Supporting Faculty During & After COVID-19: Don’t let go of equity
The following excerpt was published by Aspire: The National Alliance for Inclusive and Diverse STEM Faculty and discusses how to support faculty throughout and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Download the full article here.
| COVID-19 has upended health, education, and work systems. People are balancing new work, familial and personal care routines, coping with feelings of uncertainty and grief, and wondering how they are going to make it all work. College and university faculty are no different. Faculty, like educators everywhere, are expressing concerns about their ability to provide instructional, academic, and emotional support to students, adapt to online teaching environments, maintain research, grant and publication activity while managing personal, child, and sometimes extended familial care. Recent budget and hiring freezes and furlough announcements have only heightened faculty concerns about the stability of their appointments and their current and future workloads.
Thankfully, institutions are responding to faculty concerns. And although there are several overarching concerns, COVID-19 presents distinct challenges to differently situated faculty members, calling attention to and potentially widening individual and institutional equity gaps. Thus, as campuses set about problem-solving they must keep equity1 front and center. Below, we draw on various news sources2 to describe how institutions are responding to COVID-19 in relation to faculty support and evaluation. We also take the liberty to suggest responses that have not been widely discussed, but that we view as worthwhile considerations. |