with suggestions for the sorts of things I should include.

That list of guidelines, however, was neurotically nonprescriptive. The administrator who wrote it must have been working out a passive-aggressive complex of some kind. While the list had a very authoritative tone, it kept insisting that it offered only guidelines, and that I had to figure things out for myself -- there was no painting by the numbers in self-evaluations.

I knew my self-evaluation had to focus primarily on teaching, since we are tenured at my institution primarily according to our teaching accomplishments. We are promoted, by contrast, more according to our research and publishing accomplishments. My self-evaluation would serve as my application for both tenure and promotion (to associate professor), but the guidelines were clear enough on the point that teaching came first.

So I sat down one morning in late May, two weeks after the spring semester had concluded, and started writing. I began with a narrative of my route to the college, which included earning my Ph.D. and working for three years at a Center for Teaching Excellence. I then divided the remainder of the teaching section into two parts: the teaching strategies that I brought from my previous position that ended up serving me well and the ones that I have had to modify or revise in my five years on the job.

I didn't dwell at much length on the the areas of my teaching that are still undergoing revision. A colleague who had served on the evaluation committee once told me a story about a candidate whose application was sailing along beautifully until the committee read her self-evaluation, which expressed serious doubts about her teaching abilities. Those doubts led the committee to consider her case in a much less favorable light.

But you have to be honest, right? I toyed with the sort of noncriticisms that you come up with in job interviews in response to a question about your flaws. "Sometimes I'm too dedicated to my students." Then I came up with a better alternative.

I tried to suggest areas in which I thought my teaching still could improve, without necessarily implying that I had been doing anything wrong -- like getting my courses up on the Web, for example, and extending classroom discussions online. I've been meaning to do that for a few years now, and I hope to have time to do so on my sabbatical.

But obviously there's nothing inherently wrong with teaching without technology, so I would be extending myself into a new area there, rather than fixing something I was doing wrong.

I have managed to put together a solid publication record in my time on the tenure track, and I couldn't figure out much to say about it beyond: "Here are my articles and books. Enjoy!" So that section was short, and I'm hoping my CV speaks for itself.

I spent a bit more time on the community-service section, describing the committees on which I had served, and other service tasks I had performed, since I don't have much documentation for those activities. The search committees on which I honorably discharged my duties, or the panel discussion to which I loaned my expertise, weren't headline material. So if I wanted the evaluation committee to know about those kinds of activites, I had to give them space in the document.

When I finished my self-evaluation, I sent it to my departmental chair, who needed the document so the tenured members of the department could meet, size me up, and enumerate my good and bad qualities in a letter from the department to the evaluation committee.

How'd I do?

Who knows? My self-evaluation came in at around 15 single-spaced pages, not quite the record but probably typical for an English professor. As for the quality, I'll find out in the spring, I guess, when I receive word about my tenure case. In the meantime, I can understand a little better why students don't come back to pick up their final papers and exams at the beginning of the following semester. I know what it's like to work very hard on a piece of writing, to craft it as well as you can, and then never to want to see it again.

As frustrating as it was to write the document, I can understand why departments don't want all self-evaluations to follow the exact same format. They would be (even more) boring to read, and no doubt every faculty member has unique qualities or achievements that could never be covered in even the most comprehensive set of guidelines.

I guess the lack of specific guidelines, too, gives us the opportunity to demonstrate our imagination and creativity, skills that are absolutely necessary for both teaching and research.

And hey, I'm a creative guy -- I've written plays and novels and nonfiction books. I play the piano every day. I teach at least one creative-writing class a year.

But self-evaluations? I hope there's just one remaining, whenever I apply for full professor, but thus far, they ain't lighting my creative fires. I'm not feeling inspired to shake up the genre with Jackson Pollocklike experimentation.

I would be much happier, next time around, if they would just let me paint it by the numbers.