Thank you for the Opportunity: Writing a COVID-19 Impact Statement for Tenure
Melanie Kill
Keywords: disability; tenure
Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
In the spring of 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself asked to write yet another statement explaining myself in terms of my disability (as well as my parental responsibilities) to colleagues and administrators who would be evaluating me for promotion and tenure. Six months earlier (and ten months after I had initiated the request), I had been shocked when the final year of a disability accommodation of time and a half toward research was denied, and I learned that I would be required to go up for tenure a year earlier than expected.
I want to make the labor of this statement public, first so that it is available to people in similar situations (who may be feeling very much alone or despairing at how much company they have), and second to attempt to make it visible to others who may never be asked to expend resources of time, health, and money to justify their value as scholars and teachers. I also want to say that all advocacy, including self-advocacy, is a form of carework and activism.
Excerpt from the University Description of the “Optional COVID Impact Statement”
“Faculty members may include an optional COVID-19 impact statement with their promotion materials (for tenured and tenure-track faculty members, librarian faculty members, and professional track faculty members). The statements will be incorporated into submitted promotion dossiers and reviewed internally and not shared with external letter writers.
The decision to submit a COVID-19 impact statement remains with the faculty member and provides an opportunity for faculty members to:
- Detail and explain responses to disruptions to professional activities (Research/Scholarship/Creative works; Teaching, to include mentoring and advising; Service; and Extension activities).
- Reflect on both positive and negative impacts, as relevant, and highlight achievements that may not be otherwise visible (e.g., redirecting research to accommodate travel restrictions, developing new research methodologies and approaches).
- Detail disruptions to expected resources (including time), potential opportunities, and planned activities through circumstances beyond their control. Faculty members may also explain how they adapted to overcome these challenges and note how these adaptations represent a form of productivity during this period.
- Contextualize professional accomplishments and challenges related to the pandemic for internal audiences (“Optional COVID Impact Statement”).
COVID-19 Impact Statement
I submitted the following statement on May 28, 2021 as part of my tenure dossier:
I live with a chronic neurological condition which causes light, especially bright sunlight and moving light from electronic screens, to trigger severe symptoms that interfere with activities of daily life. This documented disability has, over the past ten years, forced changes in my living arrangements, transportation, and in the way I use—and must limit my reliance on—screens throughout any given day. In my work, I have learned to use alternative writing technologies and taught in classroom spaces with dimmable lighting, for example, in order to remain productive despite my disability.
The sudden transition to extended screen time that began for all of us in March 2020 was peculiarly disruptive to my work. Because of my disability, our collective reliance on videoconferencing for teaching and service, caused me dizziness, extreme photophobia, nausea, and pain. Moving teaching and meetings to Zoom during the pandemic necessarily reduced my available screen time for research. This is true also for access to research and teaching materials through the library. Access became more difficult and, because it requires materials be accessed online, this too has necessarily added to my daily screen time and further reduced available screen time for writing.
COVID has also increased barriers to accessing medical treatment (due to transportation and exposure risk) and suspended elements of my regular care routines such as physical therapy. I am the parent of a young child, and COVID caused a sudden upheaval in my childcare plan. My family lost approximately 946 preschool hours from March 2020 to May 2021 due to closures, summer program cancellation, and shortened school days. Alternative care options (including grandparents) were largely unavailable due to exposure risk. Virtual learning for my child was difficult for me to facilitate due to associated screen time.
Like many instructors, I reinvented my teaching in profound ways to meet the challenges of the pandemic. I expanded my teaching and mentoring work to create more accessible courses and to develop more anti-ableist practices. I provided alternative assignments, accessible materials, and flexible deadlines for students facing crisis, illness, caregiving responsibilities, strain from structural racism and intolerance, and food- or housing insecurity. This was during a time when Accessibility and Disability Services was overwhelmed, students across campus were not receiving accommodations they needed, and I myself was under-accommodated for my disability, given the significant changes in the way I had to do my job due to COVID.
One silver lining of the pandemic is that it has directed new forms of attention to ableism and systemic inequality that were there all along. Despite my time pressures as a disabled junior faculty member attempting to prioritize my research productivity with an eye on tenure, the pandemic energized my work in disability advocacy. I felt compelled to redouble my efforts to support the disability community on campus facing enormous challenges during the pandemic, including as a member of the President’s Commission for Disability Issues. The labor required to navigate my disability I now recognize as diversity, access, and equity work in itself. It is both service to the university and a project, both tangible and intellectual, that informs my scholarship and teaching. In this context, my second monograph project, “Digitizing Disability,” has taken on new relevance and urgency. The particular barriers I faced due to COVID were not accommodated, and this slowed my research. Yet the pandemic prompts new recognition of the value of research, teaching, and service that are possible only through the lived experience of disability.
Notes on the Labor and Costs of Producing this Statement
I spent significant screen time, as well as emotional and intellectual energy, on this statement. I received feedback on multiple rounds of drafts from colleagues and mentors (within my department and outside it) and also from a lawyer. While I do not have records of my own writing time or my colleagues’ reviewing time, I do know that my lawyer spent 1.2 hours on research for and review of this document. I paid her $558.00 for her time and expertise.
What I Cut from the Statement
The following remarks appeared in earlier drafts of the statement:
The option to include a COVID Impact Statement in my APT dossier makes space to account for the productive nature of adaptation in the context of a global pandemic. I would like to begin by claiming this statement as productive intellectual labor and extending that claim to include all the other statements, letters, form fields, requests for documentation, and meetings that have constituted my years of self-advocacy within the university as a disabled junior faculty member. The time, effort, and deep discomfort involved in this type of labor, offered to those of us whose bodies and lives do not conform to academic norms, should be recognized as significant diversity, access, and equity work done not only as service to the university but also as an intellectual project that informs scholarship and teaching.
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I’ve learned not to accept a role in judging the complexities of others’ lived experience. I understand that barriers are often obscured even to those facing them.
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We will never serve disabled students if we cannot retain disabled faculty.
References
The University of Maryland Office of Faculty Affairs. (2021, March 25). Optional COVID impact statement. https://faculty.umd.edu/node/2015
Bio
Melanie Kill is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She centers her research and teaching in digital rhetorics, rhetorical genre studies, technofeminism, disability rhetorics, and the public humanities. Her work approaches rhetoric as collective, discursive world-making in which the patterning of discursive norms reflects and maintains larger social structures but also opens space for challenging them.