report on faculty attrition
Following is the text of an e-mail to Keith Doubt from Marty
Erickson and Suren Fernando concerning statistics used in the
AAUP’s report and the Administration’s follow-up report on faculty
attrition.
Dear Keith,
We are writing in response to the AAUP’s Faculty Attrition
Report and the Administration’s follow-up report on faculty retention.
We feel that the basic question on the minds of many faculty members
is whether tenure-track and tenured faculty are choosing to leave
Truman State University prematurely, i.e., prior to tenure or
retirement. In reviewing the two reports, we feel that AAUP’s
report is a reasonable attempt to answer this question statistically,
while the Administration’s use of statistics is unhelpful in answering
the basic question. The Administration calculates “Unplanned
Turnover” by dividing the number of tenure-track or tenured
non-retiring faculty who left Truman (50 according to their data
but 57 according to AAUP’s figures) by the total number of faculty
(approximately 354), for an average of 2.8% per year for each
of the five years covered by the study. Such a computation is
irrelevant because the wrong universe of faculty is used. (The
correct denominator should be the number of tenure-track or tenured
non-retiring faculty.) As an analogy, to calculate the percentage
of United States citizens who quit smoking last year, the universe
should consist of United States citizens who were smokers last
year, and not consist of all United States citizens. Since the
Administration divided by the wrong universe of faculty, their
precentage is much lower than the actual percentage relevant to
the
question at hand.
Sincerely,
Marty Erickson
Suren Fernando
Division of Mathematics and Computer Science