Purpose of these guidelines
Periodic performance reviews are intended to: (1) recognize faculty member’s accomplishments; (2) identify areas which need improvement; (3) enable faculty members to continuously improve their job performance; (4) allow faculty members to benchmark their academic performance relative to their peers; and (5) provide a basis to distribute annual financial allocations from a faculty performance merit pool. Performance reviews also form an important part of a faculty member’s application for tenure and/or promotion (and to inform the adjudication of the person’s collective record).
The purpose of this document is to provide faculty with a transparent set of guidelines for how performance evaluations are conducted within the School of Public Health Sciences and enable individual faculty members to produce and submit effective performance-related documentation. This document will set out general performance expectations for individual faculty members.
Approach to performance assessment
Performance is a function of excellence (i.e., quality of work), innovation, and impact, particularly as it relates to responsibilities for teaching, scholarship and service. It requires the use of a combination of indicators. Performance is based on demonstrable outputs and not effort, time, or other inputs. Productivity in terms of number of courses taught/prepared, quantity of published/presented work, and amount of committee/service work is also important but will be considered in the wider context of the quality and impact of that work. Where assessment of quality and impact cannot be readily evaluated because of inadequate domain expertise, the Director shall have the discretion to obtain expert opinion, in confidence, from faculty members of the School, or elsewhere in the University, who hold regular appointments in a relevant disciplinary area.
Areas of responsibility and relative weights
To determine an overall numeric performance score, responsibilities for teaching/supervision, scholarship and service are typically weighted at 40%, 40% and 20% respectively for the professorial ranks; and 80% teaching, 20% service for the lectureship ranks. Faculty who hold research chairs normally have workloads of 20% teaching, 20% service, and 60% research. In some additional cases, such as appointments to administrative positions, these responsibilities are re-weighted. Re-weighting may also be considered when an individual was hired with specific alterations in responsibility (e.g., they may be hired as a research faculty member with no teaching responsibilities, or a lecturer with responsibilities for teaching and service but not research, etc.), or temporarily adjusted to reflect the conditions associated with a research award or administrative position.
Classification of graduate supervision
For purposes of periodic performance evaluation, the supervision and mentorship of graduate students is normally considered to be an element of teaching. To the extent that it is practicable, thesis supervision of undergraduate Honours students, independent study projects, practicum supervision, and postdoctoral supervision shall be accorded recognition. However, publications and research funding (but not studentships or other personnel awards) that are the product of a student and faculty member collaboration, including work related to a student’s thesis, are the exception. These outputs may be considered as constituting part of the faculty member’s research outputs.
Consistency with University and Faculty Agreements
Performance reviews of faculty members within the School must follow and be consistent with all relevant policies, regulations, guidelines, and memorandums of agreement approved by the University of Waterloo and the Faculty of Health.
Faculty members are expected to follow the reporting guidelines and format specified in the most recently approved Faculty of Health guidelines for the review of faculty performance; this document is appended.
Numeric ratings for new faculty members
As per university and faculty association (FAUW) agreements, newly appointed faculty members shall receive, in any category where assessment is not possible, a rating equal to the average rating of members in the department who hold the same rank. If assessment is possible, for example in the case of research/scholarship, a faculty member will be assigned a rating that reflects their performance, regardless of when they began their position. Where averaging needs to be done, and in circumstances where there are less than two established faculty members at the same rank, the committee may elect to calculate the mean across the two most comparable ranks (e.g., compare an Assistant Professor with the average scores of all faculty in the School at the rank of Assistant as well as Associate Professor).
Adjustments for exceptional circumstances
Following the FAUW MOA 13.5.4, performance ratings shall pertain to the portion of the evaluation year during which the Member was a paid employee of the University, including sabbatical leave, but excluding pregnancy, adoption, parental, or sick leave. For newly appointed Members, and for Members on paid or unpaid leave, it may not be possible to assess performance in all three categories during the evaluation year. In these cases only, the practices may be amended as follows: (1) A newly appointed Member shall receive, in any category where assessment is not possible, a rating equal to the average rating of Members in the Department who hold the same rank; and (2) A continuing Member who has been on leave shall receive in any category where assessment is not possible as a result of the leave, a rating equal to the average ratings of the three previous years in which the Member was not on leave.
