What Happens When the Dean Says , ‘ No ’ ? By Robert E . Emerick

n recent years, reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions have become increasingly problematic and contentious. My own service on a number of departmentand college-level “reappointment-tenure-promotion” committees has made me increasingly cynical about these putative “democratic” decision-making processes. I began to believe that faculty time and effort on such committees was actually “busy work,” since it seemed to me that whenever a college dean said “no” to a request for tenure or promotion, it became a fait accompli , despite positive recommendations from numerous faculty committees. I began to believe that procedures that supposedly include faculty members as equal decisionmaking partners are actually heavily dominated by administrators who have stronger cost-saving and empire-building motives than motives related to making things better for faculty or students. I decided to obtain and analyze recent reappointment-tenurepromotion (RTP) data from my university, for the years 1992-1997, in order to evaluate my own cynicism about the academic decisionmaking process. This paper presents the results of that analysis. R e a p p o i n t m e n t t e n u r e p r o m ot i o n (RTP) decisions at my institution, San Diego State University, are ostensibly based on reviews of the materials submitted by each candidate. These reviews take place at five different levels of the university. Recommendations from each level are then submitted to the university president who makes the sixth and final decision. And all decisions are open to review through various grievance and arbitration processes at each of the six levels. The levels of decision making include a department committee, the department chairperson, a college committee, the dean of the THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL 29