On what is hopefully the downhill side of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s a lot of discussion across higher education about “getting back to normal” or “navigating a new normal.” But “back to normal” is an airy fantasy, not a strategic plan. As the playwright Tom Stoppard once observed, it’s impossible to stir things apart. Likewise, “the new normal” is a slippery concept that usually means repackaging as much of our pre-pandemic operations as possible.
Academe stands at an inflection point. Decisions made now will echo not only in academic 2021-22 but for years to come, shaping much of what becomes “normal” in the higher-education landscape. Faculty members who find themselves somewhere in the contract-renewal and/or tenure-and-promotion pipeline understand this truth in a visceral way.
The “usual” stress of higher education’s in-or-out employment system has been magnified by the pandemic in multiple ways:
- The uncertainty over how institutions will evaluate faculty work since March 2020 — especially the reduced productivity experienced by some academics — could act like a match tossed on a pool of gasoline.
- From the institutional perspective, how we treat faculty colleagues who are, for example, up for tenure in 2021-22, will have a profound impact not just on individuals and departments but also on a wide array of campus strategic initiatives as well.
- One of the most ominous scenarios for post-pandemic academe is the potential expansion of the already significant inequities that bedevil faculty hiring and retention across disciplines and institutions. Put simply, in many fields, the deck is already stacked against women and people of color in the contract-renewal and tenure-and-promotion processes. Colleges and universities risk exacerbating that problem if they proceed with business as usual in the fall, without an intentional and self-critical examination of their job-performance criteria and evaluation processes.
Yet there isn’t a clear consensus on how to proceed. What adjustments should be made in the evaluation process to account for the difficulties of the past year? And how, in the months ahead, might we avoid replicating and expanding the inequities of the past?
That lacuna is seen most clearly in the discussion over “stopping the tenure clock” as an equity measure to deal with the disparate impacts of the pandemic. Productivity took a hit with parents and children working and schooling from home. But we know that Covid-19 posed higher challenges for women than for men — in terms of research, publication, and general productivity — because women tend to have a significantly higher burden on the home front.
One of the most commonly proposed solutions: Add a year to the “tenure clock.” That is, add a year to the contractually stipulated window of time within which a faculty member must be either awarded tenure or sent packing.
While that might seem like a straightforward solution, critics have argued that this proposal could actually harm female faculty members and faculty of color. As a letter from concerned professors in Science magazine put it: “Tenure clock extensions disadvantage some groups. For example, in economics, women on longer clocks due to parental leave get tenure at lower rates than men. Many men use leave to produce articles, whereas women are more likely to [use it to] care for children. Tenure committees often fail to account for differences in how leave time is spent.”
So it’s not the tenure-clock extensions that “disadvantage some groups.” Rather, the disadvantage stems from the ways in which other faculty members and tenure committees perceive and react to such extensions. In and of itself, stopping the tenure clock is an obvious, humane, and equitable measure. But the structural biases in the gatekeeping — controlled by senior professors and academic administrators who tend to be white and male — have perversely rendered that career-support measure dangerous to those whom it is supposed to assist.
I want to emphasize this point because it is an essential and instructive one for institutional decision-makers shaping personnel evaluations and decisions in the coming academic year. Without (a) an understanding of the myriad ways in which Covid shaped faculty members’ experiences and (b) a willingness to critically examine structural and institutional barriers to equity, we will fail the very colleagues who are supposed to be the future of our disciplines and institutions.
Lack of consensus on how to evaluate faculty work during this unprecedented year, however, should not mean inaction. The challenge for institutions and their decision-makers is to discern varied and flexible solutions that benefit individual candidates for contract renewal, tenure, and promotion as well as institutional well-being.
In our post-Covid personnel landscape, one-size-fits-all policies are destined to fall short. Instead, as we consider how to fairly evaluate faculty work during and after the pandemic, here are some essential components that every institution’s response ought to embody:
Acknowledge that the past 14 months have been riddled with grief and loss for many academics. A rush to resume pre-pandemic operations erases those people and their experiences. Whether it was a general sense of loss after the shift from in-person teaching to remote instruction, or the sharper and more specific pain of losing a loved one, everyone has been dealing with grief, stress, and loss.
The only humane option is to acknowledge that reality, affirm that we support our colleagues in the healing process, and make that support tangible. As seductive as “back to normal” sounds, we cannot pretend that trauma isn’t part of the institutional landscape that we all now occupy. That recognition should inform all of our post-pandemic practices.
Leverage that awareness to re-examine existing policies and practices. The impact of the pandemic on faculty work means we will be confronted with a panoply of modifications we need to make to performance-evaluation processes. Perhaps that involves a shift in the weight granted to an instructor’s course evaluations from students, or in the types of evidence that faculty members are asked to include in their tenure dossiers or annual reviews.