Documentation
It is important to record on attachment C (the Acknowledgment of Review) when an individual’s performance rating has been indirectly determined in whole or in part by the performance ratings of peers, or by the individual’s ratings from previous performance reviews. Attachment C will also specifically note atypical weightings of teaching, research and service (i.e., anything other than 40%, 40%, 20%), and indicate any significant adjustments to faculty workload expectations arising from previously agreed workload reductions or from formally approved types of faculty leave (e.g., sabbatical, medical).
Submission of an annual report
Faculty members are required to submit an annual or biennial performance report. As noted in MoA 13.5.2(a), faculty performance reviews will occur on an annual basis for Members holding probationary or definite-term appointments and on a biennial basis on odd numbered years for Members holding tenured or continuing appointments. This includes members on full-time, part-time (>50%), reduced load, and joint appointments including those on sabbatical, paid or unpaid leaves, or on “buy-out” arrangement to allow for well-informed decisions to be made regarding selective salary increments (see the web version of the Memorandum of Agreement, article 13). Those who fail to do so before the final day of the fall term in the year being reviewed shall be automatically given ratings of 0 in all categories, and overall. In exceptional circumstances, a faculty member may ask the Director for an extension. However, such requests must be received and approved prior to the due date for the report.
Committee selection
As per university and Faculty policy and agreements, the School is obliged to annually elect a committee to advise and assist the Director in evaluating individual faculty member performance. Election of this committee will occur annually and will be in accordance with the guidelines published in the MoA (article 13) and the University Policy #77. To the extent possible and reasonable, the membership constituency should include a balance of genders, disciplinary perspectives, professional practice and scientific program involvement, and faculty ranks. It is also desirable to have at least one person (in addition to the Director) who has previously served on the performance review committee. Finally, it is desirable to include persons with a combination of graduate and undergraduate teaching, as well as a combination of classroom and on‐line teaching experience. Continuing lecturers, tenured, and tenure-track faculty who have passed their first probationary review with appointments in the School are eligible for election to the committee. Those whose appointments are less than 50% in the School are welcome to serve on the committee depending on their service commitments to their primary Department or School. The committee will be chaired by the School’s Director or designate. Nominations and election to the committee shall occur as part of the normal service assignment and election process which generally takes place early in the calendar year (for the following calendar year). Written (e-mailed) nominations will be solicited during the service assignment process. Members will be elected by a simple majority of faculty. Elections will be conducted electronically through the School’s Community LEARN site. Those who agree to stand for election must be available for several days of meetings and allocate time to review files during January.
Use of collective indicators
Performance in a given area of responsibility must be assessed using a combination of complementary indicators. Ideally and where possible, these should include both quantitative and qualitative indicators. The combination of indicators must have face validity to enable individual faculty members, the review committee, the Director and other stakeholders to assess quality/excellence, innovation/creativity, and impact with respect to teaching/supervision, scholarship, and/or service. Performance in a given area of responsibility (i.e., teaching, scholarship, service), should be based on an overall pattern of indicators, benchmarked against theperformance of comparable faculty across the School in similar career stages (e.g. Assistant, Associate or Professor level) in the given assessment period.
