As part of our regular opinions series, “Office Hours,” we aim to feature a range of faculty voices on higher education and specific questions relating to Swarthmore College. We believe that students, staff, and other faculty could greatly benefit from reading professors’ diverse perspectives which many in the community may not have ever considered. In our third edition of this column, we asked professors to share their thoughts the following:
Recently, questions have been circulating among students and professors about the college’s approach to faculty hiring and retention, as impacted by various groups including the tenure review board, the Board of Managers, and disparate academic divisions and departments. What are your thoughts on how these groups and the college as a whole handle decisions regarding the allocation of tenure lines, faculty hiring, tenure approval, and job security?
Professor of Economics Mark Kuperberg
First, I want to thank the Phoenix for raising this topic. Hiring and retention decisions vis-à-vis faculty are the single most important thing we do with respect to academics at the college. While there is endless discussion of curriculum, teaching and learning, etc., the hiring and retention decisions ARE the curriculum. Because we believe in academic freedom, who is in the classroom IS the curriculum.
Every school handles hiring and retention differently. At Swarthmore, academic departments have a lot of autonomy in the hiring and retention decisions. Unlike Haverford [College], where an interdepartmental committee does the hiring, at Swarthmore it is the department that has almost sole authority. While no system is perfect (because as Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is hard especially if it involves the future”), I prefer Swarthmore’s system. Especially in technical subjects, the department is in the best position to determine whether a candidate is competent.
With respect to retention and tenure, the department has a lot of say but less so than in the hiring decision. There are two decision points: a third-year review and a tenure review, generally in the sixth year. These reviews are heavily regulated to ensure fairness. Last year’s letter from the provost outlining the procedures was 30 pages long. The department has more say in the third-year review than in the tenure review, which is decided by a special college committee. Just for the record, while the Board of Managers approves all tenure decisions, it has a hands-off policy. In the 47 years I have been here, to the best of my knowledge, the Board has never gone against the decisions of the college committee and the internal review process.
There has been some discussion recently of making the third-year review automatic in the sense that virtually everyone would be renewed. I view this as a mistake. Because our faculty are generally nice and collegial (others may disagree), there is already a reluctance to not renew a professor. There is always the hope that the professor will improve, but in my experience, this is generally a forlorn hope. If the third-year review were made perfunctory, then new faculty would in practice be hired for seven years. While a lot of thought and effort goes into the hiring process, it is a decision that is, of necessity, made with limited information.
One reason I am glad that The Phoenix has brought this subject up is that student input in the process is its weakest link. Half of the students who are asked to write letters [for a professor’s review process] are chosen by the professor and half are chosen randomly. Many students either don’t take the time to respond or decline to respond because they may have something negative to say and they worry it will adversely impact the professor. In both cases, however, what this does is: 1) lessen the impact of teaching on the overall decision (because the evidence one way or the other is weak) and 2) give extra weight to the most strident voices both for and against because they stand out in the relatively small sample. So, the bottom line is, if you are chosen to write a letter, please, please do so.
Assistant Professor of History Elise Mitchell
To be faculty of color, who by the fact of our presence in an institution of higher education in the U.S. is a rarity and therefore radical (even when we do not espouse radical ideas), has always meant being contingent. More often than not, to be a woman (cis, and especially trans), to be nonbinary, to be queer, and a person of color in U.S. academia is to be contingent, if not dismissed entirely. Unfortunately, in my brief time here, it appears that Swarthmore is no different than most U.S. institutions of higher learning.
Last year, multiple tenure-track women faculty members of color were not retained due to various institutional failures. Whenever these losses occur, they fracture the already fragile pipelines and informal mentorship networks that exist for faculty of color at predominantly white institutions like Swarthmore. The institution becomes a revolving door. The revolving door creates a rhythm.
The rhythm instructs faculty of color that our days at this institution are always numbered. We are always contingent, regardless of how dedicated we are to the crafts of teaching and research, regardless of how well we serve the students and the institution.
