Professor Diamond's offers a second edition of his practical guide to assessing collegiate faculty development. This book lays out the framework for criteria for promotion and tenure."It provides basic principles, raises a number of important issues, introduces a comprehensive approach to documenting and assessing faculty work, and provides several checklists (xvi) The handbook opens many academic personnel areas in its systematic topical listings-but it leaves it for a committee using the book to fill in the answers specific to their own institutions.
Diamond alsolists many paradigms for evaluating scholarship, like Eugene Riceand Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), which divides scholarship into discovery, integration, application, and teaching. This framework allows faculty to be evaluated on creative and original research or art; the synthesis of their knowledge into the information stream as in the production of textbooks; the application of their knowledge into non-theoretical real life situations; and the communication of knowledge in the classroom. Diamond lists and comments on these and other evaluative mechanisms as well.
The book is divided into two sections: Part I, Process-deals with the issues and philosophy of measuring faculty performance. Part II, Resources--is a collection of checklists, outlines, and resources relating to process. Bibliographies are embedded throughout the text.
In Part I:Process, Diamond points out that, like Gaul, all academic faculty reviews have three parts: The parts of the promotion and tenure review are: "1) the documentation the faculty member provides, 2) the materials the committee collects, and 3) the review of this material by the committee." (p.17) Insights are offered on teaching, advising, the portfolio process, the faculty essay and other areas which are part of evaluative protocols.
Part II:Resources, Diamond gives us practical examples of the way various disciplines have tried to address the issue of tenure review. Examples of criteria are given from the spectrum of academic disciplines: History, Business, Theater,Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology. Reference is made to Diamond and Adams, The Divisions Speak (1996, 2000), a source which provides numerous examples of discipline specific faculty evaluation criteria.
Serving on Promotion, Tenure, and Faculty Review Committees is written in thattechnically clear prose common to handbooks. It will be helpful at those exact points when wisdom is needed to organize the promotion and tenure committee. It provides the checklists needed for the educational administrator or committee chair.Our learning organizations are complex entities-and handbooks like these guide us through the maze that modern academia has become. It also provides the evaluator with some objective standard for faculty personnel evaluation, which helps us to escape the fear and irrationality of subjectivist academic politics.