The preparation of a thorough and thoughtful self-description and evaluation by the department chair, faculty, and students should assist in assuring a constructive review, completed in a timely manner.

The following guidelines provide suggestions for responding to items listed in the Policy and Procedure Memorandum.

Role of Department in the School and Relevance to School Mission

• What are the current School-wide academic responsibilities of the department?
• How does the department in its training and research efforts meet current School needs?
• To what extent do such activities attract students and faculty intra- and interdivisionally?
• To what level do faculty and students provide interdepartmental academic and research support?
• Identify those departmental faculty with joint appointments and those with extradepartmental primary affiliations.
• What is the departmental distribution of registered or auditing students participating in departmental curricula?
• In which extradepartmental courses do departmental faculty participate?
• What are the procedures for monitoring, evaluating or changing departmental course offerings and what inter- or intradepartmental mechanisms stimulate such efforts?

Departmental Academic Programs

• Describe the degree programs offered by the department, including objectives, academic content, and distinguishing features of each.
• What are the specific teaching responsibilities in support of the discipline identified with the department?

Relationships of Department to Master of Public Health Degree Program

• What steps has the department taken to optimize its input into the MPH curriculum?
• Describe the nature of MPH courses for which the department is responsible.
• Are the MPH students adequately or inadequately prepared to derive full benefit of its MPH teaching efforts?
• What is the distribution of departmental affiliations of students registering for MPH courses offered by the department?
• Does the department view that its contributions to the MPH program are academically worthwhile?

Departmental Research Program

• What are research interests of departmental faculty?
• What is the relevance of research activities of faculty to current scientific research in these fields?
• What is the general technique for initiating and prosecuting research ideas?
• How free and independent is the individual faculty member in initiating and pursuing research activities?
• Are there individual faculty who are totally or partly dependent on senior faculty for their research activities?
• How are research problems shared within the department?
• Is there a mechanism to evaluate research grant applications prior to their submission?
• Are manuscripts evaluated by the department prior to their submission to appropriate journals?
• Does the department have a mechanism for assisting an individual faculty member having technical difficulties or otherwise provide insights into their research progress?
• What are the general mechanisms for establishing collaborative efforts within or outside the department?

Departmental Professional Practice Activities

• Describe the nature of services that the department provides for the public sector, the private industrial sector, regulatory agencies, research agencies, academic institutions, and funding agencies.
• What sorts of service does the department provide to public health groups involved in public health delivery programs?
• Describe the nature of interactions that faculty have with the private sector.
• Is there any direct research involvement with and for private companies?
• Do any of these contacts contribute to departmental academic programs?
• Do any academic programs profit by faculty encounters with the private sector?
• If so, what is the nature of this interaction?
• Are any doctoral or master's theses derived from such outside contacts?
• Besides scholarly journals, what other mechanisms does the department employ for disseminating their expertise?

Faculty

• What is the distribution of faculty by rank and by age?
• How many faculty are and are not on tenure-directed tracks?
• What percentage of the faculty received their graduate training either in the department or in the School?
• Given your perceptions of current and planned programs, is the department faculty at optimal strength?
• Give some evidence of the levels of attrition and where and why former faculty left the department.
• Are there faculty who might qualify for early retirement?
• As evidence of scholarship, provide complete curricula vitae, including teaching responsibilities, bibliography, financial support, and consultative and collaborative activities.
• Provide for each faculty member a single abstract identifying their expertise and important scientific discoveries and observations, accompanied by germane references, along with another abstract of their future interests.
• Does the department periodically apprise individual faculty of their role in the department and their participation in its future plans?
• What mechanisms are implemented to periodically oversee an individual's scholarly progress?
• What mechanisms exist for providing guidance in the academic development of junior faculty?
• What techniques are employed by the department in order to evaluate the research or teaching performance of its junior faculty?
• Is this done in a supportive or adversarial manner?
• What mechanisms are there to sustain faculty programmatically important to the department but who are not financially independent?
• Do faculty feel their department is supportive of them?
• What are the general procedures for faculty recruitment?
• Do faculty of other departments participate in faculty recruitment?
• How is input to the fields of expertise determined in faculty recruitment?
• How is input to the fields of expertise determined when a new colleague is sought?
• Do the students participate in the recruitment process for new faculty?
• Is financial support ever a factor in determining the hiring of new faculty?
• What are the major constraints to bringing new faculty on board?
• Is the department in a competitive position for hiring the best faculty?

