W1B-028 TCD promotions-1.txt
DEPARTMENT OF ITALIAN TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN 2

Prof T.N. Mitchell Provost No. 1 College

19 December 1995

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN HANDLING PROMOTION APPLICATIONS

Dear Provost, Recent Council minutes have noted that the criteria for promotion to higher grades are being considered by a sub-committee of the Personnel Committee and are to be forwarded to Council for approval at its first meeting in Hilary Term. Actum 14/C states that "as relevant staff were normally written to at the end of November, they would be informed that the criteria were under review and that revised criteria would be issued well in advance of the submission date"." (I haven't in fact received any communication about this, as a relevant staff member; perhaps the publication of Council minutes is considered to be adequate notification.)

This letter intended to address not the substantive criteria for promotion, but the manner in which candidates for promotion are handled. As, in the nature of things, many applications will have to be rejected, I think that you should give careful consideration to how the whole process might be handled in ways which avoid devaluing the staff members concerned.

(You may have read these suggestions before; in June 1994, when I was the outgoing Chairperson of the ASA, I submitted them to the Staff Secretary with a request that they be considered by the Senior Promotions Committee at its first meeting of 1994/95 before invitations to apply were sent out. Having heard nothing further, I presumed that the suggestions were not in fact considered, since at least some of them seem non-controversial, and I would have expected to receive some sort of reply.)

1. Candidates should be individually warned about all current restrictions when being invited to apply for promotion.

I would cite my own experience in support of this suggestion. In 1993/94, when I first came up for promotion to Senior Lectureship, the reason for rejection reported to me by the Dean of my Faculty was that all first-time applicants were automatically excluded from consideration. If that was the policy - and there could be good reasons for such a policy - then I should have been told this before going to the bother of drafting a lengthy, self-congratulatory application.

2 Gratuitous insults should be avoided.

A good promotions system would combine such qualities as transparency, credibility and tact, so as to reward the most productive people and also minimise the inevitable negative effects on disappointed candidates.

In 1993/94, 21 lecturers applied for promotion to Senior Lectureship. Only 7 were promoted. Ideally, the unsuccessful 14 should have been able to console themselves by reflecting that no doubt the criteria had been fairly applied, the best people had been chosen, and College was doing its best within the financial constraints.

On this last point, there was a general caution in the invitation to apply which was sent to eligible candidates: "The number of posts in this grade may be limited by financial considerations and it may not always be possible to offer posts even to suitable candidates." That is, among other things, a nice way of reassuring rejected candidates that they are not necessarily undervalued by the institution. Tactful encouragement of this kind is all the more necessary as the current Fellowship system suggests to many academics that they are somehow second-class citizens of College.

Unfortunately, a wildly counter-productive message was sent to disappointed candidates by Minute 70/A of Council, 9 March 1994: "Arising from a question the Senior Lecturer advised Council that in the application of the three criteria for promotion appropriate to Senior Lectureship - research and publications, teaching and contribution to College [- ] in which it was required by the committee that candidates have a satisfactory record in all categories the Senior Promotions Committee felt that there were only seven persons who could be recommended for promotion this year even though the Board had indicated that it would receive recommendations for up to ten senior lecturer promotions." This was an emphatic (and, as we will see below, ill-founded) rebuff to rejected candidates. Only 7 out of 21 candidates were deemed to have "a satisfactory record" in relation to the criteria - in other words, College had the money for more promotions, but all the other applicants were sub-standard. Which leads me to suggest that particular care should be taken to avoid gratuitous insults when candidates may justifiably suspect that cost-cutting is masquerading as quality control.

Besides, the "satisfactory record" criterion reported to Council by the Senior Lecturer was simply incompatible with the "automatic exclusion of first-timers" criterion reported to me by the Dean of my Faculty, for the obvious reason that some first-timers might be perfectly satisfactory.
All of which leads to my third suggestion:
1 Careless and inaccurate reporting should be avoided.
This might be best achieved by issuing written decisions (see below) and checking them for consistency. In 1993/94, for example, there was a glaring discrepancy between the eight published criteria for Senior Lectureship and the three criteria minuted in the Senior Lecturer's report to Council. The eight published criteria [numbers added] were as follows:
At this level a balanced view of a candidate's standing in terms of [1] length of service, [2] teaching, [3] research, [4] administration and contributions to [5] learned societies and [6] public Bodies as well as to, [7,8] College and community activities will be taken.

Even if one allows for compression in the minutes, the Senior Lecturer's three reported criteria - "research and publications, teaching and contribution to College" - cannot be taken as including the "contributions to learned societies and public Bodies... and community activities" which appeared in the published criteria. And if the report to Council seems arbitrarily to exclude some criteria, a disappointed candidate might feel uncertain as to whether the criteria in general had been properly taken into account by the Committee. Such uncertainty would be compounded by shortcomings in the system for reporting the reasons for rejection to disappointed candidates. The purely verbal basis of this - where Deans are given the unenviable task of explaining - leaves the way open for misunderstandings. One colleague, who was rejected on several occasions, recalled that a different reason was given each year, and the variety soon ceased to amuse. Therefore:

1 The Senior Promotions Committee should provide all candidates with a brief written reason for its decision.

Such a written explanation - which could be supplemented by verbal explanations from the Dean - would also help to remind the Committee of its decisions in the following year, thereby aiding consistency and fairness. It would also avoid the possibility of candidates first learning of their rejection from reading Council minutes on e-mail, as happened to me in 1994/95 (although at least the minutes contained no disinformation on that occasion).

2 The Senior Promotions Committee should take account of candidates' effective opportunities to meet the eight published criteria.

Candidates and their Heads of Department might receive specific advice on this point. For example, the criteria for Senior Lectureship include the category of "administration". Some Heads of Department may consciously or unconsciously marginalise certain members of staff, who may thereby be unfairly denied the administrative responsibilities which would otherwise have strengthened their case for promotion.

Similarly, some candidates might be disadvantaged by practices prevailing in their areas. For example, in an area where no teaching quality surveys had been held, it would not be possible for candidates to provide evidence of their perceived quality as teachers, were such a criterion to be introduced.

1 There should be an effective appeals system for candidates who are unhappy about decisions affecting them.

In practice, a more transparent and "informative" system would probably forestall any sense of unfairness in most cases, but a conventional method of seeking redress should exist all the same. Such an appeal process might work simply by inviting disappointed candidates to send their views in writing to yourself, as Provost, if they felt that their treatment had been in any way unsatisfactory. You might then invite the appellant for a brief interview, perhaps attended also by the Faculty Dean. A courteous hearing and exchange of views might do much to clear the air and identify issues for resolution, either immediately or over time. An appeal lodged in this way would be a "normal" step, not necessarily implying any antagonism towards the Committee.

Do you think that these suggestions might be looked at when the revised criteria for promotion come to be ratified? I should emphasise that although the suggestions are illustrated partly from my own experience, they mostly derive from comments made to me by colleagues who were to some extent losing confidence in the promotion system.

This is not a life-or-death issue. At a time when talented junior colleagues are increasingly being employed on dead-end contracts, it may seem selfish to fret about the sensitive handling of more privileged people. All the same, a little quality improvement in this area of College life might yield valuable results.

With thanks for your attention, Yours sincerely Cormac &/O Cuillean&/ain