More devastatingly, the rhythm teaches students that women, non-binary, queer, and all people of color’s presence within the institution is contingent, no matter the race or gender of the person leading it. It teaches them that faculty of color with whom they have cultivated relationships and faculty of color who they admire will be forced to abandon them, for reasons beyond their control. It teaches them the brutal, but important lesson that we do not live in a meritocracy. We live in white supremacy, even when we occupy liberal spaces of higher learning. Moreover, it teaches students that, in places like Swarthmore, even the most brilliant scholars among us do not possess the power to stop the rhythm. Occasionally, we slow it down and slip through or help let someone else in. But, the door keeps revolving. The drum beats on.
Associate Professor of Linguistic Jonathan Washington
Over the last decade and a half, decisions to grow the student body and reduce faculty teaching loads at the college have resulted in an increase in average class sizes and a reduction in curricular offerings. This has lowered the value of a Swarthmore education and has tarnished the Swarthmore “brand” of individualized student access to faculty. Part of the college’s attempt to make up for these shortfalls has included hiring more Visiting Assistant Professors. These “VAPs” have no access to tenure and associated benefits and have a maximum stay at Swarthmore of six years, at which point college policy prevents their contracts from being renewed. VAP status was originally intended for filling temporary needs, such as tenure-track (TT) faculty leave, but hiring VAPs to take on the core work that TT faculty normally perform has become standard practice at the college.
It’s reported that there is a small financial advantage to the college of hiring someone as a VAP instead of as a TT assistant professor, since they are perpetually receiving starting salaries. The main educational advantage I hear cited is a more frequent injection of fresh perspectives into the curriculum. But the disadvantages far outweigh any of this; the college’s overreliance on VAPs harms students both directly and indirectly. Hiring a faculty member into a non-TT line means that by the time a cohort of students has taken notice of their courses, the faculty member is already on their way out the door, and the next VAP in that role has to start from scratch. Students they’ve built relationships with (advisees, research assistants, etc.) lose a mentor, often at destabilising times in their undergraduate career. And the time and effort departments and programs invest in hiring new faculty every few years takes away attention from student interaction — not to mention costing the college money. Morale also takes a hit when VAPs are forced to leave solely based on the conditions of their hiring. Swarthmore VAPs take their roles as educators and mentors at least as seriously as TT faculty, are at least as well-loved by their students and colleagues, and as a whole better reflect the student body in their diversity.
Meanwhile, the “pool” of TT positions that departments effectively compete for every year is kept artificially small by the Board. Two additional lines promised to the faculty this year have been withheld for dubious reasons, and the total number of lines currently promised to the faculty over the next few years as part of Swarthmore Forward still would not bring the college to where we were a decade and a half ago.
Associate Professor of English Literature Lara Cohen
I’d be very interested to see the numbers on this, but my sense is that Swarthmore is hiring more faculty of color than it has done in the past but not retaining them — whether because they are disproportionately hired into short-term, non-tenure-track positions, because they are denied reappointment or tenure, or because they decide to leave, with or without new jobs. (At the same time, I’m noticing a shift from the language of “(non-)tenure-track faculty,” with its hint of the racecourse, to the bucolic “(non-)tenure-stream faculty.”)
What does this say about our institutional culture and how we value our colleagues? I would like someone to explain this to me without using the word “mentorship,” whose ubiquity in these discussions recasts structural problems, or what my colleague in educational studies, [Assistant] Professor Roseann Liu, terms “agentive structural racism,” as matters of individual ability and effort.
Charles and Harriet Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy and Religion Peter Baumann
The allocation of tenure lines is — especially given what is in my view an unnecessary scarcity of such lines — a very tough job. Nobody on CEP, the committee tasked with the allocation, is to be envied here. We just need more tenure lines. As far as the hiring of faculty is concerned, three aspects are crucial: the quality of teaching, the quality of research, and collegiality in a broad sense. Are we always making good hiring decisions? Perhaps not always, but given what one can expect from fallible humans, my impression is that we are doing pretty well overall. As far as tenure decisions are concerned, I myself can only remember one or two cases of tenure denials (during my time at Swarthmore) which made me sad and which disappointed me. However, they happened in other departments.
