At the end of the tedious online performance evaluation process faculty are allowed to make a statement of sorts. Please note that my final evaluation was 4.8 out of 5: I was assessed at 5 for research (55% of my evaluation), 4.5 for teaching (35%), and 5 for service (10%). Here is what I submitted:

Why are we embarked upon a process which the provost himself has described publicly as “inane”? What does it mean for a faculty member to receive a grade of 4.8? Moreover, what’s the point of seeking to distinguish oneself when the only thing at stake is a cost of living adjustment misnamed as a “merit raise”? And this in a year when there will be no adjustments, no raises? Mr. LeBlanc can shake his head in sympathy that my salary will, in effect, be diminished by 3.5%, and maybe the dean will, too, but they both are comfortable in their 6-figure salaries and I have to decide, once again, how much of my savings I will divert to send my child to school, to effect meaningful home repair, and/or offset other expenses which grow each year even as our salaries do not. I am lucky to hold an endowed professorship, but it is only ever temporary, and I know that all I have to do is stumble professionally or annoy the wrong person and that will be taken away and things will be as bad as they are for everyone else in the department. (Or, worse, its removal could be the outcome of an under-considered process possessing no strategic focus nor even a sense of the variance in values of publications to an institution that claims to aspire to higher status.) The evaluation of performance in the absence of any meaningful reward and only the ever-present damoclean threat of punishment is not evaluation but a constant reminder that the administration always holds a knife to faculty’s throat.