VIII. Faculty Allocations

Personnel Management and slot tracker

Chairs are responsible for managing the curriculum of their department, and central to this process is hiring new faculty or replacing departing faculty or faculty going on full-year leaves. Chairs receive from the DOF office in the Fall the “slot tracker” for their departments; this document records critical information about all the FTEs of each department, including: dates for reappointment, tenure, and promotion; eligibility for sabbatical leave; teaching load, etc. Use this document to help plan your department’s hiring and curricular offerings over the next several years. It’s important for the slot tracker information to be accurate so that DOF can keep a clear record for budget and personnel planning. 

Faculty on full-year sabbatical leaves are normally replaced with term positions hired during the spring semester for the following year. This process is not automatic. Please communicate your request to replace a person who will be on a full-year leave to the Dean of Faculty.

Allocation requests

The process for replacing faculty in tenured or tenurable positions normally begins with an allocation request. At Hamilton, in most situations when a faculty member leaves the College (by retiring or resigning, but not in the case of denial of tenure or reappointment), the department must make a formal request to the Committee on Academic Policy (CAP) to have that position allocated back to them. A department may request the reallocation of the position of a faculty member in phased retirement a year or two prior to the departure of that faculty member (normally when he or she has gone down to three-fifths time).

The Faculty Handbook recognizes four types of positions: Tenurable, Renewable, Term, and Adjunct (FH: VI.).  Tenurable and Renewable positions together comprise the “Continuing Faculty” slots that uniquely contribute and are responsible for delivering our faculty-approved curriculum, and thus are allocated by the standard, annual allocation process. Renewable positions are allocated to departments in four-year increments.[1]

The CAP keeps information about allocation requests (including deadlines, templates, and other information) on its website.

The evaluation criteria considered by the CAP, ranked in order of importance, are:

1. Curricular Merit (CAP’s priority is curriculum)

• Department or program goals and rationale for how the requested position helps strengthen the program and attain goals.

• Careful examination of the nature and structure of the concentration, including comparisons to concentrations at other institutions and curricular trends in the field.

• Contribution to the college-wide curriculum.

• Curricular coordination with other departments with similar curricular needs and interests

• Assessment of student outcomes

2. Personnel

• Demonstrated long-term personnel planning by department (retirements, possible shifts among current faculty)

• Retention and mentorship history for junior faculty

• Commitment to diversity

3. Supporting Data for Context (available from the Planning Notebook on the Office of Institutional Research website)

• Department or program enrollment per FTE

• Department or program majors per FTE

• Comparisons of enrollments and curriculums at peer institutions using the Planning Notebook peer group: Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, Colby, Colgate, Colorado, Connecticut, Davidson, Grinnell, Haverford, Lafayette, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Pomona, Skidmore, Smith, Swarthmore, Trinity, Vassar, Washington and Lee, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams.

4. The allocation request should make reference to the most recent departmental review when appropriate. In addition to balancing the College’s needs, CAP expects a rigorous assessment of the department/program through the periodic review process when considering allocation requests.

Chairs should work with all members of their department to develop their allocation requests. While there are a limited number of positions to allocate in any given year, the Committee on Academic Policy encourages departments to make requests to help the committee and the Dean plan for future needs even if the requests cannot be fulfilled in the current year.

---

[1] Note the distinction between Renewable positions and Term positions:

1. Renewable positions: “A renewable position is a non-tenurable position to which reappointment for successive one- or two-year terms is possible…No renewable position may be held for more than six years.”

2. Term positions: “A term position is created to meet a particular short-term need of the College. Appointment to it is made for a specified period of time. The large majority of term positions are visiting positions created for a term of one year to enable the College to appoint replacements for continuing members of the Faculty on leave.” (Term position leave replacement recruitment is described in the previous section of this guide.)