ADEPT Development
Content: Career Accounts (used for web, AV, C&Q, NYC and SM components)
This is a case summary, or unofficial account, of candidate's career. This account is non-coded; annotated, or color-coded versions, are written with biases and procedural issues highlighted, and are used only in the "Cases & Questions" activity.
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Samia Mansour
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.
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.
During her fourth year, Mansour consulted with her chair about coming
up for an early decision on promotion and tenure. 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. 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.
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.
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?
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