2024 PAR: Instructions for Department Chairs
This page contains instructions for department chairs as they process the 2024 PARs for their departments. For instructions to faculty members, see Instructions for 2024 Professional Activity Report (PAR).
A Google Drive folder will be shared with you by December 23, 2023. The folder will be unique to your department and will be accessible by you, your dean, and the provost (and deputy provosts). The folder will be titled with your department name.
Your department folder will contain the following:
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One sub-folder for each faculty member (tenured, tenure-track, and termed) in your department. The faculty members in your department will save their PARs in their respective folders.
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A folder called “Course Evaluations” which will be pre-loaded with tabular lists of course evaluation ratings for faculty in your department for the past three years.
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A folder called “Chair Notes” in which you can save private notes that faculty members will not have access to.
More information about each of these components is given below.
You will receive an email from Google when the department folder is shared with you. The email will contain the link to your department folder. If you lose track of that email, you can always find the folder by logging into your Google Drive and searching for your department name or browsing under “Shared with me”.
In a Nutshell
For each faculty member, you should follow these steps.
Read the PAR: Each faculty member in your department will save their PAR in the individual folder with their name. Their deadline for them to do so is Friday, January 19, 2024. You will have access to that folder and can open and read their PAR from there. Course evaluation summaries will be available in your department-level folder.
Write your notes: For each faculty member, write your notes in a file and save it in the subfolder for that faculty member within the “Chair Notes” folder. Use the filename userid_notes.pdf (or .txt or .docx), where userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID. The deadline for you to write your notes is Friday, February 16, 2024.
Write and save your merit raise letter: Write the letter for each department member. After the budget and raise amounts are finalized, and when you are ready to distribute the letters to your faculty, save them using the filename userid_letter.pdf, where userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID. Save each letter in the subfolder for that faculty member (not the subfolder within the “Chair Notes” folder). The deadline for you to finalize and save the letters is Friday, June 14, 2024.
Important: Once you save your letter to a faculty member’s individual folder, they will have access to it. Don’t save your letters in those folders until they are finalized and you are ready for your faculty to see them.
Archiving: Once the PAR cycle is complete, each faculty member’s PAR, merit raise letter, and chair’s private notes will be automatically copied to that faculty member’s file in Banner for archiving.
Reading the PARs
Each faculty member in your department will save their PAR in the individual folder with their name. You will have access to that folder and can open and read their PAR from there.
Faculty were instructed to save the PAR as a single PDF that contains both their CV and their statement, if applicable, using the filename userid_PAR.pdf, where userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID (e.g., abc123).
For your convenience, course evaluations (in tabular list format) for your faculty members for the past three years will be pre-loaded into the folder called “Course Evaluations” within your department-level folder. As always, you can also access course evaluations for your faculty at go.lehigh.edu/evalkit. Instructions on how to access the course evaluations for your department are available here.
Writing Your Notes
You can write private notes about a faculty member’s PAR that will go to your dean and will later be archived in the faculty member’s record (analogous to the notes that you previously would have saved in the “Comments” fields in Lyterati). To do this, save your notes in a file called userid_notes.pdf, where userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID, and save the file in the subfolder for that faculty member within the “Chair Notes” folder. (Instead of saving as a PDF file, you can alternatively save as a Word (.docx) or plain text (.txt) file.)
Important notes:
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Faculty members will not have access to any files or folders that are in the “Chair Notes” folder, but your dean and the provost (and deputy provosts) will.
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All files that are saved in a faculty member’s folder within the “Chair Notes” folder will automatically be archived in that faculty member’s file in Banner (similar to how your notes in the Lyterati “Comments” fields were previously archived).
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Any files that you store in the “Chair Notes” folder but not in a faculty subfolder will not be archived. You may keep or dispose of these files as you wish.
If your dean wishes to provide you with comments about a faculty member's PAR, they will email those comments to you directly.
Writing and Saving Your Merit Raise Letters
As you write your merit raise letters, save them on your hard drive or wherever you’d like—not yet in the PAR Google Drive.
After the budget and raise amounts are finalized, and when you are ready to distribute the letters to your faculty, save them using the filename userid_letter.pdf, where userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID. Save each letter in the subfolder for that faculty member (not the subfolder within the “Chair Notes” folder). The letter should be in PDF format. The deadline for you to finalize and save the letters is Friday, June 14, 2024.
Important: Once you save your letter to a faculty member’s individual folder, they will have access to it. Don’t save your letters in those folders until they are finalized and you are ready for your faculty to see them.
Also: Remember that your faculty members will have access to all documents saved in their respective folders. Don’t save any information in those folders that you don’t want them to see.
Archiving
All PAR information will be archived in faculty members’ files in Banner. This will happen automatically after the PAR cycle is complete. You do not need to do anything to make this happen.
In particular, the following will be archived in Banner:
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The faculty member’s PAR (userid_PAR.pdf in the faculty member’s individual folder).
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Your merit raise letter (userid_letter.pdf in the faculty member’s individual folder).
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Your private notes (userid_notes.pdf in the faculty member’s subfolder within your “Chair Notes” folder).
In the filenames above, userid is the faculty member’s Lehigh user ID. The file-naming conventions are important to enable proper archiving at the end of the PAR cycle.
Important Dates
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Saturday, December 23, 2023: Google Drive folders shared with faculty and chairs by this date. Course evaluation summaries also loaded into the “Course Evaluations” folder within your department folder. Faculty may save their PARs in their folders starting on this date.
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Friday, January 19, 2024: Deadline for faculty to save their PARs in their Google Drive folders.
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Friday, February 16, 2024: Deadline for you to save your notes in the faculty members’ subfolders within your “Chair Notes” folder.
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Friday, March 8, 2024: Deadline for deans to send you comments, if any, about faculty PARs.
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May 16-17, 2024: Board of Trustees finalizes budget.
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Friday, June 14, 2024: Deadline for you to finalize and save merit raise letters to faculty members’ folders.
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Late spring/early summer 2024: PAR materials automatically transferred to Banner for archiving.
What about Your Own PAR?
You should prepare and save your own PAR following the instructions provided to faculty. Your individual faculty folder will be a subfolder of your college’s folder; it will not appear in the list of subfolders for your department. Your dean will have access to your PAR and will process it similarly to how you process the PARs for the faculty in your department.
Questions or Problems?
If you have questions or encounter any problems, please email indpfa@lehigh.edu.