Faculty Annual Report Supplement – 2020
Documenting Pandemic Impacts
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on faculty workloads that must be recognized. As outlined by University of Massachusetts-Amherst:
“Most faculty members have had to do significantly more work, moving courses online, mentoring students in need, reworking university programs and addressing COVID-19 risks, and helping communities manage current realities. At the same time, many faculty members are experiencing damage to their productivity and research record, due to lack of access to labs and facilities, research sites, and research subjects, as well as canceled conferences and inability to travel to conduct research and meet with collaborators.
These effects are exacerbated by differences among faculty. Those with children at home that need care or homeschooling or other family members that need care, face limited work time (research shows that women are submitting fewer journal articles during the pandemic). Women and faculty of color were already burdened by higher levels of mentoring students, which takes on new weight during the pandemic. Faculty of color are more likely to be suffering losses and providing care for extended family members. Those facing intersectional inequalities, such as women of color, face the highest burdens. Vulnerable faculty members may also be less comfortable drawing attention to COVID-19 impacts.”
(See: Documenting Pandemic Impacts: Best Practices.)
In keeping with the ‘best practices’ put forward by UMass-Amherst, the IUPUI School of Liberal Arts is encouraging faculty and departments to document the differential impacts to help with “mitigating against unequal outcomes” by facilitating units’ abilities “to assess faculty members fairly, accounting for their different working conditions under and even after the pandemic” (Documenting Pandemic Impacts: Best Practices).
While not required, faculty are encouraged to provide a self-report, as part of the DMAI FAReport, on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their scholarly work. This accounting should, as relevant, also include the impact on personal lives that was detrimental to scholarly work (e.g., increased care-giving requirements). In keeping with the best practices referenced above, Annual Review Committees and Chairs:
should recognize the contributions faculty have made in various spheres, while considering each person’s specific working conditions, rather than comparing across faculty with different working conditions. Increased caregiving responsibilities or lack of access to research facilities as a result of the pandemic should not negatively affect assessments of faculty...
While not all faculty may wish to document health or caregiving impacts, reviewers should note that caregiving responsibilities or efforts toward homeschooling children (including single parenthood) reflects the disparate impact COVID-19 had on work-time for faculty members. Similarly, documentation of illness, risk of illness (pre-existing conditions, partnership with an essential worker), or loss of loved ones, provides greater context for assessments. De-stigmatizing care and illness is important to creating fair assessments. Personnel Committees may write a standardized acknowledgement of pandemic impacts with particular attention to their field and expected disruptions to work for all faculty members. This statement could be inserted at the beginning of each PC memo responding to faculty submission as context for the annual review.
To facilitate the documentation of pandemic impacts, faculty may use the FAReport COVID Supplement template provided on the next page. The goal is to provide context to help reviewers account for individual situations while at the same time not adding significantly more work to the documentation requested in support of the annual review process.
Documenting Pandemic Impacts: FAReport COVID Supplement
The following is a list of areas of faculty work that have been commonly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as identified by UMass-Amherst (See: Documenting Pandemic Impacts: Best Practices). Faculty are encouraged, but not required, to highlight the areas that apply to them and briefly provide both documentation and commentary. For those that don’t apply, simply delete them.
When completing Faculty Annual Reviews for faculty, department chairs should recognize the contributions faculty have made in teaching, research and service while considering each person’s specific working conditions as impacted (or not) by the COVID-19 pandemic, as self-reported by faculty.
To be completed by faculty members (all items are optional):
- Identify scope of work during the pandemic. What work did it apply to, and what new work was added.
- Document changes to courses, including moving courses online and new technologies. Faculty may identify how many additional hours each week focused on teaching to concretize these effects (e.g., 15-hour/week workload for X course shifted to 30- hour/week workload for 7 weeks).
- Point out specific challenges, such as lack of resources (high-speed broadband, software) for faculty and students, and trainings attended or led.
- Identify additional teaching responsibilities, including course overloads due to personnel changes, retirements, issues with teaching assistants, assisting others with technology, other workload changes.
- Address how advising changed, particularly as students navigated changing requirements. Identify any increases in advising load. Mention any additional support for students experiencing physical and or mental health, economic, and social consequences of the pandemic.
- Document mentoring impacts, including student progress, and additional mentoring time required with students/peers facing pandemic impacts.
- List attending/leading meetings, additional efforts made – any work that would not have occurred during a regular semester. List efforts to move meetings/events online e.g. commencement.
- List additional work needed to develop plans for closing & re-opening of laboratories, including: coordination among research teams, development of cleaning & distancing protocols in the laboratory space, etc.
- Identify contributions to any department, university, professional society, interdisciplinary, or community engaged pandemic initiative.
- Identify how research or creative work was disrupted. For example, faculty might note loss of:
- Research time due to increased or changed teaching and service responsibilities
- Sabbatical time, other paid or unpaid leave (Fulbright, Guggenheim, etc.)
- If willing, research time due to health issues or caregiving responsibilities
- Access to necessary research facilities/labs/ computing resources (including impacts on longitudinal research), studios, or venues for creative works/performances
- Access to research subjects, animals, cell cultures (including for longitudinal research)
- Additional time and resources spent to restart research, which varies by field
- Travel and field research opportunities
- Funding to support personnel due to travel and visa restrictions or due to research restrictions
- Access to internal or external research funds
- Note other kinds of impacts:
- Additional teaching/preparations
- Cancellations of seminars, presentations, visits with collaborators or research teams
- Challenges due to increased time for review of submissions for funding or publication
- Redirected funding for COVID-19 related topics
- Pivoting/changing research agenda due to pandemic restrictions
- Diversion of funds for PPE
- Donation of supplies or personnel time to COVID-19 initiatives
- Challenges due to travel/visa restrictions
