Copying +Billy Hung‘s comment as well, since it bears repeating:
I am also sad to see that Koch didn’t get tenure.
However, what I find most admirable about this is that Koch went into this following his own priority of educating and mentoring students. He was clear that he would be evaluated on a different standard, but chose to do what his heart told him is the right thing. This is a form of civil disobedience against the academia, and I think he deserves a great amount of credit for it.
As with most schools, the tenure process is one that has rules and guidelines. In fact, most schools could possibly use more detailed guidelines to make it less a guess-what-we-want process. It is sad that UNM couldn’t fit Koch’s work into the existing guidelines, but I think the criticism here should be on their inability to adjust these guidelines to take into account newer forms of scholarship, and not on the fact that they followed existing guidelines.
Mark Hahnel originally shared this post:
Steve Koch, one of the most active practitioners of open science, announced today that he has not been awarded tenure, despite the considerable support he had received from the global open science com…