Recognition of multidisciplinary
The School of Public Health Sciences is a multidisciplinary unit that employs and utilizes the expertise of faculty and staff with a wide array of scholarly backgrounds, disciplinary traditions, and administrative experiences. To this end, performance indicators should be interpreted in a manner consistent with these various disciplinary perspectives and traditions. For example, it should be recognized that certain disciplines place greater emphasis on certain types of scholarly outputs (e.g., peer-reviewed journal articles, policy briefs and technical reports, conference proceedings, book and book chapters, artistic works). Moreover, different disciplines use different traditions to signal the relative contributions of collaborating partners. For example, some traditions put the most influential author at the beginning of a multiple author list while others might reserve the last place for the most influential author. That said, it is incumbent upon individual faculty members to put their work into proper disciplinary context for consideration by the performance review committee by clarifying issues such as the interpretation of authorship rankings, the author’s fractional or percentage contribution to the published work, the role of the author in the conduct and reporting of the study, and the potential impact and relevance of the study.
Student and postdoctoral fellow collaborations
Faculty members are encouraged to help their mentees build a record of publication and funding. This includes providing students and PDFs the opportunity to serve as the primary author and/or investigator on a project. In order to reduce potential conflicts of interest, it is the practice of the School (for purposes of performance evaluation) to credit a faculty member with primary authorship in circumstances where all authors of preceding importance are students or PDFs (whether or not they are supervised by the faculty member), or students/PDFs from other universities where the faculty member currently holds or has previously held an academic appointment or is currently collaborating on research. Student and PDF authors should be designated by placing an asterisk after their name (e.g., Smith, JP*). For example, in a discipline where importance is determined by the order of appearance in the authorship list, a faculty member named Jones would be credited as the primary or first author for a citation which read, Smith JP*, Chow W*, Jones XZ, Benz M. This procedure shall be used for all type of research outputs including journal publications, book chapter, reviews, technical reports, self-‐initiated abstracts and presentations, and grants.
This said, it is important for faculty to recognize that the same standard may not be applied by external reviewers of cases for tenure or promotion, who may focus more on senior/corresponding authorship, and view co-authorship with students as demonstrating mentorship (i.e., in the domain of teaching), rather than research or scholarly productivity. It is therefore important for faculty to clarify their authorship role and contributions to publications.
Reporting integrity
Faculty members are expected to make every reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of their performance reports. To this end, it is important not to “double count” outputs under a given category across reporting periods. For example, outputs that were listed in a previous report as “in press” should be identified as “submitted in last APR report”. It is, however, acceptable to list a grant as “in submission” in one year’s report and then list it as funded in the following year’s report. Potential publications that have been submitted and are under review should NOT be listed in a performance report. Outputs that were published during the preceding year, but inadvertently not included or counted in the Performance Review of that year, may be brought forward in the following year outputs for recognition in the Performance Review of the latter year.
Importance of feedback
As noted previously, an important aspect of the performance review process is to enable faculty members to continuously improve their performance through honest, constructive feedback. While overall numeric ratings as well as individual scores for teaching, research and service are useful, they are relative to peer performance and so individual improvement does not always equate to a higher score. As such, written feedback is also important. Feedback is normally provided on Attachment C, the Acknowledgment of Review. Written feedback should be honest, concise, and constructive. It may be useful to include specific examples of excellence or areas of challenge. It may also be useful to include statements that help a faculty member to benchmark their performance against their peers in the School. The Director should not normally wait until the completion of a performance review cycle to provide feedback regarding a serious concern or deficiency in a faculty member’s performance. In these instances, it is important to provide feedback during the year in a timely way, with special emphasis on the development of a remediation plan. Similarly, faculty members with serious concerns about factors that may impair their performance should not wait until the end of the performance review process to express these concerns. Mutual education may be necessary between faculty and Director as to how to express an assessment clearly when the annual performance work report contains unconventional research or service outputs in specialized areas or rapidly evolving areas of the School.
