This is a case summary, or unofficial accounts, of candidate's career. This account is annotated, or color-coded; non-coded accounts are written without biases and procedural issues highlighted, and are used in all ADEPT activities. Consistent formatting was done using a template.
Legend:Bias issue
Procedural issue
Linked reference
--------------------------------
Chemistry
ISSUES: significance of letters of reference and what kind of service counts
Samia Mansour, Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University,
was hired as an assistant professor by the Department of Physical
Sciences at a prestigious research university. Mansour’s research field
has long been central to the university; she joined a number of
colleagues who do similar and complementary work in the same field. Her
start-up package was slightly better than average; she had four offers
to consider at leading universities. Mansour
was immediately asked to participate in a campus committee charged to
study why so few women are employed in science during her first year.
In her second and third years, she was invited to serve on two similar
committees at the university level (bias report on committee assignments).
During her first three years at the university, Mansour produced an
extraordinary number of publications in the top-ranked journals in her
field, including one prize-winning paper. She wrote most of her papers
with a small group of faculty and graduate students, but some
represented collaborations with just one or two individuals, typically
graduate students.
Mansour’s funding level as an assistant professor was within the
average range for her field and slightly higher than the departmental
average. She was able to secure a lab budget based on a National
Science Foundation (NSF) grant for new faculty in her area as well as
some training grants for individual graduate students. She also
partnered with colleagues in developing novel methods of drug delivery
on a moderate grant from a pharmaceutical company.
In her third year, she won an NSF Faculty Early Career Development
Award, largely for writing one paper that garnered much national
attention for its novel approach to a particular problem. Near the
beginning of her fourth year, she was notified by the NSF that she was
selected as a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career
Award (PCASE).
Her undergraduate and graduate students generally awarded her good
teaching scores. Evaluations for the intro-level undergraduate course
earned some negative comments from a few students about her casual
attire; as a result, Mansour upgraded her wardrobe and began to wear
tailored clothing. She attracted excellent graduate students to her
lab, encouraging some undergraduates to continue graduate study at the
university and welcoming new graduate students. At the end of her third
year, she was nominated for a college teaching award by the
undergraduate coordinator with a recommendation from the graduate
director who cited her “dedication” and “long hours of working in her
lab along with graduate students.”
In addition to her work on women’s issues, Mansour was appointed to a
number of unit and college committees concerning visiting speakers,
honors, and searches. She became especially active in a professional
society and in her college’s network for junior faculty in sciences,
for which she helped organize a session on grant-writing for new
faculty. Issues
concerning women in her unit, and to some extent in sciences more
generally, fell on her shoulders, as manifested by numerous invitations
by chairs and deans at her university to address student and alumni
groups (reference on bias in terms of service activities for women and minorities).
During her fourth year, Mansour consulted with her chair about coming up for an early decision on promotion and tenure (reference on guidelines for deciding how to come up for P&T and who makes final decision).
As she had established a body of work and a set of achievements
comparable to or exceeding others in her field in her unit, she and her
chair were confident of her chances to be promoted and receive tenure
on this accelerated schedule. He had found her agreeable to serve in a
broad range of roles at his request and considered this along with her
PECASE as indicative of well-balanced roles and strong scholarly
potential.
At the beginning of her fifth year, Mansour’s case came up for review in her department. The
letters of reference in her promotion and tenure curriculum vita (cv) were generally
good, except for one taking issue with her celebrated paper (references for guidelines for selecting references and considering all references in deliberations).
The one negative review avoided addressing Mansour’s entire scholarly
output; instead, the reviewer took an extremely hostile approach to the
argument of the celebrated paper. One member of the promotion and
tenure committee noted that this review was so detailed that it could
have been published as an oppositional argument in a journal along with
Mansour’s paper. This reviewer also commented negatively about
Mansour’s style of presenting papers at meetings of a professional
society, raising some suspicions of a personal grudge. Another
reviewer commented as much on the value of Mansour’s service to the
profession, especially for women in her field, as on the value of her
scholarly research (bias regarding views of scholarly contributions of women in the sciences and engineering).
The unit promotion and tenure committee is split about whether to
emphasize the negative review or the one privileging service and
whether Mansour’s case should be forwarded to the next level. One
member expresses the view that her case should be eliminated from
further consideration this year, ideally by having the chair of the
department speak with Mansour about the negative review so the
candidate can withdraw the curriculum vita (cv). This
member suggests that next year the hostile reviewer and the one who
supplied the review focusing on Mansour’s service should not be invited
to submit reviews and that her case would have a better chance of
success if it comes up according to schedule, rather than early (reference on guidelines for how to consider negative letters of reference in committee reports).
As a member of the unit-level promotion and tenure committee, what
consideration would you give these reviews in evaluating Mansour’s
scholarship and career? What would you suggest regarding whether
Mansour’s case ought to be considered early or during the next year?