The following policy appears in the FAS Appointments Handbook.

Ordinarily, non-tenured appointments are made for a specified term. However, regardless of the term length, appointments are always contingent upon satisfactory performance. In the case of involuntary termination before the appointment end date of a non-ladder faculty or research appointment, the following documents must be sent to the Office for Faculty Affairs.

1. A record of communications between the faculty member/researcher and his/her supervisor, documenting a pattern of expectations/benchmarks on specific tasks and corresponding deficiencies. Ideally, these exchanges should state that there will be real consequences, if performance does not improve.

2. A documented formal conversation between the faculty member/researcher and his/her supervisor, summarizing the issues and alerting the faculty member/researcher that his/her performance is not consistent with continued employment.

3. A letter terminating the appointment (“fair notice”). There is no standard length of time by which termination is effective; however, 30 days should be given unless circumstances require that less notice be given. It can be less, if stages 1 and 2 have been clear.