It is very unfortunate that I am here today, addressing you in public session, in front of god and everyone, with a 3-minute timer counting down.

10 months ago, after being denied promotion to E range, 6 of my colleagues and I filed appeals with FARB, the faculty administrative review board. This was a first in the history of the college. Never had so many faculty appealed at the same time. This should have been a sign that something was amiss in the promotion process.

For 10 months we followed the appeal process. We finally received detailed, preliminary findings in December.

In February, FARB issued its recommendations to President Caputo, who, per the contract, had 10 instruction days to respond. And it’s here that the train goes fully off the tracks.

President Caputo unilaterally decided that FARB didn’t actually finish its work in February. Instead, unbeknownst to the administrators and faculty on FARB, it finished back in December.

This petty dispute between President Caputo and FARB is harming faculty. While the president debates with FARB over whether its meetings were actually meetings, and which recommendations were its final recommendations, faculty are left on the sidelines. We get denied an opportunity to meet with you, the board, because the president retroactively decided the timeframe for us to meet with you had ended one month prior.

And what happens with FARB’s recommendations? The administrators and faculty on FARB unanimously agreed on their report. This report documents in detail how the promotion process violates the board policy of equity. It also provides details on how to improve the process. Much of this was also in the December report. And the president has chosen to ignore it.

How is it in the best interest of the college to ignore a report on such an important process?

We have also heard that any changes to the promotion process have to be negotiated in the new contract. But what happens to the faculty who are right now awaiting the outcome of their applications for promotion? You know the process is broken, but you won’t fix it. The current process violates the contract. Nothing in the contract requires a broken process, and nothing in the contract prevents fixing it.

As this process has dragged on and on, faculty who have been here far longer than I have approached me and commented that they have never applied for promotion because they don’t trust the process. That shows this broken process is harming both faculty and the college as a whole. Why don’t we fix it?