CFAES Give Today
OSU Extension

College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences

CFAES

Football, Dossiers, and The Great Pumpkin

- Friday, September 18, 2020
Infographic describing parallel construction, by Pat Brinkman

Fall is for football and going back to school (well, normally). It is when the days get shorter, the dew gets heavier, and Linus waits patiently in the moonlit darkness for the Great Pumpkin. It is also when faculty promotion and tenure committees come together to review the accomplishments of their faculty peers.

I have had the opportunity to sit in on four different committees in the past couple of weeks. The committees ranged in size from 3 members to 30. Each was guided by their department’s Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure documents or APT. The APT aligns with Volume 3 of the Office of Academic Affairs Policies and Procedures Handbook; and other policies and procedures of the college (e.g. FAES APT) and university to which the department and its faculty are subject. If that sounds like pretty serious business, it is because it is.

Working in ways worthy of promotion requires personal and professional growth. One thing I’ve learned is that we have an abundance of opportunities for personal and professional growth. Department of Extension faculty enjoy a support structure that involves peer-to-peer coaching, annual dossier reviews, and a seemingly never-ending list of potential collaborators and opportunities to pursue. Extension faculty pursuing promotion benefit from our P&T committees comprised of programmatic diversity and a variety of Extension position types too. Whether serving as chair, coach, procedural oversight designee or committee alternate, their peers take the various committee roles quite seriously.

This year, the Extension Promotion Committee was chaired by Gary Gao and included Ed Lentz and Myra Moss as members (this committee of professors reviews our professor candidates). The Extension P&T Committee reviews our associate professor candidates, dossiers of candidates being considered for a faculty appointment, and courtesy appointments. The committee this year was chaired by Pat Brinkman and included:

  • Jim Bates
  • David Civittolo
  • Julie Fox
  • Jason Hedrick
  • Mark Light
  • David Marrison
  • Jeff McCutcheon
  • Chris Penrose
  • Brian Raison
  • Eric Romich

In concluding her three-year P&T committee term, Pat recently described how to better connect one’s various efforts and accomplishments throughout the dossier using a concept referred to as parallel construction. I think of this like threads. Because it is not unusual for your overall dossier submission to contain 100 pages or more, such threads help the reader better see your contributions…in teaching, curriculum, creative and scholarly outputs, funding, and service. Because of our use of this technique, the quality of our faculty, and the dedicated work of our promotion committees, our dossier submissions have become known within the college as being some of the highest quality submissions. Thank you, Pat. And thank you to all of our dedicated colleagues involved in this year’s P&T committee work.  

 

 

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.