Honors and Awards

UMass Amherst Receives Second Place Award in NSF Taking Action: COVID-19 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Challenge

For its efforts to support faculty during the pandemic, UMass Amherst has been awarded second place in the STEM Faculty category of the National Science Foundation’s Taking Action: COVID-19 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Challenge.

Led by Provost John McCarthy and Joya Misra and Laurel Smith-Doerr of the UMass ADVANCE Program, the university’s entry described the collaborative effort at the university to quickly develop and implement a suite of policies and programs to support faculty, including financial support to faculty for increased dependent care costs.

The submission outlined the “5-R” Institutional COVID-19 Action Plan, which centers equity in the institution’s pandemic response by reworking timelines, realizing care responsibilities, recognizing faculty work holistically, recalibrating evaluations based on faculty work contexts and workloads and retraining evaluators.

“Through meaningful collaboration of many different offices, UMass has been leading on faculty support and equity in the face of this enormously disruptive and traumatizing pandemic,” says Misra, professor of sociology and public policy and UMass ADVANCE co-principal investigator. “This award reflects the partnership between the provost and his office, the Office of Faculty Development, the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the UMass Amherst Faculty Senate and ADVANCE.”

“COVID-19 has taught us that we must pay attention in times of crisis, because that is when inequalities may be exacerbated and when we are in danger of losing gains in faculty diversity and equitable practices,” says Smith-Doerr, professor of sociology and UMass ADVANCE principal investigator. “Research shows that women and BIPOC faculty have faced greater disruptions to their work during the pandemic. To retain our brilliant diverse faculty requires understanding the problem and intervening.”

The Taking Action: COVID-19 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Challenge had two primary goals. First, the contest aimed to encourage institutes of higher education to think deeply about the long-term, potentially negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM and develop systemic solutions and actions to mitigate the impacts on STEM students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty. Second, the challenge will be used to create a repository of the actions of the prize-winning and honorable mention submissions that can be shared broadly to highlight the importance of these actions to diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM and to provide information for other institutes of higher education to adapt these actions.

The second-place award includes a $15,000 prize, which Misra says will be used as part of a new pandemic recovery program being developed by ADVANCE aimed at supporting faculty mentoring of UMass colleagues who are reworking their goals and approaches to research. The UMass ADVANCE team conducts cutting-edge research on collaboration and equity, which informs programs and initiatives such as supporting faculty to write pandemic impact statements, and training department leaders to equitably evaluate pandemic impact statements.

“We need to attend to how pandemic disruptions to faculty productivity may have long lasting and unequal effects on careers, and intervene to help faculty recover,” says Smith-Doerr. “Our funding toward greater faculty gender equity from the NSF ADVANCE program for Institutional Transformation has meant that UMass has had a program office on campus focused on faculty equity throughout the pandemic.”

Misra and Smith-Doerr note that in addition to McCarthy, the challenge submission was supported by Michelle Budig, professor of sociology and senior vice provost, Amel Ahmed, associate professor of political science and associate provost, Michael Eagen, associate provost and Eve Weinbaum, associate professor of sociology and labor studies and co-president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors.

The NSF distributed a total of $200,000 in cash prizes among the winners of the challenge and will host a virtual showcase in June, during which winners will share their actions and plans. Following the showcase, an open access repository of winning entries and honorable mentions will be shared broadly for the benefit of all institutions facing similar situations due to the pandemic.