Overview
Each year, every tenured/tenure-track and term (teaching faculty, research faculty, and Professor of Practice) faculty member submits a professional activity report (PAR), which is used for annual salary increases. The PAR consists of a CV and (in some cases) statement, outlining the faculty member’s activities and accomplishments in research, teaching, and service over the preceding 3 calendar years.
Annual Review vs. PAR
The PAR is different from the annual review. The annual review is intended to help ensure that an untenured, tenure-track faculty member is on the right track toward tenure, whereas the PAR is the mechanism for assigning annual salary increases. Only untenured, tenure-track faculty members undergo an annual review, whereas every tenured/tenure-track and term faculty member completes a PAR each year. For more on the annual review, visit the Annual Review page.
The Process
Who Submits a PAR, and When?
All tenured/tenure-track faculty and term faculty (teaching faculty, research faculty, and Professors of Practice) submit a PAR. The deadline for doing so is typically around January 15.
Visiting and adjunct faculty do not submit PARs.
How Does the PAR and Salary Increase Process Work?
Faculty members submit their PAR via Interfolio. The Department Chair uses the PARs to determine the salary increase for each faculty member in the department. The Chair recommends the raises to the Dean, who makes the final determination about raises.
The process of determining salary increases based on PARs varies from college to college and department to department. Talk to your Department Chair or Associate Dean for Faculty if you have questions about how it works in your unit.
Faculty with Joint Appointments
For faculty members with joint appointments, the Chair of the home department is responsible for the annual salary review. The Chair solicits a written evaluation of the faculty member from the Chair/Director of the secondary unit(s) if specified in the MOU. The special committee (if any) does not participate. The Chair of the home department submits the salary increase recommendation to the Dean and provides written feedback to the faculty member.
Materials to Be Submitted
The PAR consists of a CV and a 2-page statement (which is optional at the university level but may be required by individual colleges or departments).
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
The CV should follow the Lehigh CV template. There are two options for formatting your CV:
- Option 1: Provide a complete CV that includes activities dating as far back as you wish, with activities from the past three years highlighted using color, boldface, or another style convenient for you.
- Option 2: Provide a CV that only includes activities from the past three years.
The first option may be more convenient for faculty who regularly maintain an up-to-date CV, while the second may be more convenient for those who do not. The goal is to minimize any additional work for faculty, while also making it easy for Chairs and Deans to quickly identify activities that took place during the reporting period. Under either option, “the past three years” refers to calendar years, i.e., the January 2025 PAR consists of activities in calendar years 2022–2024.
Statement
The statement is an opportunity to discuss your major activities and accomplishments in research, teaching, and service over the last three years. General guidelines for your statement are given below. If your college or department has provided additional instructions, those supersede the guidelines that follow.
You have flexibility in how you choose to structure your statement. You may choose to write a narrative summarizing your overall accomplishments and goals in the three areas (research, teaching, service), or use it as a way to highlight accomplishments that may not be obvious from your CV, or use another approach that you feel will be most informative to the review process. Your statement should be grounded in the information contained in the CV.
Your statement can discuss public-facing scholarship, community-engaged work, translational research (patents, startups, etc.), software development, performances, teaching innovations, and other aspects of your work that you wish to highlight. You are also encouraged to describe diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility activities in the domains of teaching, research, and/or service.
The opening paragraph should be written so that it can be understood by an interested non-expert. The Provost encourages Assistant and Associate Professors to use the process of writing the statement as a way to develop and refine some of the ideas they will eventually discuss in the statements that they submit as part of their applications for promotion and/or tenure.
The combined statement (including research, teaching, and service) should be no more than 2 pages, single-spaced. The use of bullet points, rather than paragraphs, is acceptable.
The statement is not required at the University level. However, some colleges, departments, and programs have made the statement required, and have provided further guidance about what to include in the statement. Check with your Department Chair about whether the statement is required or optional for you.
PAR and Salary Increase Schedule
The tentative schedules listed below are for the current academic year. Schedules may change from year to year, but the dates are likely to be similar to the current year.
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AY2024–25 |
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PARs are open in Interfolio and faculty members may begin uploading materials |
December 15, 2024 |
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Deadline to submit PAR |
January 15, 2025 |
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Deadline for Department Chairs to send salary review letters to faculty |
June 15, 2025 |
(Department chairs cannot finalize salary increases until after the Board of Trustees has approved the budget at their May meeting).
Relevant Sections of R&P
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2.2.3.1.4 Annual Evaluation for Merit [for faculty with joint appointments]
Additional Documents
- Interfolio login page
- Interfolio at Lehigh
- Lehigh CV template
Notes
- This overview is intended to supplement the information contained in Lehigh’s Rules and Procedures of the Faculty (R&P). If there is a discrepancy between the guidance on this page and R&P, the provisions of R&P govern.
- Feel free to contact your Department Chair, Associate Dean for Faculty, the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, or the Director of Faculty Affairs with any questions or concerns.