General expectations for faculty member performance
Supporting training and professional development
Faculty members are encouraged to participate in training and professional development opportunities (e.g., workshops, seminars) to support the educational mandate of the School. These opportunities may include diverse topic areas such as Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), teaching practices (e.g., CEL, CTE courses and workshops), and other skills development for the purposes of teaching (e.g. training in methods or a field). Faculty members should include relevant details regarding any training and professional development activities in their APR document and these will be given consideration. Faculty may also wish to reflect on how they have included EDI principles into their courses, research activities, and service commitments.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking can be an important means of placing one’s performance into context. To that end, each numeric score is linked to a descriptive label (see the Faculty of Health policy document, appended). For example, a score of 2.00 is considered ‘outstanding’. It is reserved for rare instances where an individual’s performance is demonstrably better than the vast majority of their peers due to exceptional achievement as recognized by external awards or internal consensus. Standards of performance within the School are generally high. Therefore, the majority of performance scores are normally expected to be awarded in the range of ‘good’ (1.25) to excellent (1.75). While a score of 1.0 is considered minimally satisfactory, it is below the average performance of faculty within the School. Scores of less than 1.25 in a given category, or overall, are well below the typical performance standards within the School, and individuals with such scores are encouraged to work with their Director to develop a specific, time-anchored plan for improvement.
For sake of transparency and accountability, the School will make available to faculty, subsequent to any readjustment by the Dean of Health, aggregate statistics regarding overall, teaching, research and service scores.
Teaching
Those with 40% teaching responsibilities are typically expected to teach the equivalent of 3.5 courses per year; those with 80% teaching responsibilities are typically expected to teach the equivalent of 6 courses/year. Those with alternative workloads will have different teaching expectation, though the minimum teaching responsibility per year in the School is 1.5 courses/course equivalents. General principles and metrics for assigning and assessing teaching workloads are spelled out in the School Teaching Workload Equity Policy (posted to the LEARN site). In addition to in-class or online instructional activities, teaching activities include course development and preparation, course renewal, undergraduate thesis supervision, and graduate student supervision and professional program student advisement. Faculty are responsible for keeping a documentary archive of all of their teaching activities, including materials related to course development, preparation or revision, reading lists, audiovisual materials, case study or problem-based instructional materials, homework and project assignments, marking rubrics, and so on. Faculty members should be prepared to provide some or all of these materials upon the request of the Director or an Associate Director, for the purposes of quality assurance in the teaching mission of the School, and for the purposes of annual faculty performance reviews and tenure and promotion decisions. All faculty members, particularly tenure-‐track faculty members, are encouraged to create and maintain an up-‐to-‐date teaching dossier that documents all of their significant activities regarding preparation and delivery of teaching materials.
Important indicators of teaching performance include, but should not be limited to, student course perception surveys (especially where response rates are high). Student course perception surveys should be interpreted with caution and consider factors such as whether the instructor had sufficient notice to adequately prepare the course, the instructor’s familiarity with courses being covered for other absent/unavailable faculty, the size of the 1 course, whether it is a required or elective course, and the response rate. Faculty are encouraged to provide evidence of their teaching effectiveness through documenting their commitment to teaching excellence. Such evidence can include: curricular development (including experimentation with new teaching methods and practices), professional development (e.g. completion of teaching-related trainings, workshops, training in methods or a field for teaching purposes), and contribution to teaching scholarship. Student course perception surveys are also included as an indicator of teaching performance (especially where response rates are high).
Given the limitation of student course perception surveys, faculty are encouraged to provide information that would assist the APR committee’s evaluation of teaching: experimenting with new methods, challenges faced in course delivery, participation in CTE courses, and so on. Faculty who will be going up for tenure or promotion should be sure to arrange for peer evaluation of course teaching methods; these may be included in the APR document. Outside of the tenure and promotion process, faculty may wish to arrange for and include periodic peer reviews of their teaching.
Faculty members are expected to be engaged teachers who dedicate sufficient time and thought to the craft of teaching and mentorship. They are expected to periodically explore and try innovative teaching methods, and then share results with their peers. Courses where the overall student grade average is significantly higher or lower than expected in comparison to comparable courses in the School, or in same course in previous years, may be examined further to identify any recurring problematic aspects of course teaching that might constitute a major factor affecting the instructor and/or course ratings.
