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Guidelines for Optional Pandemic Impact Statements

January 18, 2022

Applies to Annual Faculty Evaluations for Calendar Year 2021

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has had differential impacts on university faculty productivity and wellbeing and in many cases has compounded inequities among faculty. For some faculty, the pandemic has created new research and teaching opportunities; for others, the pandemic has closed off active lines of research, shifted the balance of work toward teaching, and/or increased caregiving responsibilities, for example. Whether in this statement or in some other way, faculty are encouraged to create a record of the impacts now. By recognizing and documenting pandemic impacts through the evaluation process, the variable impacts of the pandemic will be less likely to exacerbate existing inequalities or to create new ones.

Annual evaluations and other personnel reviews conducted during an “affected term” (per the Faculty Evaluation Procedural Appendix) must consider the impact of each person’s unique working conditions on productivity. Currently, faculty members can document the impact of the pandemic on specific activities in Faculty 180 using the drop-down menus under “Activity Classifications.”

The option to also include a Pandemic Impact Statement provides faculty the opportunity to describe the impact and the contextual factors that are important for reviewers to understand. It is an opportunity to detail disruptions to their activity experienced through no fault of their own, to explain the ways in which they adapted to overcome these and to note how these adaptations represent a form of productivity during this period. 

The purpose of a Pandemic Impact Statement is to 1) enable faculty to make relevant, but potentially invisible impacts on their work visible and 2) provide current and future reviewers the context and information that they need to perform a fair, contextualized review of the faculty member’s performance and contributions. It is not meant to create an additional burden on faculty.

Guidelines

Purpose and Use

What is a Pandemic Impact Statement?

A Pandemic Impact Statement is a brief description of the effects that pandemic conditions have had on a faculty member’s performance in teaching, scholarly activity, administration, and/or service. The Statement is specifically focused on how pandemic conditions directly impacted a faculty member’s workload and professional opportunities and, by extension, how they specifically affected the faculty member’s productivity, performance, and trajectory (see “Types of Impacts to Consider” below). The statement itself should be about three pages in length and may be organized into sections based on relevant evaluative categories (research, teaching, service, administration) or may be organized instead according to changes in one or more evaluative areas as they relate to changes in others.

The Statement can be included not only for the annual evaluation process but also for all types of reviews including biennial tenure reviews, promotion and tenure, and periodic review. For annual reviews it should be considered formative (documenting the immediate impacts), and for tenure/promotion/post-tenure review it should be considered summative (documenting the overall impacts).

How will these impact statements be used?

Acknowledging the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on different groups of faculty, academic leaders at Boise State have been instructed to consider each individual’s working conditions to support more equitable assessments, per the Faculty Evaluation Procedural Appendix. Evaluators are expected to consider these impacts and adjusted workload assignments as they apply departmental, school, and college standards in faculty evaluation processes. Pandemic Impact Statements provide reviewers the information they need about the effects of the pandemic on the mix or balance of an individual faculty member’s work activities and the types of work outcomes that they were able to achieve.

Evaluators are also expected to recognize the individualized impacts of the pandemic and avoid universalizing these statements; for example, the same factor that presented an opportunity for one candidate may have presented a hardship for another. Evaluators are also expected to use caution when comparing and contrasting faculty members’ relative productivity. Health concerns, child care responsibilities, and financial challenges, which are personal matters and thus not typically included in annual file narratives, may affect productivity levels. Therefore, in evaluating faculty work during the COVID-19 crisis, committees and unit leaders are urged to give greater weight to the quality and impact of a faculty member’s teaching, scholarship, service, and/or administration versus the quantity of what was achieved.

Additional Resources

Writing Your Impact Statement

The goal of the Pandemic Impact Statement is to give faculty members an opportunity to formally contextualize the impact of the pandemic on their work productivity across their areas or responsibility. Consider this statement as a strategy to account for interruptions, delays, opportunities, and atypical circumstances that have impacted your “normal” and expected productivity. It is expected that Pandemic Impact Statements may range from no impacts to substantial impacts, both negative and positive (see “Types of Impacts to Consider” below). However, the purpose of providing this opportunity is to particularly account for any negative impacts on faculty who are experiencing issues with productivity or disparities due to circumstances created by the pandemic. 

