This dissertation shares the results of an institutional ethnography conducted in a large, Midwestern research and doctoral granting institution. The researcher tells a story of a department’s relationship with course observation as an aspect of faculty evaluation and governance by considering these practices through the lens of labor equity. Through surveys, both ethnographic and object-based reflective interviews, and genre-tracing analyses of department documents, the study maps locations for change based in labor equity. The results demonstrate how observation and evaluation are implicated in departmental labor conditions and how academic rank—when constellated with those activities—influences faculty perceptions of professional value, agency, and long-term career trajectory.Faculty off the tenure line experience observation and evaluation as a feature of “long-term precarity” or a limited career trajectory over time. This work contributes to an area of limited scholarship in writing studies on faculty evaluation and shared governance as it intersects with labor equity concerns. The dissertation offers heuristic approaches to faculty evaluation that reimagine current hierarchies of departmental rank and highlight avenues for departments to engage observation and evaluation in more agentive ways. The dissertation additionally makes recommendations for graduate professional training in the context of an ever-shrinking tenure-stream model in higher education.
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