All faculty members are expected to supervise and mentor graduate students enrolled in one or more of the graduate programs within the School, though the numbers of students will vary over time, and may depend on the stage of the faculty member’s career, access to funding, restrictions on available laboratory or research space, and student demand.
Teaching and mentorship include an expectation that tenured and tenure-track faculty members will sit on the committees of students (thesis committees, comprehensive exams) that they don’t directly supervise. It is expected that faculty should be available to serve on the committee or comprehensive exam of at least one student per year (other than those they supervise or co-‐supervise). In cases where such graduate student thesis committee or comprehensive committee work is infrequent, other forms of activity may be recognized as equivalent, such as graduate practicum supervision.
Graduate student supervisors are expected to support their students in research projects including publishing in refereed journals and presenting at academic and professional conferences. They are expected to help students apply for and obtain studentships and awards. They are expected to enable a high proportion of their students to graduate and complete degree requirements within standard term limits specified for the degree program. They are expected to meet with students on a regular basis and be available to offer relevant advice, instruction, and feedback. These activities should be reported in your APR file.
1 See FAUW Responses to CTAPT and CEPT(2) Reports (pdf). Back to text.
Research and scholarship
All tenure and tenure-track faculty are expected to develop and maintain a high-quality program of research that aims to have positive impact on the state of knowledge, research practice, professional practice, policy and/or other relevant outcomes. The School values curiosity-driven, basic research equally with applied research and knowledge translation/knowledge-to-action activities.
It is important to document research outputs, including but not limited to journal papers, proceedings, presentations, books and book chapters, monographs, reviews, technical reports, and policy briefs. Not all outputs provide the same level of confidence when assessing research performance. Therefore, it is incumbent on the faculty member to ensure that each major published or presented work has undergone some form of peer review, editorial board review, or review by a relevant committee of a recognized research body or governmental organization. Papers published in peer-reviewed journals, and authored books and book chapters, edited books and technical reports accepted by reputable publishers with academically sound editorial policies are considered as particularly important, and are normally accorded a greater weight than other types of research communications where editorial review is seen as absent or weak. For some disciplines (e.g., engineering and computer science), peer-reviewed conference proceedings are also regarded as important.
The School does not explicitly use indicators such as citation counts or journal impact factors because these do not always indicate whether research has been shared through the most appropriate channel relative to the work’s purpose and primary audience, nor does it reflect on the wider policy or social impact of a research product. We recognize, however, that journal impact factors are important indicators of research quality in some areas/disciplines. It is up to the individual faculty member to note for the committee when completing the APR form. In order to demonstrate quality and innovation, over the course of one’s career faculty members are strongly encouraged to publish at least some of their work in key venues in their field such as high profile, high impact peer-reviewed journals or books. In any event, it is incumbent on a faculty member to identify and articulate the impact of a particular piece of work, especially if it is less “traditional”; e.g., a policy brief that results in a change to policy or law, or development of a critical community collaboration that facilitates ongoing applied research activities.
Tenure and tenure-track faculty are expected to disseminate their work with appropriate audiences (other researchers, practitioners, policy makers, etc.) through recognized and novel mediums (journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations to professional and/or research audiences, etc.). Faculty members are expected to secure funding at a level and from a source that is appropriate for their work, rank, position and aims. They are expected to secure funding to support graduate student stipends, travel, and research projects.
In recognition of the fact that travel by air is a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, faculty members who decide not to attend or participate in conferences for this reason will not be penalized for this decision. This will need to be articulated on the APR form.
Obtaining peer-reviewed funding is usually taken as an indication that one’s research is of high quality, innovative and will add value to the field. Funding from one or more of the tri-‐council agencies (NSERC, CIHR, and SSHRC) is held in particularly high esteem, although a combination of funders and funding types, including both grants and contracts is acceptable and typical in a multidisciplinary and applied program of research. Grants and contracts from major sources of public health funding in Canada, including international agencies (e.g., WHO, FAO), federal agencies (e.g., Health Canada, PHAC), provincial agencies (e.g., MOHLTC, MOE, WSIB), and local public health agencies are all considered desirable and important.
