Faculty Procedures Manual

Updated November 2022
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Preliminary Comments
This manual serves as a practical guide to the procedures for various faculty personnel actions at Duke University. The Duke University Faculty Handbook records the policy justifications and requirements for many of these actions. Where that is clearly the case, this manual will show a reference to the Faculty Handbook. The Provost is grateful to the Deans of the various schools for their generosity in furnishing much of the material contained in this manual, for their suggestions for improvement, and for their review of the final product. Particular thanks goes to the administration of Arts and Sciences, from whose files many parts of this manual have been taken.

Academic units at Duke use different organizational structures to meet their specific needs. Schools, Institutes, Departments, Divisions, Programs, and Centers have both different titles for their administrative heads and different levels of units within them. For example, some schools have a departmental structure, in which Chairs report to a Dean. These include Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, and the Pratt School of Engineering. In the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Board of Trustees has authorized a divisional structure where, for the purposes of this manual, divisions function like departments. Five schools do not have departments: the Divinity School, the Fuqua School of Business, the School of Law, the Nursing School, and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Finally, some centers report to a Dean, and others, to the Provost. For this reason, users of this manual are encouraged to employ discretion and flexibility when determining which unit or officer might initiate certain actions and to whom they might forward a recommendation or report. This manual will assume the more elaborated structure (i.e. departments to schools to university). Where there are no departments, the Dean or Institute Director will fulfill the role outlined for the Department Chair as well as the role outlined for the Dean or Institute Director.

The dFac database constitutes the official record of faculty appointments. This manual alerts users to the appropriate times and places for entering or modifying dFac records. This alert will most often be a simple reference to the dFac and its users’ manual. The primary appointment unit is responsible for entering all faculty data in dFac, even data concerning a secondary or joint appointment, when this dual status is known at the time of appointment. If a joint or secondary offer is made to an individual already at Duke, the joint/secondary department will enter that particular record.

The discussion of faculty titles in Chapter 2 is ordered by Personnel SubAreas (PSAs). Thus, in addition to descriptions of regular rank and non-regular rank faculty, other PSAs receive treatment in Chapter 2. The manual also contains a table showing the equivalencies of campus ranks with clinical ranks in the School of Medicine.

The manual’s Appendix A contains sample departmental bylaws. This is intended merely as a model for departments, divisions, and schools as they codify their governance procedures.

The Glossary (the manual’s last chapter) explains several acronyms used at Duke and identifies some little-known documents referred to in this manual.