Maybe we need to think even more expansively, and allow tenure candidates to allocate the amount of emphasis granted in their own evaluation to the categories of teaching, research, and service. The pandemic showed us that faculty performance can be shaped by myriad, context-specific factors. Why not take that observation to its logical conclusion?
Might all of this be a signal that we need to rethink faculty-evaluation processes entirely? And examine our personnel policies and expectations to ensure they are universal rather than, say, culturally or gender-specific? Do our expectations privilege independent scholarly practice over collaborative work? Do we devalue advising and mentoring, and might that be because those tasks are often seen as women’s labor — the academic equivalent of the “domestic sphere?” Are our criteria and processes sufficiently attuned to the ways in which unplanned disruptions in academic lives can occur? If we have a faculty promotion system in which successful outcomes depend upon an uninterrupted and predictable march toward a singular objective, that system is not an equitable one for our post-Covid world.
Understand that “equality” and “equity” are related terms, but not completely synonymous. Often, we define “fair” as “everyone being treated the same.” But is that really fair — or are we handcuffing ourselves to policies and criteria that are actually unfair to some people? Does a single mother going up for tenure this year have the same standards applied to her as a professor who lives alone?
The goal of our contract and tenure processes is a fair evaluation of a faculty member’s performance and future contributions to the institution. To actually accomplish that goal, we literally cannot apply the same criteria to both of those hypothetical cases after a year of Covid.
We already understand that context matters. After all, we acknowledge the varying ways in which disciplines conduct scholarly work, for example. What we must be sensitive to going forward is the need to keep that level of discernment at the center of our evaluation processes. Just as the scholarly output and expectations appropriate for a chemist will be different from those of a historian, so, too, might the dossiers differ for a white, male, married tenure candidate versus a single Black woman who is called upon to do an enormous amount of “informal” mentoring for students of color (labor that is usually unacknowledged and uncompensated, despite its importance to the institution).
Equitable policies ensure that rigorous criteria are applied in ways that reflect the actual academic labor of each candidate — as opposed to a single, unvarying standard that privileges certain life contexts and penalizes others.
Be as flexible with junior colleagues as you’ve been with students. Remember back in March of 2020, when we told our students that we would extend them flexibility and understanding as we all shifted to emergency remote instruction? Remember when compassion and empathy were the watchwords? We asked students to extend us a bit of grace when we struggled with the technology and, in turn, we allowed for the fact that they were now doing their work in less-than-optimal conditions.
That sense of empathy was long overdue in college teaching, and we would do well to sustain the same spirit going forward, both in our classrooms and in our departments.
We need to recognize that what happened to our students this past year also happened to us, collectively. We know that students — especially those from disadvantaged and underserved communities — were paying a cognitive bandwidth “tax” that prevented them from always bringing their full academic selves to a particular learning task. Well, many of our colleagues were paying that tax, too. I’ve noted with dismay that administrators who communicate empathy and solidarity with students have not always done so with employees. That needs to change.
No, flexibility and compassion in faculty evaluation do not mean watered-down criteria. There will be those who leap to that conclusion — who see more-flexible policies as “weakening” standards and accommodating the “less deserving” — just as there were academics who insisted that flexibility and understanding during the pandemic somehow devalued the teaching and learning that occurred, as if some arbitrary definition of “rigor” were the sole determinant of effective learning.
But do our traditional promotion-and-tenure criteria truly reflect the qualifications of candidates? Do they reward actual accomplishments and potential, or merely cultural capital and proficiency at the academic game? Are we really assessing someone’s contributions to the academic community? Or are we seeking to put people through the same hazing we experienced on the tenure track?
If you went through the P&T process and now claim that, even though it was a miserable experience, you turned out all right, so others should have that miserable experience, too — perhaps you did not, in fact, turn out “all right.”
The simple and undeniable fact is that — for more than a year — labs were closed, classrooms shoved online, archives and libraries shuttered, and all parts of the scholarly enterprise profoundly disrupted. In addition, some faculty members faced severe productivity constraints as their children’s schools and daycare closed or they (or someone in their family) became ill. If we aren’t acknowledging how those factors have significantly reshaped the current academic landscape, we have no business judging anyone else’s scholarly aptitude.
In this hinge moment in higher education, we have the opportunity to powerfully shape the future of our vocation. Sure, we could choose to ignore all that we’ve learned in the past year and return to “business as usual.” Or we could take all of those key traits that sustained us and our students through this crisis — flexibility, empathy, innovation, experimentation — and apply them to our badly outdated process of faculty evaluation. We can try to return to the pre-pandemic status quo, or we can decide to do better. Let’s choose wisely.
