University at Buffalo (UB)
The academic excellence of a university is established and maintained at the departmental level. It is established by the quality of appointments at the Instructor/Assistant Librarian, Assistant Professor/Senior Assistant Librarian levels, and is maintained through careful consideration of appointments or promotions to Associate Professor/Associate Librarian levels, and by the careful selection of those who receive continuing appointment. That excellence is then reaffirmed by the quality of those who are appointed at or promoted to the rank of Full Professor/Librarian.
A major responsibility for establishing and maintaining a high degree of excellence rests on the department chairs, who must recruit individuals of great promise, ensure that faculty will be regularly evaluated, and oversee efforts to assist current faculty members in improving their performance. They must also take responsibility for difficult decisions that may lead to nonrenewal of faculty members whose records of teaching and scholarship do not provide compelling reasons for continuing appointment. In this connection, department chairs should obtain and be guided by current information about the standards for promotion and tenure in their respective disciplines at the leading public research universities.
Faculty members share the responsibility for and take an active role in recruiting and evaluating members of their department or school/faculty by their advisory votes as members of personnel or ad hoc committees, or as faculty members voting by rank or status, or as members of the whole, depending upon the applicable bylaws.
Faculty members should be informed about the criteria for promotion and tenure, and department and faculty/school expectations regarding their duties and responsibilities, upon initial appointment, and at any time during the course of an appointment when responsibilities change, and at renewal of a term appointment. Such specification of responsibilities is particularly important in those instances in which a faculty member carries a heavy service obligation, e.g., as associate chair of a department, or as chair of a major university committee. In such cases, the relationship between performance in the administrative position and such personnel actions as increases in salaries or promotions in rank should be understood by all involved when the appointment is initiated. Specifications of duties should be included in letters of appointment and in any dossier presented for review.
Faculty members who have not yet achieved continuing appointment should not be asked to undertake substantial administrative tasks but should be allowed full opportunity to develop as scholars and teachers, or as librarians.
All faculty members on unqualified rank appointments should be reviewed and evaluated annually by the administrative officer of the department or comparable academic unit. The appropriate administrative officer should assess and discuss with the faculty/school members their performance on factors relevant to their particular cases. As a part of the review, the chair or other reviewing officer should consider:
The emphasis should be upon supporting and aiding the efforts of the faculty member rather than finding fault. Deficiencies in performance, however, should be made explicit. Student evaluations of teaching must be systematically conducted each year using a standard measuring instrument, and collected in a manner that assures the confidentiality of responses. Appropriate norms for appraising the results of student evaluations must be established. Students' opinions that have been gathered unsystematically have relatively little value in the promotion and tenure process. In those disciplines where class size or content does not permit measuring instruments (e.g., clinical instruction in the medical school), assessments in writing should be collected at the end of each semester.