Sample Informal Review Letter to Candidate

Date

Professor _____________

Department of _________

Dear ________:

On ______, the tenured members of the department met and agreed on a proposed outline for your informal review during the _________ academic year. Here is our current plan for conducting this review.

1. After consulting with you on courses and dates, we (with the exception of _________, who will be on leave and out of town length of time) will visit your classes during _______ terms. Following these visits, we will individually discuss our observations with you, and we may make specific recommendations.
2. We will review course evaluation forms from your courses. It would be most helpful if you could provide me with those forms for the current academic year (_________), so that we can review them before visiting your classes. We also intend to review the course evaluations for your courses in term and term, once they become available. If there is further information that we think we would like to obtain from your students, or that you would like us to obtain from your students, we will, in consultation with you, probably design a form to be sent out in the fall to students who took your classes during the current academic year.
3. During _______ term, we will review your scholarly materials. These can be published or unpublished and can range from articles and books to items such as class handouts. Please provide us early in the term with a copy of the materials you would like us to consider.
4. We also ask you to provide us with an updated c.v. and a career prospectus by _______. The prospectus can be in a form of your choosing, and it does not need to be long; we ask for it in order to have a framework for the other information that we will have received during this review. Do make sure, both in the c.v. and in the prospectus, to describe not only your teaching and scholarly activities, but also your professional service within and beyond the department.
5. During _______ term, we will meet to discuss our observations and the materials that you have submitted. We will then write a departmental letter to you; like the present letter, it will be copied to the Dean of the College, who will not be otherwise involved in the review process. The departmental letter will contain a recommendation about your reappointment, but we hope that an equally useful function of the letter will be to give you feedback on what we feel are important aspects of your work in the department. The letter may contain recommendations for improvement, suggestions about setting priorities, and the like.

We hope that this plan is acceptable to you, at least in broad outline, but we also urge you to be candid in expressing any misgivings you have about it. Comments, questions, and suggestions for change are welcome; if they result in substantial modifications, you may get a follow-up letter to confirm those changes in the procedure.

Finally, let me assure you that if this letter seems overly formal or bureaucratic, that is only to try to make sure that we all have the same understanding about how the review will develop, so as to avoid anyone being unpleasantly surprised later. We have very much enjoyed having you in the department, and we are looking forward to learning more about your activities and being of as much help as we can as you continue to unfold your strengths in teaching, scholarship, and service.

For the tenured members of the department,

___________, Chair

cc: Dean of the College
Tenured Members of the Department