Dear Peter,

Here are some brief comments on how I think post tenure review should function.

• (1) Post tenure review decisions are made from "raw data", that is, data that requires knowledge of the expectations of the field to properly understand. They therefore need to be made by people who understand that data, that is, people in the department. Anything else will lead to arbitrariness and will also impose an unnecessarily large workload on the people charged with doing the review.
• (2) Another reason for doing post tenure review in the department is that (at least as suggested by experience in the math department) the department will have a much better mechanism for ensuring that the post tenure review committee (or whatever) is actually appropriately staffed. There is much less likely to be the problem of shortage of candidates that we already experience with the DAC, FPC, Senate, etc. This happens not only because the department is (at least in our case) better at seeing that its committees actually have people serving on them, but also because the workload of a departmental committee is much smaller than that of a committee covering a broader area would be.
• (3) The form of the salary connection ($2000 of "off budget" money awarded directly by the committee) is unworkable at any level of post tenure review committee. I have explained elsewhere some of the problems I see, and other people have brought up other problems. The most sensible solution I can think of is that salary increases resulting from post tenure review should be treated, to the extent possible, by the same mechanisms that other salary increases are treated. I am sure there are problems with existing mechanisms, but as far as I can tell it works at least moderately well. I think the proposal (in both Draft A and Draft B) is going to lead to quite nasty problems.

• Index of documents relating to post tenure review maintained on the senate web page
• Senate Executive Committee documents on PTR
• Main web page of the University of Oregon Senate