COVID-19 has been a trying time for pretty much everyone — even cosseted tenure-track professors. Reasonably enough, university leaders are working to accommodate faculty upended by the pandemic, providing professors more flexibility in their pursuit of tenure (and the lifelong sinecure it provides) by asking faculty to submit “pandemic impact statements” that detail how professors’ work and output has been affected by the pandemic. This is all sensible enough; we could all use a little bit of grace right now.
The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has issued guidance promising an extra pre-tenure year to pretty much all assistant and associate professors while observing that the pandemic’s “specific” effects “will be different for different faculty members.” UPenn could’ve stopped there, and just said that the pandemic disrupted a lot of teaching, convening, and research, and that’s why it’s giving faculty some leeway.
Instead, the university went on to endorse a series of rather specific race- and gender-based assertions about how the pandemic affected college faculty, backed only by the sloppy, misleading application of junk science. It’s a study in how a sensible impulse can go awry in the hands of today’s woke campus bureaucrats.
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