THE LAWYERING BEGINS. At Blogs for Industry, an update on a tenure denial at Oakland including a notice of grievance by the AAUP. Oakland faculty are covered by a collective-bargaining agreement with the AAUP. Wayne State was also under such an agreement when I was there.

The Oakland AAUP note the possibility that departments have in fact been lax in properly mentoring tenure-track faculty and documenting their progress.

The administration’s responses to date for all three tenure grievances have raised several serious issues that will need to be addressed during bargaining next summer. For the two current grievances these responses contained a sentence that should be immediately brought to the attention of all current candidates for reappointment and tenure. In both cases the administration claims it is the andidate’s “responsibility to develop and fully complete” the review dossier and that both “did not contain sufficient evidence that … had satisfied the (unit) criteria.” These statements could be read to say that perhaps the candidate had met the criteria but that this could not be established from material presented in the dossier. It is worth repeating that it is the candidate’s responsibility to prepare the strongest possible dossier to document fulfillment of all criteria. An academic unit that fails to assist a candidate in preparing such a dossier is either intentionally or unintentionally undercutting their colleague’s chances for a positive review.

Whether those criteria are properly stated or not, there's something wrong if a department and a college review committee can both recommend a candidate for promotion and tenure with little or no dissent only to have a case overturned for lack of documentation.