We encourage you to be as concise as possible in describing how the pandemic has affected your workload and productivity. In addition to documenting adjustments to your professional responsibilities, at your discretion, you may elect to address personal circumstances that have impacted overall productivity (i.e. increased caregiving demands) as well as other observed effects on productivity that may fall outside of specific realms of responsibility. Faculty are not expected to address these personal circumstances, however; doing so is optional.

It is a personal choice to determine how much is shared to demonstrate these effects. If medical leaves are discussed, do not provide details about diagnoses or prognoses, but do note when such leaves occurred.

Prompts

Below are some prompts to consider in writing your Pandemic Impact statement. These prompts are not prescriptive; you can consider them or not. 

  • Provide details of how your work was impacted, steps you have taken or need to take to address the impacts, and any outcomes that have resulted from those actions. 
  • Was your program of research specifically impacted? If so, how? (e.g., lab closings, access to populations, team challenges, increased workload in another area, decreased attention to it due to caregiver responsibilities, new data etc.) 
  • What specific challenges, if any, did you encounter in shifting your courses to online delivery? 
  • Have you experienced increases/decreases in service load and/or ability to effectively meet current service obligations? 
  • Have you contributed “invisible” service to sustain departmental or other operations or to support students?
  • Has your actual and/or assigned workload changed per the Faculty Evaluation Procedural Appendix?

Types of Impacts to Consider

Teaching and Advising Examples

  • (negative) Moving class online might have led to negative impact in terms of re-distribution of workload away from scholarship
  • (negative) Impact on student course evaluation results could be contextualized given the move to online instruction
  • (negative) Invisible student care or advising support added to faculty workload
  • (negative) Faculty member covered another faculty member’s course for some period of time (which is positive in terms of service but might have diverted the work time the faculty member had for scholarship or other workload)
  • (positive) Moving class online resulted in improved pedagogical experience of some kind (e.g., increased office hours attendance, etc.)

Additional factors to note:

  • Increased time on course preparation
  • Development of new courses or new course materials
  • Changes in student evaluations associated with new instructional modalities
  • Professional development through teaching-related workshops or trainings
  • Increased mentoring of students
  • Technology challenges altered traditional methods of assigning and assessing student work
  • Remote or hybrid instruction continuing into Spring 2021 and Fall 2021 required many faculty members to spend a significant amount of time learning new pedagogical methods and technological approaches, and to revise existing courses for new teaching approaches
  • Student care activities went up significantly both for coursework and for advising (academic and other)
  • Caregiver needs intruded on teaching time
  • Additional teaching responsibilities in response to pandemic (e.g., serving as a replacement instructor for a colleague; sudden changes in workload as a response to loss of S-contracts)
  • Cancellation of performances and exhibitions
  • Cancellation of field courses
  • Cancellation of community engaged educational programs
  • Interruption of clinical teaching and supervision of internships; the need to revise how those programs are designed and delivered
  • Required revisions of research and teaching assistantship activities for undergraduate and graduate students who are under faculty supervision
  • Cancellation of conferences related to teaching professional development
  • Student feedback potentially more negative
  • Collaborators/team teaching members impacted
  • Interruption/cancellation of study abroad
  • Extension work was interrupted or canceled
  • Sabbatical interruptions, postponements or adjustments

