A pool of faculty members and students is to be provided as a source of panels in order to reduce as far as possible the influence of a particular case on the process of selecting a panel to hear it. Selection of a subset of the pool as a panel cannot be completely random, for there must be some provision for exclusions on the grounds of conflict of interest and there should be some reasonable rotation in service. The following plan is proposed.
The chairperson of the AFTPE Committee, or the chairperson’s delegate, will be responsible for establishing and maintaining an ordering of the pool for selection purposes according to the following conditions.
(a) The numbers from 1 to n will be assigned at random to the n members of the pool to determine the order of consideration for panel duty, where “1” indicates first choice.
(b) When a panel of size k is chosen, the selection ordering changes as follows: the n-k persons not selected move up, retaining their relative order, while k panelists move to the bottom of the list, retaining their relative order.
(c) Replacements to the pool will be inserted at random into the order of the set of pool members not in an existing panel.
(d) It is the responsibility of the AFTPE Committee to determine the size of each panel, and of the chairperson to maintain the size of the pool at a level that will provide at least one panel in addition to all those committed to hearings. A hearing officer chosen by the AFTPE Committee from its membership will act as chairperson, without vote, of the hearing panel.
(e) Two random processes are involved in reordering:
- arranging a set of integers in a random order, and
- selecting at random one set of integers.
These processes will be carried out for the committee by Computing Services.