Henry's Reappointment Evaluations
The “Smoking Gun”
I recently showed my documents to a friend who is in academia and knows CTS very well. When I pointed to Henry’s first reappointment evaluation that he gave me the night of January 2, 2003 and then showed her his revised version of that evaluation that came more than a week later, she said, “O, my gosh. I don’t believe it. This can’t be true.”
The revised version is the “smoking gun” in this case—revised after I exercised my rights to see my colleagues’ evaluations of me. As I’ve stated above, instead of 2 positive quotes he now had 15, and on the negative side, he conceded that most of the quotes were written by 2 individuals (whose comments, I know, could have only been written by an administrator and another individual who is not a full-time professor).
Why was the first evaluation so negatively biased? Only Henry can answer that. One attempt to explain it was to claim that often rough drafts of evaluations are initially given to the faculty member and they are changed after the individual is permitted to have input. But in this case, I immediately wrote back with strong evidence showing student evaluations were much better than he had indicated; he didn’t even acknowledge my letter, much less change his assessment.
There were other issues that I challenged, but he made no changes to reflect my input. He changed only the section on colleagues’ evaluations—presumably because I asked for the originals (which he typed up), and he knew I would immediately see his very obvious negatively biased overview of them.
Henry said at one point that in the revised version he came to a different conclusion, basing that statement on slightly different wording in the conclusion. I believe the conclusions were the same in both the original and revised versions. On this point I’m in agreement with Neal. Neal emailed me (1-14-03), saying, “VP DeMoor adjusted the body of his evaluation, but not his conclusion.”
This raises another aspect of this “smoking gun.” When Neal saw such a significant change in the 2nd version of the reappointment evaluation, why didn’t he question Henry regarding his original negative bias? That’s an important question.
It points to my belief that Neal was involved in the negatively biased evaluation from the very beginning. And, not just Neal but also Duane who I believe was in on this ordeal from day one.
You certainly have your own priorities in mind, and not those of the church.
mike