A new version of this site was created, following the June 24 Bylaws update. This is now the ARCHIVED site.
Adopted and circulated to pre-tenure faculty list, October 2020
The following are policies and accommodations made by the Provost’s Office in response to the 2020 pandemic to support faculty who are standing for evaluation and promotion. Specifically, these redress policies apply to all tenure-track faculty who started their probationary period between Fall 2015 and Spring 2021. *
[*NOTE: For faculty preparing 3- and 5-year post-tenure review files in FA22 and faculty preparing full professor files in SP23, Provost Gantz has also agreed to extend to those faculty the ability to include a COVID impact statement as described below and to exclude standardized teaching evaluation scores from FA20 and SP20 if the candidate desires.]
Candidates have the option to include a brief opening passage in the Self-Report in the form of a Covid Impact Statement. The purpose of such a passage would be to provide the evaluators the necessary context to understand whatever concrete effects the pandemic may have had on the candidate’s work that is measured against the College’s standard institutional and departmental expectations. Such effects may include, but are not limited to, disruptions to or cancellations of research opportunities, inability to travel for the purposes of on-site scholarship (labs, field sites, etc.), professional time diverted to converting courses into remote learning formats, and increased/different childcare responsibilities. There is no official expectation that the file include a Covid Impact Statement; instead, this is an option to be exercised at the candidate’s discretion.
Regarding scores from required student evaluations, scores from courses during Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 are optional, at the candidate's discretion. Beginning with Spring 2021, regardless of delivery mode, student evaluations will again become a required element of the file.
Regarding required narrative evaluations from two of the three semesters before the submission of a file for tenure or promotion to full professor, narratives from courses during spring 2020 are optional, at the candidate’s discretion. If the candidate is unable to provide two semesters' worth of narratives due to having planned on collecting narratives in Spring 2020, then the candidate is excused from the requirement for two sets. However, the candidate must still plan to include the required two sets of narrative student evaluations if there remains enough time to plan for their collection.
The Office of the Associate Dean of Faculty has devised a means to administer narrative evaluations electronically to replicate both the process and the output as closely as possible to the traditional, hard-copy version. Should the candidate wish to collect narratives during hybrid/remote instruction, please contact the Associate Dean of Faculty; all students, whether remote or in class, will receive the same electronic format.
Faculty governed by these policies may request and will be granted a one-year pandemic tenure clock extension. Such requests must be made in writing to the Office of the Provost by September 1st of any academic year and no later than the deadline in which their research file would be due for external evaluators. A pandemic tenure clock extension is separate and distinct from any other tenure clock extensions granted to the candidate. A pandemic tenure clock extension will be applied to the academic year in which the request is submitted to the Provost’s Office. The effect is as if that academic year did not exist in the tenure timeline (although accomplishments during the year still count). For example, a candidate who requests a pandemic tenure clock extension by September 1st of the fifth semester would have the 3-year contract review shifted to the seventh semester. Likewise, narrative student evaluations administered during the spring semester prior to requesting a pandemic tenure clock extension will be included in the tenure and promotion file.
Additional Clarification about Narrative Student Evaluations (10/7/2021)
Two semesters of narrative student evaluations are to be included in the file. If narrative student evaluations were administered in the fall and/or spring of the academic year before a candidate's original tenure evaluation year in anticipation of an on-time review, but a request is later made by the deadline to request the pandemic tenure clock extension, the narratives that were collected must be included in the tenure and promotion file even though they were not collected in 2 of the 3 semesters immediately prior to the tenure review.