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

-- Anonymous, February 14, 2000