Jamestown Community College Faculty and Administrators Collaborate on Personnel Decisions

August 29, 2008

By: Rob Kelly in Uncategorized

Jamestown (New York) Community College uses a joint faculty-administration committee to make all decisions related to faculty hiring, retention, promotion, salary, and tenure. The idea is that the variety of perspectives will help the college make better decisions in these critical areas.

The HRPST (hiring, retention, promotion, salary, and tenure) Committee includes five administrators—vice president and dean of administration, vice president and dean of academic affairs, vice president and dean of student development, vice president and dean of the Cattaraugus County campus (approximately 50 miles from the main campus), and the college president—and five elected faculty members who serve two-year terms. (The terms are staggered to avoid having an entirely new group of faculty on the committee every two years.)

A search committee, which includes department or division members and at least one member from outside the department, identifies a faculty candidate based on telephone and in-person interviews. The candidate then goes through an administrative interview. Once a candidate makes it through that process, he or she is then brought to the HRPST Committee for consideration. That committee looks at credentials and recommended salary. “We try to keep equity based on a person’s education and experience. Opinions on the committee don’t generally vary that much, because things are looked at pretty closely by the time the candidates get to that point,” says Jean Schrader, assistant dean of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and HRPST Committee member.

Once a full-time faculty member is hired, he or she comes up for review each year for four years. (The fourth review is the tenure review.) The assistant dean puts together a review packet for each review, which includes a personal data sheet, self-evaluation, peer evaluation, student evaluation, and a written evaluation by the assistant dean. Faculty are reviewed on contributions to the college, the community, and their professional fields.

Although every discipline is different, using the same review standards across the college helps the college work toward improving the educational experience for students. The faculty contract delineates what goes into the HRPST packet.

One of the biggest benefits of the makeup of the committee is that different committee members bring different concerns and perspectives to the evaluation of faculty members. For example, the division evaluator will likely be more knowledgeable about a faculty member’s teaching performance than will the other committee members.

All members have an equal say in the committee’s decisions, and the president doesn’t vote, except to break a tie. “The good thing about this process is that it allows a lot of input,” Schrader says. “I hear that in a lot of colleges, it’s the decision of one person as to whether to keep the candidate or promote him or her or grant tenure. That can’t possibly be good, because all kinds of things can happen if you let one person make the decision. Everybody knows that there is a committee that is going to review the packets, so these things don’t end up happening behind closed doors within a department or division. There are people from other divisions looking at these packets and having discussions about whether the faculty member is doing the kind of job we need him or her to be doing and whether he or she is at the point of doing things we expect of an assistant, associate, or full professor.”

Each review packet has the same type of information, and the process is reviewed regularly by the HRPST Committee and the faculty union. So far the process has remained in place for approximately 40 years. The faculty union has existed for approximately 15 years.

Implementing a similar review process in a unionized institution would be difficult, says Roslin Newton, assistant dean of arts, humanities, and health sciences. “There has to be desire on both sides [administration and faculty]. Those institutions used to the department chair being the person giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, the evaluation process often is not clearly laid out or documented. In such institutions, the decisions are made more on a friendly basis rather than a critical basis. And making that switch is very frightening to institutions and faculty who have not had that as part of their history or tradition.”

Although program directors and coordinators are not directly involved in the HRPST Committee, they often serve as peer evaluators. “I was director for a while, and I made darn sure that I got to be peer evaluator at some point as people were coming through the tenure process,” Schrader says.

In addition to avoiding the “myopic” view of department-only reviews, having faculty collaborate with the administration on these personnel decisions give faculty a voice in these important decisions and a better understanding of the workings of the college and their own professional growth, Newton says.

Contact Jean Schrader at jeanschrader@mail.sunyjcc.edu and Roslin Newton at roznewton@mail.sunyjcc.edu.