Joya Misra, 2021 PEP Fellow and Laurel Smith-Doerr, PEP Steering Committee Member, were recently quoted in an article on faculty burnout. At Massachusetts, the Advance program and an Amherst sociologist are proposing a de-identified study of the Covid-19-impact feedback submitted by faculty members. Experts also say it’s not enough to just tell instructors to catalog consequences. Amherst held workshops for department chairs and for personnel committee members on how to evaluate people fairly, because “the last thing we would want is for those statements to then activate bias against people,” says Joya Misra, a co-principal investigator with the Amherst Advance program. Universities need to realize that not every task must be completed immediately, Misra says. Equity should not be back-burned, for example, but curricular reform can probably wait. Smith-Doerr is the principal investigator for the university’s Advance program, part of a national project funded by the National Science Foundation that focuses on faculty equity and success. Advance issued guidance for how faculty members should track the pandemic’s influence on their work and home lives, both through their annual faculty reviews and through “impact statements.” Laurel Smith-Doerr explains that it’s important for instructors to document Covid-19’s impact. That way evaluators can pinpoint faculty needs, at an aggregate level, and what the campus should be attending to, says Smith-Doerr. Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education.