Amira Rose Davis is hiding out. On Wednesday, on the opposite side of a closed office door, her sons wrestle and play with Legos. Her daughter belts musicals and makes TikTok videos. Amid the pandemonium, Davis, an assistant professor of history and African-American studies at Pennsylvania State University, tries to get a little work done.
It’s difficult. But Davis makes the attempt because, she said, she hears her tenure clock ticking.
In recent weeks, the spread of the coronavirus has upended faculty work. Campuses, like Penn State’s, have gone remote. Research has shuttered. Conferences are canceled. Teaching has become more like triage as professors scramble to convert to virtual lessons. Many professors, like Davis, are attending to their responsibilities and also caring for their children, who are now TikToking at home instead of studying at school. Yet for junior faculty members, the countdown to their tenure deadline continues, one day at a time.
A few colleges are attempting to ease that pressure. Ohio State University’s provost tweeted on Tuesday that faculty members in their probationary period would be offered a one-year extension to their tenure clocks. At least two other institutions have announced similar moves. More colleges are likely to consider extensions, as the long-term side effects of the pandemic come into focus.
For Davis, time is of the essence. Every day that passes, she said, is another day to deal with those anxieties. She’s on leave this semester, which was supposed to give her extended quiet time to work on the book manuscript that is crucial to her future.
“But how do I maintain a writing schedule,” she said, “when my toddler won’t get off my lap?”
‘We Owe It to Them’
The ask to Ohio State’s faculty was huge: Convert about 6,000 courses to some form of remote delivery in about 10 days. Bruce A. McPheron, the provost, said he and his team began looking for ways to ease professors’ stress, to take something off their plate at a time when “their plate is completely full.”
Ohio State’s existing tenure and promotion policy allows for an extension to accommodate an event beyond a faculty member’s control, but many of them do not know it exists, McPheron said. So he announced it on Twitter to let junior faculty members know that “we’re thinking about you,” he said.
The university’s 700 or so tenure-track faculty members have the option of extending the clock by a year either before or after their fourth-year reviews. They can go ahead on the current timetable, if they wish, or request an extension but later decide they don’t need it, Rob Messinger, director of communications, said in an email.
Young faculty members are “the creative engine” of the university, McPheron said. “I think we owe it to them.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Creighton University, in Nebraska, also announced an opt-in policy. Pre-tenure faculty members can notify their department chair and dean, before the fall semester, of their intent to extend the tenure clock by a year, the provost, Thomas F. Murray, said in a news release. Murray and the appropriate dean will review and approve the requests, he said.
The University of California at Santa Barbara will offer a similar option. Assistant professors, along with certain other personnel, can request tenure-clock extensions of various lengths, a Tuesday memo from academic leaders says. An extension of one quarter will not change a faculty member’s total years on the clock but will “mark that particular period of time as one during which duties were disrupted.” Those who don’t request a clock stop “will not be penalized for a reduction in duties during the duration of the Covid-19 crisis,” the memo says.
Other faculty members have applauded those decisions on social media and encouraged their institutions to do the same, or go farther. Peter Shulman said he saw no downside to an across-the-board tenure-clock extension for junior faculty members without the burden of opting in. That way, those employees would not have to advocate for themselves at a time of intense stress, said Shulman, an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio.
He can imagine administrators might worry that faculty members could abuse the offer. But, he said, that concern “just pales in comparison to the scale of social disruption that we’re facing.”
‘Cult of Productivity’
That social disruption has altered the work of junior professors in myriad ways.
For one thing, key research that builds a tenure portfolio has slowed or, in some cases, stalled altogether. Many university libraries and archives have closed. For humanists like Shulman, “the libraries are our laboratories.” He said that closure would have been terrible for him when he was working to complete a manuscript before he went up for tenure.
People are looking to faculty for answers, and faculty themselves, they’re trying to figure out their new normal.
Many institutions have also suspended research on human subjects, to keep people safe, The Chronicle reported. Studies that require in-person contact now carry the possibility of exposure to the coronavirus. And when research shutters, graduate students, too, are left in the lurch. Andy Saultz directs the Ph.D. program in education and leadership at Pacific University, in Oregon. Amid caring for his two toddlers, he’s fielded questions from anxious students about their now-uncertain research prospects and what it means for their degrees.
“People are looking to faculty for answers,” Saultz said, “and faculty themselves, they’re trying to figure out their new normal.”
Saultz is lucky. He got his tenure-approval letter in the mail just a week ago, on Friday the 13th, amid the burgeoning pandemic. The timing amused him. But he sympathizes with his pre-tenure colleagues. In addition to paused research, they still rely heavily on student evaluations to help make their case for tenure. Right now, classes are being hastily converted to an online format. To pretend that evaluations from this semester are comparable with those of any other year, said Saultz, is to ignore reality.
The American Association of University Professors agrees. Faculty members, especially contingent ones and those without tenure, “should be protected against the punitive use of negative teaching evaluations during the period of the disruption,” the organization said. It also recommended giving tenure-track faculty members the option of stopping the tenure clock for “the duration of the disruption.”
But how long the disruption will last is anything but certain. And its effects could ripple outward long after the spring of 2020. One result, said Jen Heemstra, may be a heightened awareness of many life situations that can interfere with the relatively rigid tenure process. A loved one dies, for example, or older relatives need care.
Some institutions had started to become more flexible with the tenure clock, said Heemstra, an associate professor of chemistry at Emory University, and the pandemic could accelerate those policy changes.
Davis, too, thinks now is the time to question the “cult of productivity.” Many faculty members feel they can never ease up, she said, even though they’ve been catapulted into a new normal. Davis and her husband are now effectively home-schooling their three children without much outside help. She’s brushing up on middle-school math and learning German phrases through the Duolingo app.
This moment, she said, is amplifying all the voices who say, “You cannot be productive while the world is burning.”