Funding support from organizations in the voluntary sectors (e.g., Heart and Stroke Canada, Cancer Care Ontario), and health-related NGO’s and research institutes is also considered as valuable, especially where faculty can demonstrate continuing or repeated linkages to influencing policy and practice in public health and health services in Ontario, in Canada, or globally. Research work undertaken by faculty members that involves collaboration, consulting, expert testimony, or contracting with private sector business organizations and governmental organizations may be counted toward academic research activity for the purposes of merit and tenure if it is demonstrably related to current or recent areas of research typically conducted by the faculty member within the university.
Remunerated external work is allowable for annual performance consideration if the faculty member derives no private income from the activity, where the activity has been registered and approved by the University Office of Research or an equivalent body at another university, and major findings of the research are published or disseminated by the author(s) in the public domain, without editorial interference or undue delay by any external organization or sponsor.
In accordance with Policy 49, where a faculty member engages in external work that is directly remunerated for the purposes of deriving non-‐University income, in some circumstances this work may also be eligible for consideration in annual performance appraisals. However, in order to be eligible, it is strongly recommended that any such income-generating work should be approved in advance by the Director, especially if the income activity occurs on a frequent or recurring basis.
Invitation to present at major professional or scientific conferences and meetings can be an important indicator that a faculty member’s research is innovative, and/or is having an impact on influential stakeholders and decision makers.
Involvement in multidisciplinary Team Science efforts and community-of-practise can require a considerable amount of time, and the scholarship outputs might not always be reflected in quantifiable units, or in non-traditional outputs (e.g., consortium authorship, white papers, data sharing units). In this case, faculty are encouraged to demonstrate how these efforts and how they impact contribution to the respective field of research. Faculty should put these efforts in context of their scholarship work in the performance review.
Technical reports, monographs, policy briefs and other written outputs can be important indicators of research productivity, quality, innovation and impact. However, in order to assist the performance review committee, faculty members are encouraged to provide annotation describing the origin (e.g., who initiated the work), scope, and impact (i.e., who the primary audience is) of these types of works. It is especially important to be able to objectively demonstrate whether a published or presented work has undergone formal peer review by a scholarly review committee, or in the case of policy reports and technical reports whether the report has undergone the equivalent of peer review in the form of institutional acceptance and publication of the report on the institutional website or in formally printed materials under the control of the institution. Reports that are unpublished, not available in the public domain, substantively modified by the sponsoring organization without the control of the original authors, or classified as proprietary or confidential will not normally be accorded status as a peer-‐reviewed publication.
In general, self-‐initiated and/or non-‐peer reviewed outputs are considered the least reliable indicators of quality, innovation and impact.
Finally, research performance cannot be adequately captured only through quantitative indicators of outputs. While it is important to document productivity, it is more important to provide evidence of quality, creativity, and impact. Scholarship in public health practice is valued by the School. Scholarly outputs may vary by area of practice. To this end, faculty members are expected to help the performance review committee understand the context of research that will aid in the interpretation of its quality, impact, and innovation. For example, it can be helpful to annotate one’s role in the production of a publication. Sometimes, it can be useful to identify policies and plans, standards, regulations, products, court or regulatory tribunal decisions, and other outcomes that were directly based on or highly influenced by a faculty member’s research. Where a publication, report, or project (or series of projects) from a previous time period has become demonstrably impactful to current public health theory, policy, or practice, faculty members who were PI’s or primary authors are encouraged to note this impact in their Annual Report, as further evidence for innovation and impact in the long-term time horizon of their research.
