Appeals plan allows for more options
By Lauren Hanvey
Staff Reporter

Non-tenured faculty members now have a new appeal option in their annual department evaluations after the plan received approval at the Board of Trustees meeting on April 11.

Each year non-tenured faculty members working to gain tenure, a status that protects one from a quick dismissal, must undergo an evaluation by the chairman or chairwoman and tenured faculty of their respective department, said Mary Volcansek, dean of Add Ran College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Until now, there was not a higher official that non-tenured faculty could go to if they were dissatisfied with an evaluation they received, said William Koehler, provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs. The only recourse was to request a meeting with the chairman or chairwoman and tenured faculty of the department to discuss the evaluation, he said.

Under the new policy, if a professor still does not like his or her evaluation after meeting with the department, he or she can appeal it to the dean of the college and the vice chancellor for Academic Affairs, he said.

“In other words, the faculty member has an expanded avenue of appeal,” Koehler said.

He said the new policy was created because there have been situations when the chairman or chairwoman and department have been very firm in their evaluations even though the person being evaluated thinks the evaluation is unfair.

The evaluation is intended to help non-tenured faculty members know what they are doing right or wrong and what changes they may need to make before they are up for tenure, Volcansek said. But, the annual evaluation does not necessarily determine whether someone will be tenured, so the appeal is not related to appealing tenure denial, she said. However, she said, if someone receives three or four bad evaluations in a row, it is an indication that they should start looking for another job.

Donelle Barnes, an associate professor of nursing, said the change sounds like a good idea. She said, it gives faculty the opportunity to go outside the department with their appeal.

“As I understood it, the way it used to work was that your appeal went to the very person that gave you your evaluation,” Barnes said. “So, it doesn’t matter if you appeal once or ten times, they will still have the same opinion.”

This change is not a major issue, Volcansek said. The evaluation process is already designed to be more helpful than hurtful to tenure-track professors, she said.

Staff Reporter Bill Morrison contributed to this story.

l.e.hanvey@tcu.edu