Governance

Community Testimony for Faculty Evaluations
 
Who can submit? All members of the Bard community are encouraged to participate in the faculty evaluation process by submitting written testimony. Faculty members, staff, students, and alumni all have valuable perspectives that help carry out a more thorough assessment of the people up for review. 
 
Format? Testimony may be submitted in many ways -- as a memo; as a letter; as a few lines of comment; even as a quick post. The important thing is that the readers get a sense of your experience with, or assessment of the works of, the person being evaluated. The testimony should be signed (electronic signature will be accepted) and sent to the Office of the Dean of the College; it cannot be submitted anonymously.
 
Content? Testimony should respond to the three categories of evaluation: teaching, research, and service to the community.
 
Who reads testimony? Testimony goes into what is called the “closed file.” Letters are confidential and will not be read by the evaluatee. Readers do include the Divisional Chairs and Divisional Evaluators, faculty members who make use of community testimony, among other documents, for a report that summarizes the content of the open and closed files. The authors of any testimony quoted are not identified. This report is distributed to the faculty in the division with which the person evaluated is affiliated. The Faculty Evaluation Review Committee (FERC), the College Evaluation Committee (CEC), the Dean of the College, and the President of the College also read the original materials in the closed files, where the testimony is kept.
 
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Call for Testimony for Spring 2026 Evaluations:
 
All members of the College community, and especially tenure-line and regular non-tenure track faculty members in the immediate programs of a faculty member being evaluated, are invited and encouraged to submit signed written testimony concerning faculty members being evaluated. 
 
The dean of the college solicits written testimony from all segments of the Bard community and requests that all such testimony be sent to the Office of the Dean of the College. Evaluatees should not solicit testimony on their own behalf from current or former members of the Bard community. 
 
If you would like to submit a letter to the evaluation file of a faculty member scheduled to be evaluated this semester, it should be signed and sent campus mail to the Office of the Dean of the College or via e-mail as an attachment with electronic signature to [email protected] by Wednesday, February 11.

NON-TENURE-TRACK EVALUATIONS
Andrew Atwell, SST/Religion
Matthew Greenberg, SMC/Chemistry
Kwame Holmes, SST/Human Rights
Elena Kim, SST/Human Rights and Psychology
Gabriella Lindsay, L&L/French Studies
Oleg Minin, L&L/Russian and Eurasian Studies
Joseph O’Neill, L&L/Written Arts
Julia Weist, ARTS/Studio Arts

SENIOR REGULAR NON-TENURE-TRACK EVALUATIONS
Jeff Jurgens, SST/Anthropology 

SENIOR EVALUATIONS  
Lauren Curtis, L&L/Classics
Christopher Gibbs, ARTS/Music
Susan Merriam, ARTS/Art History and Visual Culture 
James Romm, L&L/Classics
Samuel (Shai) Secunda, SST/Religion 
Karen Sullivan, L&L/Literature 


**Non-tenure-track evaluation testimony is read by the divisional evaluators, the division chair, the College Evaluation Committee (CEC), the associate dean of the college, and the president.
***Senior evaluations are generally scheduled every seven years after tenure or a CEC evaluation or in accordance with contractual agreements, and materials are read by the program director, the division chair, the dean of the college.