Students

• What are the nature and source of departmental students, including academic degrees and institutions awarding the degrees?
• What efforts are employed by the department for the recruitment of degree students?
• What School and departmental efforts can be made to optimize the quality and quantity of your students?
• Is there an admissions committee in the department and how does it function?
• Are students included in the evaluation or admissions process?
• What could the School do to help attract and recruit better students?
• What does the department feel are the major constraints to improving the quality of their student population?
• What methods are employed by the department to evaluate its students' academic progress, their research progress or the completeness of their doctoral or master's research?
• How does the department evaluate a student's suitability for admission to candidacy for their respective degrees?
• Are these processes supportive or adversarial?
• What have been the trends in the number and faculty ratio of matriculating students?

Alumni

• Provide a list of recent departmental graduates.
• What sort of positions do departmental graduates assume?
• What mechanisms exist for soliciting input to the academic and research programs from department graduates?

Departmental Organization, Governance, and Decision-Making Processes

• What is the basic structure of the department in terms of chains of command?
• What input into the governance process do the senior faculty, junior faculty, and students have?
• What mechanisms are practiced to govern the department, oversee student and faculty development, and oversee curriculum?
• What are the procedures for deciding whether a faculty member is to be promoted?
• Is there a departmental promotion committee and what is the nature of its membership?
• What procedures are employed in the decisions for the continuation at the rank for Assistant and Associate Professors?
• Do faculty feel they have sufficient input into departmental decisions on governance?
• What mechanisms exist to evaluate and support a sense of collegiality on the part of individual faculty in terms of teaching, research, and departmental administration?
• Is the organizational setting conducive to research, learning, and doing good science?
• What methods has the department employed to optimize its intellectual and physical capabilities?
• Is there a strong or weak sense of intellectual community?
• What techniques could be introduced to improve the intellectual life of the department?
• What seminars, research clubs, and journal clubs are offered in the department?
• What is done to encourage full faculty and student participation?
• Are students and faculty encouraged to attend annual professional meetings or have opportunities outside the School for exchanging new ideas and developments in their field?
• To what extent does the department socialize or interact after work hours?
• What are curricula vitae of key administrative personnel?
• What mechanisms exist to handle routine plant and equipment management, departmental safety, and financial management?
• How is office management controlled?
• Does the department have a centralized office or do faculty have individual secretaries?
• What is the source of financial support for departmental management?
• Is there a typing pool for manuscripts and grant applications?

Departmental Internal Evaluation Processes

• What mechanisms exist for evaluating the quality of departmental academic, research, and professional practice activities?
• Do the published course evaluations accurately reflect the quality of departmental courses? If they do not, what questions should be included in such evaluations to more accurately reflect course quality?

Departmental Resources

• Is the quality and quantity of space adequate to execute the department's academic and research goals?
• Is there sufficient classroom, conference, office, laboratory, library, and communal facility space to fulfill your departmental responsibilities?
• Is the population/space density adequate to support the stated mission of the department?
• What is the floor plan of space occupied by the department?
• Does the School and the department provide adequate maintenance of existing facilities and equipment?
• How does the department finance its facilities such as communal research facilities, computer facilities, and communal equipment?
• Is departmental equipment generally shared or is it used on an individual basis?
• Does the department have sufficient technical support personnel to maintain and possibly fabricate needed equipment?

Departmental Constraints

• What problems does the department have which it considers may jeopardize its current or future educational and research missions?
• What remedies are suggested to solve the department's problems?

Future Directions

• What mechanisms exist for determining changing societal needs and directions relevant to the department?
• What mechanisms exist for determining changes in the future directions of the teaching and research programs of the department?
• What future programmatic directions are anticipated?
• What efforts are being made to implement new programs?

What problems and constraints are anticipated which might impede such developments?