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| May 23, 1994 Dear President Bowen, My name is Martin Millman. I have held the rank of Assistant Prof. of Mathematics since coming to LaGuardia in 1988. I received my Ph.D. at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, N.Y.U., in 1968 and have been dedicated to teaching and scholarly research since then. My teaching has earned uniform praise over the years and my research papers have been published in numerous prestigious journals. The LaGuardia P&B [ tenure and promotion committee ] unanimously awarded me tenure in 1992. I am, justifiably I think, proud of my record. I tell you this in advance, lest you gain the impression that I am disgruntled over failure to achieve professional success. I am writing to share with you some thoughts concerning the promotion process at LaGuardia. Last year I applied for promotion to Associate Prof. I was ultimately ranked 11th out of 15 applicants and was not promoted. This in itself would have caused me no ill feeling as it is certainly possible that there were ten faculty more qualified than I for promotion. I would therefore have simply resolved to try harder in the future were it not for one confounding anomaly. A colleague in my department who was not initially supported by the chairman and who was advised not to apply for promotion was, in fact, promoted. To further cloud the issue, I had been aware for some time that the teaching ability and college contributions of my colleague were widely held in low regard by both the College Administration and students. This curious circumstance prompted me to inquire more deeply into the nature of the promotion process at LaGuardia. I began by consulting the criteria for promotion set forth in the Professional Staff Handbook. I briefly paraphrase these below: 1. Evidence of teaching excellence. 2. Documented College contributions. 3. Professional development in one's field of expertise. With respect to the first of these criteria, it struck me as rather remarkable that while my student evaluations have consistently been among the very best in the department, my colleague's have not only been uniformly bad, but so dismally bad as to have elicited a "letter of concern" from the College administration. The second criterion served to further increase my puzzlement. For your information, I take the liberty of including a brief synopsis here of my documented College contributions up until last year: 1. I have significantly contributed to almost every committee in my department, including P&B. 2. Deputy Chairman for nighttime adjunct activities. 3. Two years as scheduler of full-time and adjunct teaching assignments. 4. I wrote the original proposal for MAT 095 [ remedial arithmetic ], presented it to the College Curriculum Committee, and served as course coordinator for a year. 5. Four years of active participation on the President's Affirmative Action Committee, including one as Chairman. 6. Three years of active participation on the Sexual Harassment Task Force and Network. 7. Statistical Consultant to the Task Force on Pluralism. I helped design and implement the College-wide survey on student attitudes toward campus prejudice in 1992 and carried out an extensive statistical analysis of the collected data. This work was lauded by the Task Force as a truly significant contribution to College life. 8. Member of the first ad-hoc committee to study the results of the new six-week semester. I helped design and carried out a detailed analysis of the Faculty Survey implemented in 1992 and reported my findings at an Instructional Staff meeting. 9. Campus Coordinator for one year of the CUNY-wide AMPS program, set up and funded by the NSF for the purpose of enhancing minority participation in mathematics and science. I designed the Mathematics Department study-group program and recruited, trained and supervised 30 peer-tutors, among many other duties and responsibilities. 10. I participated in the Enterprise Center for three years. This work included the creation and teaching of interdepartmental paired courses and student career workshops. 11. I gave several workshops for Faculty in the use of SPSS statistical software. 12. I participated in Dean Matthews' collaborative learning seminars and have been a pioneer in collaborative-learning techniques in the Mathematics Department. 13. One year of teaching at International High School. The results of this very successful inter-school endeavor were reported on the front page of On Campus magazine. 14. Member, three years, Board of Editors of Faculty and Staff Notes. 15. Member, Middle States Mini-Team. I wrote the sections of the team's report on student discipline and the Foreign Student Office. 16. Graduation Marshall, Phonathon volunteer, invited member of the search committee for Director of Institutional Research, participant in 3-day workshop of the Network to Confront Racism, faculty advisor to the Hong Kong Club and Pakistani Club, frequent participant in LaGuardia's mock-job-interview program, LaGuardia Representative at the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce 45th Annual Dinner, etc., etc. I include the above list of contributions not to blow my own horn, but rather to contrast them with those of my colleague, who has been admonished for lack of participation in College activities and who, in fact, was once denied tenure at LaGuardia for this lack of involvement. Again, remarkable. Finally, with respect to the third criterion above, I have presented research papers at professional conferences every year of my employment at LaGuardia. In 1991 I was the recipient of an NSF grant to create a computer-based alternative syllabus and textbook for MAT 121 ( Statistics II ). Since its inception, the course has been very popular with students and has received much praise from colleagues. This course design was recently selected for publication in the Sourcebook of the National Center for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. I have also had the honor this past year of having a research paper accepted for publication in the CUNY journal Mathematics in College. As you may imagine, these considerations left me quite perplexed and I therefore sought clarification this past year from senior Faculty and members of the College Administration. My conversations with them were most instructive and I am indebted to several of them for their astonishing frankness. All were most sympathetic and in full agreement on my qualifications for promotion. In fact, one of them expressed the opinion that I was the most qualified candidate for promotion that he had seen in the history of LaGuardia. Some of them helped me put my doubts about the ethicality of the promotion process in historical perspective by outlining a sequence of circumstances, similar to my own, extending back to the late 1970's. Others hypothesized the existence of a fourth ( political ) criterion for promotion which, while not appearing in the Handbook, is often of surpassing importance in the promotion process. My department chairman refers to the circumstances I alluded to above as "mistakes" in the judgement of the College P&B. I submit to you that they are not mistakes at all, but instead are carefully-calculated deals in which political favors take precedence over merit. This is conduct of a distinctly unethical, unprofessional and exploitive character. The insightful words of one Dean sum up my feelings succinctly: "The system stinks." Quite a disturbing remark, is it not? What it lacks in eloquence it more than makes up for in accuracy. Sincerely, Martin Millman cc: College P&B Committee |
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