Tenure reviews are and must be confidential. Colleagues outside the relevant department or program don’t have access to relevant information. For this reason, I am not in a position to know all the relevant facts and, on that basis, to comment upon or make verdicts about these denials. For similar reasons, I cannot really say much at all, if anything, about tenure approvals outside my department but I can say that I am very happy about the tenure approvals that I witnessed in my own department! Similar things as for tenure decisions hold for third-year reviews and for promotions. What about retention of faculty? Swarthmore does not make retention offers in the way many other institutions do. I think that the college is right on this important topic. Job security? For faculty it is very good!
Associate Professor of English Sangina Patnaik
In April of 2024, I was one of 135 faculty members who signed an open letter supporting Swarthmore students’ right to pro-Palestine protest. I had been asked to participate in a presentation on pedagogy for the Board of Managers the following week. During that presentation, the former chair of the Board demanded to know how faculty who had signed the open letter expected Jewish students to feel safe in their classrooms. I was terrified. It was clear from the tone in the room — and the fact that other members of the Board followed up on his aggressive line of questioning — that my political expression may have put my career in danger. The chair of the board later told the provost that a single board member could not fire faculty — but, of course, the board as a whole clearly can. When I was hired at Swarthmore, I believed that the college lived into its Quaker roots by supporting (even encouraging) the sorts of moral and intellectual truth-seeking crucial to the best kinds of academic inquiry. I don’t believe that anymore.
Professor of German and Film and Media Studies, Sunka Simon
There are three facets to the RPT process (Review, Promotion, and Tenure).
The first is an external facet, by which institutions of higher learning, both research universities and liberal arts colleges, ascertain, manage, and demonstrate their united core principles and standards of scientific inquiry, disciplinary and interdisciplinary innovation, and pedagogical excellence.
The second is tied to the first in that this process only works to its fullest potential when there is absolute confidentiality internally and externally, which means that letters of reference or evaluation from inside or outside the institution are held in the strictest confidence. Depending on the state and the institution, candidates up for RPT have the right to see different, usually very limited, parts of their files that redact evaluators’ names. Why? To make sure that they get the concrete feedback they need and deserve after working so hard to get to this point in their careers, and to make sure that the evaluation remains as uncensored or un-self-censored as possible to allow for the full spectrum of evidence to be entered into the assessment: would you write something critical about a peer’s performance if you knew you would be outed as the critic? Maybe you would. If so, you are more courageous than the majority of people. And we would really quickly lose people willing or able to write letters that are taken seriously and make the whole process unsustainable.
Especially at the third-year-review stage, constructive criticism has to be an important factor because it is a check-in for junior faculty to allow for course corrections. If we didn’t have confidentiality agreements, the whole exercise, especially the third-year review, would be a waste of time and energy. Does critique mean that the letter writers do not support the candidacy or the candidate? In the majority of cases, especially at the third-year-review stage, absolutely not. It seeks to set the candidate up to NOT fail during the tenure review by communicating to them that certain expectations have not been met, expectations they might not have heard or might not have thought important to address (for whatever reason). And it gives them two years to adjust. At the tenure stage, the stakes are higher and in case of unsolvable disagreements about the file between members of a program, the Committee on Tenure and Promotion (which includes the provost and the president) will go over the case with a fine-tooth comb and issue recommendations or even a decision. And then, the candidate still has the right to appeal. This is not pleasant for any side to be sure, but still gives the candidate a chance to be heard and thereby altering the outcome.
The third facet is departmental autonomy. Each department/program at the college has a set of publically available guidelines for review cases. These guidelines come out of the discipline’s professional organization’s general set of expectations for faculty advancement, and are usually amended by lengthy departmental discussions and decisions to reflect Swarthmore’s and the department’s/program’s specific standards. For example, Department A might have specific research/teaching/service expectations or needs that a candidate in Department B might not have. For this reason, #3 also means that Department or Program A can’t tell Department or Program B to retain or not to retain a candidate. We have a mechanism that gives colleagues in other departments a voice in the process, but only in the third category among three categories of voices: external specialists, departmental specialists, and college-wide affiliated specialists. And the latter discourages publicly campaigning for or against a candidate. You might think campaigning “for” would be great, but if we allow “for,” then “against” is also not off the table. And that would be a horrid scenario.
