College Level COVID-19 Accommodations and Resources at UMD

In an effort to understand the range of COVID-19-related accommodations, this brief summarizes the responses from each UMD academic college or school regarding changes to faculty-related policy and practice. Initiated by the ADVANCE Program and the ADVANCE Professors, each dean and associate dean for faculty affairs completed a brief inventory regarding their unit’s response to COVID-19. This brief is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather, offer a snapshot of some of the practices and policies being implemented across campus. This brief also summarizes emerging policies and practices from other colleges and universities across the country in different areas of faculty work (e.g., promotion and tenure, teaching, and scholarship).

Key Takeaways

1. Colleges are largely relying upon campus level policies, guidelines, and reporting structures for documenting, contextualizing, and flexibly evaluating the impact of COVID-19 in promotion and tenure decisions, annual reviews, and other evaluative contexts.
2. Relatively few colleges or units have put in place pandemic-related emergency funding (e.g., for emergency care, research funding, TAs).
3. Many/most workload accommodations have been made on an ad-hoc basis as a result of negotiations with individual faculty members, their units, and sometimes the college.
4. Almost all colleges have created new platforms for engagement/communication with faculty, department chairs, and college administration, with good success.