Sample e-mail for initiator of a tenure, promotion or special appointment renewal review, to send to recruit students to serve on the review committee
Dear [NAME]
Next year, [FACULTY MEMBER] will be considered for [tenure and promotion to associate professor/promotion to full professor/renewal of a special appointment]. For each review, there is a committee of students who read and summarize the evaluations of the candidate’s teaching and advising that are completed by current students and alumni. I am writing to ask if you would be willing to [be the chair of OR serve on] the student committee for [faculty member]’s review. Each committee is required to have one student who has not worked with the faculty member being reviewed, so your invitation to review Professor [NAME] is intentional.
You would work with two other students and staff in the office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment. The responsibilities of the student committee are:
- This spring, review and suggest edits, if any, to a question written by the candidate’s department(s) AND write an additional question, if desired, to add to the review of teaching and advising.
- Next fall, read and summarize the responses to the review of teaching typically in late September/early October, to conclude before fall break.
The committee meets once in the spring, ideally some time in April, for about an hour. You will all then meet again in the fall to complete the summary document. I would estimate that the total time commitment is around 5 hours, some of which would be time just reading the responses to the reviews of teaching.
The document linked below provides a more detailed description of the duties. Please take a look and let me know what other questions you have.
For student committees
For student committees
Best wishes,