How to Support Faculty During the Chaos

Last month was a very dark month for higher education. We can start almost anywhere, but, to take just two things, let’s start with the odd Dear Colleague letter sent out by the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights declaring DEI work to be illegal. Then there was the firing of devoted civil servants working at the National Science Foundation. Many of us are sharing our fear, disgust and anger. Others are trying every which way to support people whose lives are negatively disrupted and impacted by the actions of DOGE and the Trump administration.

And then there are the people whose job it is to support the careers of faculty members at institutions of higher education like department chairs, faculty colleagues, deans, associate deans, provosts and chancellors. Their lives are topsy-turvy as they try to figure out who is impacted and how to address it. We know that this is a very hard and emotionally taxing activity.

We also know that our junior colleagues and colleagues from minoritized backgrounds are, as they were during the pandemic, once again bearing the brunt of this tragic disruption and destruction of science and other academic disciplines throughout the academy. We wrote here in Inside Higher Ed almost five years ago encouraging our colleagues to address four major faculty challenges during the pandemic: gendered resource disparities, difficulties of remote work for caregivers, the hidden labor performed by women and especially women of color, and the significant demands on women and minoritized faculty members related to managing the work and household labor crises. We reminded our colleagues to be inclusive in assessing and resolving the significant faculty-related issues that arose like disrupted research projects abroad and/or interruptions to research involving human subjects, time deficits due to family care, and many others.

The authors have more than 50 years of cumulative experience in the academy supporting faculty and faculty administrators in their efforts to create inclusive workplaces and disciplines. We have led organizational and national efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion for all faculty members and especially STEM faculty.

Today, we once again call on our university colleagues to provide tangible support to our most vulnerable colleagues—those without tenure, on a teaching track or working in research positions. While some universities are providing support to affected colleagues, this is something that we all need to do to preserve an academy that will outlast and outperform the current forces against academic freedom and knowledge creation.

While there are many parallels to the challenges that emerged during the pandemic, there are unique challenges and potentially longer-term ramifications of the current chaos for many scholars. While institutions have been rightfully focused on their policies and practices (e.g., hiring, recruiting, programming, staffing) targeted by anti-DEI executive orders and other actions, we need to remember that these policies and practices are predicated on a broad and deep research literature that demonstrates the existence of barriers (psychological, social, institutional) to achieving diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as solutions for mitigating them.

Scholars across many disciplines, but especially those in social sciences and humanities, have used a wide range of empirical methods to study diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. These scholars are facing an existential epistemic threat. Entire areas of scholarship in psychology, sociology, anthropology, education and other disciplines (like climate change and environmental sustainability, to mention just two) are at risk of coming to an abrupt halt should these scholars be unable to seek funding to conduct and disseminate their important work and therefore to continue to advance in their career paths.

Our institutions and the academy are at risk of immediately losing these talented scholars, who may either move to institutions in other countries where they can continue their work (if able to) or abandon the work to survive in the current system. It won’t take long for these impacts to also affect training the next generation of scholars who would carry that work forward.

Faculty members and institutional leadership are currently wrestling with questions like, how do we support faculty who have lost the opportunity for funding? How do we address the current losses in advancement policies (tenure and other tracks)? How do we advise graduate students who are losing their funding?

Below, we suggest a few practices, processes and policies that are low cost and will go a long way toward supporting our colleagues who are losing their funding, having to change the curriculum and/or changing research directions.

Faculty Assessment by Opportunity

During the pandemic, some institutions adopted a stance that faculty evaluation would be conducted based upon an individual’s opportunity to participate in research and service opportunities. Evaluating “achievement relative to opportunity” encourages assessment based on fairness rather than diluting standards. This reorientation of evaluative processes will take time to institute, but if we start now, many institutions can use this approach to evaluation nimbly.

Tenure Clock Flexibility

While tenure extensions are a tool commonly used to manage faculty career disruptions, they can also put faculty members who take those leaves further behind their peers in terms of salary and may even reflect badly on some faculty during the tenure-review process. Many of those affected by the recent war on fairness and science may not be on a tenure track, and yet others need support to obtain the rank of full professor. Still, we do recommend using this tool in the short run to ensure that faculty members who do need and want additional time can receive it. This strategy will work most effectively when paired with achievement-relative-to-opportunity evaluative frameworks and when its use is determined by individual faculty members in consultation with their chairs and mentors.

Supports for Affected Faculty Members and Graduate Trainees

Many faculty members may wish to pivot their research foci to obtain future funding. They may also wish to continue their research with different methodologies or different funders. For these faculty members, research development supports will be critical to assist with any desired pivot. In addition, small amounts of pilot funding can be useful for scholars who need to change research directions because of the attack on their scholarship. Yes, this one is hard, as university budgets also are getting slammed.

The use of fairer annual performance and merit reviews, such as those using achievement-based-on-opportunity frameworks, will be necessary, as well as changes to evaluative time frames. A three- or five-year time frame for evaluations will reduce the impact of one or two extremely difficult years.

Faculty members working in the areas of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice could benefit from a university- or department-level statement, like those used for faculty impacted by the pandemic, that states there have been major disruptions in teaching, service/engagement and research. Evaluation for advancement should be focused on impact of scholarship rather than numerical criteria.

Finally, beyond these supports, stopgap funding to support graduate trainees impacted by the abrupt loss of funds will be needed to afford flexibility for trainees to pivot their work and still complete their degrees, even if on a longer timeline. We know that stopgap funding is likely to be very scarce.

Ethos of Care

Many of us, especially those of us in STEM fields, have found department and disciplinary climates sometimes insensitive to our needs. Several scholars wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed encouraging the academy to take on an ethos of care. A recent report, “Centering Care in the Academic Research Enterprise,” identifies numerous ways the academy can work toward everyone feeling valued and able to do their best work. It identifies both short- and longer-term ways to infuse caring into our workplaces. Recent research by Hannah M. Douglas and team identifies how perceived insensitivity can lead to quiet quitting or a departure from the academy and scientific endeavors. This is not good for either career outcomes or knowledge production.

To be sure, there are many other ways we can support our faculty. The options noted above are relatively simple and can be accomplished rapidly. An immediate show of support for colleagues, especially those who are most affected, will go a long way toward stabilizing the academy and ensuring that academic freedom is not eroded irreparably. It will also support the scholarship and science and the scholars and scientists whose impacts are already making society a fairer place irrespective of an individual’s background.