Dear Colleagues:

I think it is VERY important to quite formally put something like the following passage into any guidelines for post tenure review:

"Academic freedom is the right of any scholar, within his / her field of expertise, to think about and do research on any problem that interests him / her, to make public his / her conclusions, and to teach what he / she sincerely believes to be true."

My main concern is that post tenure review will be used to "bring people into the fold" regards research topics (let alone political views...). For example, post tenure review could be used to force faculty to develop research that is better suited to generate funding as opposed to research that is more intellectually stimulating or more fundamental and high risk. From experience, the Engineering College mindset is already so entrenched that many cannot even conceive of research as being worthy unless big $ attached. There is already great pressure to do research that generates big $, not research that generates great ideas and understanding. The two are most definitely NOT the same!

I believe that post tenure review would be used to enforce this connection between "good" research and research that generates big $. This will act to limit diversity in our work and is an extraordinarily myopic viewpoint that in the long term will seriously jeopardize the future of our society.

The term for review should be as long as possible, 5yrs is bordering on too short. 7yrs was in the note from Jiscke so lets use that! By implementing short terms, we are once again limiting the type of work that people can do.

Joseph M. Prusa