We recognize that the pandemic has significantly impacted the scholarship, teaching and service of faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences starting in Spring 2020 and will likely do so throughout the 2020-21 academic year. The faculty responded with great effort, resilience and creativity this past academic year. Nonetheless, “business-as-usual” was not at all possible, a situation that should be acknowledged in the annual faculty evaluation process.
Here we provide guidelines to assist evaluation committees to acknowledge the challenges posed by the pandemic when writing evaluation letters. Below we provide suggestions for determining numerical scores for scholarship, teaching and service in annual letters. Independent of the numbers assigned, departments and programs should, as always, provide developmental feedback for achieving tenure and/or promotion. We note that the weightings used to obtain and overall scores will remain the same, per the Provost’s email, October 22, 2020.
Scholarship/Creative Activity
Faculty in the College faced significant challenges to their regular research programs in AY 2019-2020. As a consequence, the Dean's Office recommends allocating generous scholarship scores to all faculty under review, acknowledging the challenges of conducting Scholarship during COVID-19. (We strongly suggest that a general statement be included in the letter to make this clear.) We suggest that Departments emphasize developmental feedback, which will help faculty members petition successfully for tenure and promotion.
Teaching
For Fall 2019: The evaluation should be based on normal evidence: SETs, narrative evaluations, syllabi review, class observations, etc.
For any quarter in which teaching was/s primarily online, i.e., winter 2020, spring 2020, fall 2020, winter 2021): The evaluation should acknowledge any curricular development that addressed the pivot to online and/or hybrid learning. Efforts to assist colleagues with curricular development should be acknowledged as contributions to Teaching. Advising is also considered teaching, and so any exceptional outreach to and/or support of students and advisees under these circumstances should be acknowledged.
Service
For Fall 2019: The evaluation should be based on normal evidence of meaningful activity appropriate to rank.
For Winter 2020 forward, we acknowledge that service opportunities may have diminished as a result of circumstances outside the control of the faculty member. Faculty members should not be penalized for diminished or cancelled service opportunities in late Winter or Spring. In particular, please acknowledge and give credit for service contributions (at all levels) that address the issues related to the following:
- racial inequalities on campus and/or nationwide
- COVID planning on campus or in the community
College guidelines for Faculty Evaluations for 2019-20 period pdf