Campus Procedures for Determining Merit Awards

1.    Forms, deadlines, and instructions for application will be made available by the Dean and the Council Chair when Merit Awards are to be made.

2.    Tenured and tenure-track members of Council will carefully read each file, with each person forming his or her independent evaluation.

3.    Tenured and tenure-track Council members will meet in executive session to consider each applicant’s file. This session is solely for appraising each applicant’s record, asking questions of constituency members, and clarifying information. This session is not for explicitly comparing the performances of colleagues in open discussion. Each Council member is responsible for making those kinds of judgments independently after the meeting concludes. Council members will not be present for the discussion of their own files or for the discussions of the files submitted by their spouses or significant others.

4.    Each Council member shall assign to each file a score between 0 (low) and 10 (high) in each category for which the faculty member has applied. Scores will be submitted electronically and will remain anonymous at every stage of the process. The scores will be tallied and the median computed. Then all applicants will be ranked per the median score for each faculty member.

Council members are not allowed to assign scores to themselves, their spouses or significant others, so not everyone will have the same number of total votes. However, the median score should reflect the correct ranking.

The integrity and fairness of the process demands that the scoring by Council members be done without consultation with other Council members or non-Council members of the faculty.

5.    The Council Chair and Secretary shall submit the median rank score for each category for each applicant, as well as the original data the medians were based upon, to the Dean. The Chair and Secretary shall keep all the scores confidential.

6.    The Dean will make a preliminary determination of the Merit Awards and notify individual faculty members, the Council, and the Provost. Faculty members who wish to know their discrete ranking in each category by the Dean or by Council may request that information from the Dean.

7.    A faculty member shall have the right to request reconsideration of the preliminary determination. The procedure for making such a request is as follows:

a.    The request shall be made, in writing, to the Dean for transmission to the Council for its review and recommendation on reconsideration.

b.    A necessary condition for Council review of a written request for reconsideration is that the request must give an informed and substantive reason for reconsidering the preliminary determination. An informed reason is based upon at least as much information as was available to Council. Thus, the expectation is that any faculty member requesting reconsideration will have reviewed the documentation submitted by all applicants for Merit Awards who would be affected by a revision of the preliminary determination. A substantive reason discloses a significant misinterpretation or a real and verifiable error in the preliminary determination. Thus, disappointment about the size of an award alone is insufficient reason to request reconsideration. Those appealing may request to present their reconsideration rationale to the Council.

c.    After evaluating all requests for reconsideration, the Council will make a final recommendation to the Dean.

d.    The Dean will make a final determination of Faculty Excellence Awards and notify affected individual faculty, the Council, and the Provost.