Scholarship/Research/Creative Activity Examples

  • (negative) Cancelation of
    • Conference presentations / keynotes / invited talks
    • Performances
    • Exhibitions
    • Artist/scholar-in-residence appointments
  • (positive) Pivot in response to COVID led to new avenue for research and discovery
  • (positive) Scholarly expertise of relevance to pandemics led to more research opportunities and collaborations
  • (negative) Closing of labs or access to research resources (field work sites, archives and libraries, human subjects, performance space, data-gathering / collaboration travel, etc.)
  • (negative) FRA or other faculty development leave shortchanged, delayed, interrupted, etc.
  • Grant funding
    • (negative) Restricted
    • (positive) Expanded opportunities for those in COVID-related research fields
    • (negative) Paying students although not making expected progress in research – time spent re-defining how to achieve research objectives
  • (negative) Cancelation or delay of book contracts and publication due to book press closures or restrictions
  • (negative) Delays in publications due to reviewer inaccessibility
  • (negative) Delays in arrivals or visits of international collaborators (faculty, students, post docs)
  • (negative) Other professional responsibilities and workload foci intruded on research or creative performance time

Additional factors to note:

  • Increased productivity that may not be sustained (i.e., shouldn’t represent a new annual expectation)
  • Decreased productivity that may be sustained beyond the pandemic. In this instance, faculty are encouraged to describe their current plans for re-establishing their work, appreciating that these plans will need to be flexible.
  • Shifts in research focus
  • The establishment of new lines of research associated with the pandemic
  • Loss of research time due to lab closures
  • Closures of research collections
  • Travel restrictions
  • Budgetary constraints
  • Delay in enrollment of patients into clinical trials
  • Impacts on grant funding, including changes in the priorities of granting agencies, cutbacks in funding available, new grant funding opportunities, and the fact that faculty were encouraged to continue to pay students, postdocs and technicians even if not advancing projects.
  • Cancellation of book contracts due to the closure of or cutbacks at university or other
  • presses
  • Cancellation of performances and exhibitions
  • Cancellation of conferences before or after abstracts/papers accepted
  • Inaccessibility of field work sites, human subjects, libraries, archives, and other research collections
  • Delays in journal review process and publication schedules
  • Delay in arrival of international students/postdocs
  • Impact of the need to revise/redefine activities of undergraduate and graduate student research assistants and how those trainees are supervised and mentored
  • Cancellation of invited talks
  • Cancellation of fellowships, artist/scholar-in-residence appointments
  • Caregiver needs intruded on research time
  • Other workload priorities intruded on research time
  • Collaborators/research team members impacted
  • Extension work was interrupted or canceled
  • Sabbatical interruptions, postponements or adjustments

Service Examples

  • Service leadership workload increased in support of staff, students, faculty (positive in terms of service although might negatively impact time available for other areas of specialization like research or teaching, etc.)
    • Clarify the level of the service leadership (program, department, college, school, institution, community, national, etc.)

Additional factors to note:

  • Increased mentoring of faculty colleagues
  • Reduced time to engage in service to professional organizations
  • Increased service specifically related to the pandemic
  • Reduced availability for community partnership opportunities
  • Clinical Service
    • Clinic closures and reduced and/or different caseload
  • Increased caseload
  • Increased time addressing safety needs related to clinical training (students, residents, interns) and client/patient interactions
  • Reduced clinical productivity due to patient concerns about safety
  • Increased time on clinics and clinical administrative responsibilities due to staffing issues (quarantine, child/elder care, schooling) and/or call-backs
  • Decreased ability and time to work up clinical cases for case-studies and house-officer (residents/interns) training
  • Reduced clinical operations capacity
  • Reduced support in working up and educating patients due to absence of students and residents
  • Reduced communication with team members resulting in extra time required to gather information individually regarding patients
  • Pandemic response suspended or curtailed traditional and ad hoc service assignmentsPandemic response greatly increased service responsibilities for some faculty, especially for those engaged in community outreach, governance, curriculum or mentoring.
  • Pandemic complicated external service responsibilities such as journal editorships, chairing of academic conference sessions, professional organization service, and other integrated scholarly service
  • Service to community-based institutions was halted and then altered in significant ways; as were public presentations
  • Caregiver needs intruded on service time
  • Other workload priorities intruded on service time
  • Collaborators/service & engagement team members impacted
  • Sabbatical interruptions, postponements or adjustments

Sources