Context of the research is critical in its assessment. One example is participatory, community-based and Indigenous research approaches and methodologies that are extremely time intensive with respect to establishing research relationships. Following Tri-Agency guidelines for working with community-based and Indigenous populations or integrating ethical data and information governance (e.g., OCAPTM principles) means that community-based and Indigenous research may require much longer periods of time before publication because of the required partner approvals necessary before research can be shared. Or, academic publications are not always valued by community partners, and so other more accessible and relevant knowledge outputs are generated. Another example is research in engineering and computer science, which often involves development of novel hardware or software, user studies that engage human participants, and both qualitative and quantitative data analysis. This work takes time and resources, many of which are not available in SPHS, and which therefore must also be highly collaborative. It also places a strong emphasis on novelty, in addition to other factors considered during peer review like rigour and replicability. Awards at competitive venues should be considered as recognizing the highest quality research (e.g., in ACM conferences, “Best Paper” awards correspond to the top 1% of submissions) and acknowledged as such. In some programs (e.g. computer science, engineering), research is also often focused on programs rather than projects, and funding amounts should also not be directly compared on a dollar-to-dollar basis (e.g., NSERC awards are on average 20% of CIHR awards). Given the importance of conference publications, conference organization is also held in particularly high regard, and is strong indicator of recognition within the field, not simply as service to the academic community.
The School also recognizes that the separation of knowledge generation and knowledge mobilization is problematic in some research approaches (e.g., community-based approaches, participatory action research, Indigenous methodologies, arts-based methodologies) where knowledge generation and mobilization are and must be integrally linked. Often associated with community-based and participatory research are the responsibilities of the researchers to provide community supports such as community workshops, and non-peer-reviewed knowledge outputs (e.g., reports, videos, blogs, and podcasts). For example, community workshops are an important space for both knowledge generation and mobilization, but these workshops are often treated as Service. The School understands the importance of these initiatives as reciprocal and responsible protocols with community partners and values them as Research. Again, it is incumbent on faculty members to clearly articulate the role of these initiatives in the research and the impacts of these initiatives for the research process and/or partnering individuals/communities/organizations (e.g., local non-governmental organizations, Indigenous organizations, etc.).
Service
Recognized service may be classified into three types: (1) service within the School, Faculty, and University; (2) service to one’s profession; and (3) public service to the community.
Collegial leadership is a defining characteristic of successful academic institutions. To that end, all faculty members are expected to provide leadership through service to the University of Waterloo. This typically includes being assigned to committees within the School and agreeing to participate in one or more ad hoc or administrative committees (e.g., SACAs).
Faculty members will be given an opportunity to express their interest in serving on one or more committees; the School Executive Committee will take this into consideration in making assignments. Not all faculty will be able in any given year to serve on a standing committee; and their service expectation may be met by serving on ad hoc committees in the School or on committees at the level of the Faculty or University. This includes assignments to the university pool of chairs for doctoral defences, serving on Senate, and assisting with graduate program admissions.
All faculty members are expected to be involved in the recruitment of high-quality students at the undergraduate and graduate level. It is the responsibility of the individual faculty member, supported by the School recruitment activities, to help enrol students into all programs offered by the School. Such activities may include attending recruitment events, seeking out and attracting strong students to our program areas, and responding to individual student enquiries.
All faculty members are expected to help build a positive, collegial environment by attending information, career, orientation, and/or social events for students, faculty and staff.
All faculty members are expected to contribute to their profession by serving as a reviewer of manuscripts and grants, serving on professional societies, organizing conferences, etc.
Depending upon the nature of their work, faculty members are encouraged to provide some type of public service connected to their expertise and position. This might include services such as sitting on a grant review panel, providing peer reviews, providing policy or program advice to governments or professional societies, giving public lectures, responding to media inquiries and interviews, serving as an expert witness in a court proceeding, etc. Faculty members are expected to act in a manner that enhances the reputation and positive impact of the university and is within their area of professional competence. Community service that is unrelated to one’s role as a professor and expert is normally not considered part of one’s service contributions.