Revising The Faculty Handbook (#1397)

Topics/tags: Grinnell, Academia, Rambly

A few weeks ago, Dean Feingold announced that we would be revising The Faculty Handbook next year. It’s about time. The last major revision of the Handbook was before I came to Grinnell. Parts of the Trustee By-Laws were incorporated in 1999–2000. Since then? There have been lots of amendments, but no full rewrite. And, as you might expect, the Faculty Handbook needs some updates. Plans had started in late 2019, but the pandemic intervened.

The Faculty Handbook is a conceptually complicated document. It spells out many major policies, such as broad procedures for awarding tenure and promoting faculty. It also deals with some more minor issues, such as the Department Chair’s responsibility to meet with the Student Educational Policy Committee and report issues back to the departmental faculty. In any case, the range of issues isn’t the biggest conceptual complication. Rather, that’s the contractual status of the Handbook. On one hand, it says,

The Faculty Handbook, while dealing with employment policies and procedures, is not intended to provide any assurance of continued employment and should in no way be construed as an employment contract.

On the other, my offer letter from the College says states that the Faculty Handbook and portions of the Trustee By-Laws are included by reference [1].

I’ve always handled the apparent conflict with the understanding that the Handbook is not an employment contract until included by reference in an employment contract. A lawyer I chatted with informally about the issue agreed.

In addition, tenure is supposed to provide assurance of continued employment, isnt it? Since the Handbook is where our tenure rules reside, shouldn’t it be where the College provides assurance of its tenure policies?

Oh well. I suppose that’s one of the issues that we’ll consider in the coming year.

There’s also another complexity involved, a different kind of complexity. All of the previous rewrites of The Faculty Handbook have been by the faculty. When our Dean announced the latest rewrite, she made it clear that we’re hiring a consultant to do the rewrite. That may be for the best. The College will benefit from someone who has considered other handbooks closely. A consultant can also lead us in discussions of the various topics that should and should not be in the Handbook.

Dean Feingold described a multi-step process. If I recall correctly, the first step involved conversations with the faculty to understand the components and goals of the Handbook and the rewrite. But it also sounded like the College attorneys were to be involved from fairly early in the process. That led me to ask a somewhat confrontational question, which went something like this.

The College attorneys will represent the interests of the institution, not the faculty. Will we have contract attorneys representing the faculty review the contract?

From my perspective, the Dean’s response was not satisfactory. As I recall, she suggested that the Faculty would review the changes and that would suffice. She also said that we’d follow the policies for revising the Handbook.

Why is that unsatisfactory? Thirty years ago, when we last rewrote the Handbook, life at Grinnell was much more casual. Much of what happened was undergirded by a sense of mutual trust. Lawyers weren’t involved. And our favorite weasel word, normally, was regularly invoked.

But we’re no longer that Grinnell. The College keeps throwing policies at us, some of which undermine trust. We’ve also seen some serious complexities in the contract our attorneys made with the student union, including serious misunderstanding of terms like academic freedom. Hence, if the College attorneys have significant input on the contract, I want someone other than faculty to read through it.

I’m also not sure that policies for revising the Handbook, which are intended mostly for edits, should be interpreted as applying to a full rewrite. I also believe that Jim Swartz added them without discussion when he realized that we lacked the protection of such policies.

The policies also remind me of something unavoidable. In the end, the Trustees of the College own the Handbook. They can make the changes they want. They respect the faculty enough to consult us and to give us much of the authority. However, if they want to change it, they can, no matter what we or our consulting labor lawyers say.

In the end, I’ll admit that I don’t expect the rewrite to be a particularly contentious process. But I do expect that there will be some complexities, both expected (e.g., disagreements about what should and should not be in the Handbook, which we’re already hearing) and unexpected. It should be an interesting process.

Coming soon: My reflections on the various ways we present policies at Grinnell. Beyond The Faculty Handbook, we are also governed by The Staff Handbook, an ever-increasing list of formally vetted College Policies, procedures that we reference in The Faculty Handbook, results of faculty votes that seem to exist only in the minutes of faculty meetings, hidden notes in the Dean’s office, and so much more. Stay tuned!

[1] I’m fairly sure that it uses the passive voice.

Version 1.0 of 2026-03-09.