This Toolkit for Co-Creating RPT Department Guidelines supports our campus faculty community, especially department chairs, to facilitate the co-creation of inclusive, transparent, equitable and contextually relevant department guidelines for RPT. The components open a permission structure to operationalize terms like "excellence" in ways that are consistent with the Lehigh Strategy, enabling a future-ready faculty evaluation framework. This is an opportunity to consider faculty excellence through multiple forms of scholarship, teaching, and service that involve a variety of activities and impacts of knowledge, institution- and community-building. It supports co-creation of indicators and metrics which help recognize and reward what should be valued. It fosters honesty and humility about what should be learned about evaluating scholarship, teaching, and service that differs from one’s own. It prompts our consideration of how achievement relative to opportunity can be kept in view throughout Lehigh’s evaluation and rewards system. The tools suggested herein reflect a commitment to ensuring those with different access to power and identities are proactively included in the development of the shared norms and expectations to produce inclusive guidelines for evaluation which align with the mission, vision, and core values of Lehigh University. Lehigh ADVANCE Center is available to consult on the implementation of the resources and concepts in this toolkit. This toolkit doesn’t cover strategies for implementing a faculty evaluation process (e.g., conduct of the review, voting, or giving feedback); though it may surface issues related to implementation, which is also part of the department guidelines.
Appreciation
This work is informed heavily by conversations with and scholarship by those across the NSF ADVANCE, TRUCEN, and PTIE networks, including (not limited to) Drs. Jessi Smith, Kerry Ann O’Meara, Joya Misra, Emily Janke, Rich Carter. It reflects adaptation and application (especially from Smith et al, 2025) towards implementation goals within the Lehigh University context.