The other side

If you remember, last year about this time I was blogging about my tenure deliberations. This year I was on the other side of the process, as one of the tenured faculty evaluating someone else's tenure & promotion bid.

The deliberations had a lot of "ritual" associated with it. Nothing formal, but I could see it in the way some people presented their testimony. A declaration of their level of association with the candidate, the information they want to share, and then a statement to the effect that they didn't have anybody they wanted to call into the session. Some of the phrasing was exactly the same. Again, this wasn't anything formal, but I could tell it certainly gave a feeling of "this is important" for some people to do it this way.

To tell you the truth, that is probably a good thing, as it would be horrible if we came into this session with little regard to the impact of our decision on our colleagues.