Faculty Critical of CAP

According to a feature article in the Dartmouth, recent tenure decisions made by the Committee Advisory to the President (CAP) have upset some members of the faculty on the grounds that teaching evaluations by young alumni were weighed more heavily than departmental recommendations in deciding tenure cases.

Consisting of six professors and the dean of the faculty, CAP advises the president and the Trustees on faculty tenure and promotion. Current CAP members are Professors William Cook, Robert Kleck, James Hornig, Donald Kreider, Christian Wolff, Charles Wood, and Dean Hans Penner.

Professor Roger Masters of the government department resigned from four committees to protest recent decisions made by CAP. He noted that in two tenure cases, "unanimous departmental recommendations were overturned by CAP on the basis of anonymous letters from former students, which seem to have been treated as the sole reliable evidence as to the quality of teaching." Professor J. Laurie Snell of the mathematics department expressed similar displeasure, claiming in a memo that last spring's tenure decisions had a "devastating effect" on the mathematics department.