Return to One Department's Guidelines.

What were the particular circumstances that drove us to revise our guidelines now?

Our department decided to add provisional language for evaluating computer-related activity to our TP&R guidelines now largely because this is the first year in which we have candidates for tenure who have done any significant computer-related work. While this work has, as yet, gone no further than running a class listserv or having students do Web-based research, in the next two years we will have candidates for tenure who have more significant bodies of computer-related work. We therefore needed to add some kind of explicit language to our existing document for several reasons:

• to make clear to both the tenure candidates and the senior faculty that computer-related work would be evaluated seriously as part of the tenure package;
• to begin the departmental discussion of how computer-related work would be evaluated; and
• to make clear to the tenure candidates that, at least initially, the burden of explaining the value of particular computer related activity would rest heavily on the candidates themselves; and further,
• to make clear that, at least for now, the criteria for evaluating computer-related work will be based on existing criteria and the traditional categories.

With these reasons clearly in mind, the committee chose to make particular sorts of additions to our TP&R guidelines, which I describe in the section on the language we added. These additions were made within particular practical limitations on what we could do, which I describe in the sections on what we did and constraints on guidelines. These revisions, of course, have particularvirtues and faults. We have also made these additions to our TP&R guidelines with the understanding that they will be subject to future revision.

Return to One Department's Guidelines.

E-mail: seth@bradley.bradley.edu

Last revised February 6, 1997