AUFA prevents Provost from interfering in promotion process
Article 3 of the AUFA collective agreement governs tenure and promotion for academics. If an AUFA member wishes to be promoted in rank (e.g., from assistant to associate professor), the process works like this:
The member makes application and a three-person committee is struck.
The committee solicits external reviews from two senior scholars in the field and, combined with other information, makes a recommendation to the Provost for or against promotion.
The Provost approves or denies the promotion application.
If the Provost denies promotion, the member has a right of appeal to an internal committee.
This process set out in the collective agreement is a procedural right, in that it specifies how the employer must handle promotions. This prevents the employer from altering the process (or the standards for promotion) in a way that is unfair to a member applying for promotion.
This spring, an AUFA member applied for promotion. Instead of striking the three-person committee and awaiting its recommendation, the Provost simply refused the application, stating that the applicant had not met the standard for promotion. This refusal is objectionable in three ways:
The Provost has no power to summarily refuse the application under the collective agreement. Rather, the Provost can accept or decline the committee’s recommendation only after the application has been reviewed by the committee and the external reviewers. The Provost’s refusal to accept the application is a clear violation of the member’s procedural rights.
Summarily refusing the application also denies the member their right of appeal (which is only available after the committee has made a recommendation and the Provost has rendered her decision). Absent the documentation created during the process, the appeal committee would have no material to work with in rendering its decision.
The Provost does not normally have the requisite expertise to assess an application. This lack of expertise is the reason why the process relies so heavily on the expertise of two external reviewers. In this case, this Provost is particularly unqualified to assess the applications because she has never held a professorship and has no meaningful record of scholarship.
After two months, during which the applicant was on tenterhooks, AUFA managed to convince the Provost to strike the committee and allow the application to proceed through the contractually required process. While this is good news for the applicant, there remain difficulties.
The Provost’s initial refusal of the application suggests she has already drawn a negative conclusion about the application. Given this, how can the member trust that the committee’s recommendation will receive a fair consideration by the Provost when it eventually reaches her? If the Provost believes she can operate entirely outside of the Collective Agreement, how can she build trust with the AUFA members? A solution to this would be for the Provost to recuse herself from this decision and have another executive member perform this function.
The Provost’s handling of this application also raises profound questions about the Provost’s judgment. The promotion process is more than 40 years old and is clearly set out in both the collective agreement and university policy. That the Provost felt free to just create a new process on the fly and then, when informed that she was bound by the collective agreement, let the member twist in the wind all summer, speaks poorly of her judgment.
AUFA’s committee on Tenure & Promotion is ready to go
Athabasca University pressed AUFA hard during bargaining on a rewrite of Article 3 which covers tenure and promotion processes for academics. AUFA’s committee has been prepared to meet for months at this point, and AU’s top priority in bargaining has not seen any followup from the employer. AUFA is eager to begin meeting with AU’s chosen committee so that any such incidents do not occur in the future.