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COVID Impact Statements

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Guidance on Writing and Reading COVID Impact Statements

Overview

Lehigh University recognizes that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our community in many acute and prolonged ways. Faculty experienced a range of personal and professional disruptions, often in ways that exacerbated or created inequities. As a result, Lehigh has made COVID impact statements an (optional) component of all types of faculty reviews, giving faculty members an opportunity to articulate the ways in which the pandemic affected their professional trajectory.

A COVID impact statement documents how the work and workload of a faculty member was disrupted or changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes or impacts can be positive, negative, or a combination.

This page provides guidance for faculty review candidates on writing a COVID impact statement, as well as to internal and external evaluators on reading and interpreting such statements. Many of the recommendations below are based on the work of UMass ADVANCE, as well as on guidance from the University of Denver, the University of Maryland,  the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, and more.

In a nutshell, Lehigh recommends that evaluators take a holistic approach that applies the concept of “achievement relative to opportunity.” In other words, what opportunities did the candidate have, how did they overcome challenges, and what did they achieve? It is not a sign of weakness for a candidate to describe ways their work was delayed or derailed because of COVID-19, nor is it a sign of lower standards if evaluators take these ways into account. 

For more resources on COVID impact statements, including research about the inequitable impacts of COVID, see the ADVANCE Pandemic Equity page. 

Purpose of a COVID Impact Statement

The purpose of a COVID impact statement is to show how a faculty member’s workload and professional opportunities changed due to the pandemic, in ways that are not typically evident from a CV. These changes might have had a positive, negative, or mixed impact on the plans and contributions of a faculty member. The statement can also point out invisible labor borne by the faculty member. Making visible the workload changes and invisible labor may be useful to the faculty member in evaluating their own accomplishments, and useful to evaluators so they can perform a fair, contextualized evaluation.

Guidance for Faculty Review Candidates

General Guidance

First and foremost, appreciate that any disruptions or delays due to COVID are part of your professional history, and give yourself credit for your flexibility, growth, and commitment. In your statement, address the opportunities and challenges you were faced with, and what you achieved relative to those opportunities.

Remember that the COVID impact statement is optional. You are not obligated to submit one if you worry that it will disadvantage you. 

COVID impact statements are limited to 2 pages.

What Should a COVID Impact Statement Contain?

Your COVID impact statement can contain topics such as the following:

  • Time periods (though not reasons) when you took approved medical or personal leaves related to COVID-19.
  • Your workload, performance, or trajectory prior to the pandemic.
  • The impact (positive, negative, or mixed) that COVID-19 had on your workload and professional opportunities related to research/scholarly work, teaching, and service, as well as awards, mentoring, etc.
  • How you have adjusted your work plans in light of COVID. 

See the sections below for more detailed suggestions about describing the impacts on your work.

Use your discretion when deciding which, if any, personal details to share (e.g., unavailability of dependent care, your or your family members’ health information, etc.). You are not required to disclose any such information if you do not want to.

The next sections provide suggestions about the types of professional impacts that you might wish to include, in the areas of research, teaching, and service.

Impact on Research and Scholarly or Creative Works

Here are some examples of the types of impacts that you might describe related to your research and scholarly or creative works:

  • Cancellation of conferences, invited seminars, performances, exhibitions, and artist/scholar-in-residence appointments.
  • New avenues in research and discovery that you discovered as the result of a COVID pivot.
  • Changes in the availability of laboratories, studios, libraries, field work sites, human subjects, performance spaces, archives, or other resources.
  • Delays in the turnaround time for grants and publications, or contract cancellations due to press closures or restrictions.
  • Creation and monitoring of COVID-19 safety protocols in labs or other facilities.
  • Cancellation or delays in receiving research suppliers.
  • Leave of absence delayed, interrupted, or altered.
  • Grant funding forced to be spent on students who cannot make expected progress, or time spent redefining how to achieve research objectives under the grant.
  • Delays in arrivals or visits of international collaborators (faculty, students, postdocs).
Sample Text

(Examples throughout this page are adapted from the University of Maryland ADVANCE Center, compiled from Lehigh faculty focus groups, and quoted from statements submitted by Lehigh faculty who have given permission to share portions of their narratives.)

"I oversaw the pivot of all grant-sponsored workshops that were intended to be delivered in person to the online environment. Successfully transitioning all of our content and curriculum to an online platform included developing a new, web-based interactive curriculum and required we ensure the audience members had access to the internet and tools to participate in a virtual learning environment. Initial evaluation results indicate that the online intervention was successful, with participants reporting a 10% increase pre to post in their efficacy. Although we saw some program attrition, and the implementation timeline was delayed, overall the results indicate extra effort in this area brought positive results. Some of the interactive strategies will remain for future programming that takes place in person. "

“Multiple funded research field trips, valued in millions of dollars, were postponed or outright canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The causes vary but include ballooning costs, backlogged projects, lack of specialized staff, and efforts to avoid COVID outbreaks in foreign countries and close quarters. For example, our plans for fieldwork had to be abandoned when costs more than doubled relative to pre-COVID quotes used for budgeting. On top of this loss, my students, collaborators, and I could not access one critical field site for 1.5 years. Other fieldwork has been rescheduled with reduced scientific objectives or increased resource demands. For example, three members of my research laboratory each had to spend more than two weeks in isolation at a hotel in early 2021 before participating in a month-long research trip. Although I am grateful that our expedition was able to happen at all, this isolation time amounts to 1.5 months of salary costs spent outside the laboratory. These challenges are creating new problems as there is pressure to accomplish project aims with less time and resources.”

“One of my research projects requiring a trip that was scheduled for 2021 was canceled outright, due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. My Ph.D student was forced to shift the focus of much of his dissertation as a result. Fortunately, the funder accepted a new proposal at a new location in 2023, which will engage other students.”

“Salaries of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students funded by external grants had to be used to support them through closures, instead of supporting research in the laboratory and collecting data as intended. Some of these essential personnel re-evaluated their career goals and decided to resign or shorten their positions. This phenomenon is widespread.”

Impact on Teaching, Mentoring, and Advising

Here are some examples of the types of impacts that you might describe related to your teaching, mentoring, and advising:

  • Moving of classes online, and the resulting time taken away from scholarship.
  • Impact on student evaluations.
  • Invisible labor in caring for or mentoring students, in addition to usual workload.
  • Coverage of another faculty member’s course for some period of time while they were out on medical leave, and the resulting time taken away from scholarship.
  • Additional one-on-one research student mentoring was required because group meetings could not take place.
Sample Text

“I participated in 10 hours of workshops through my professional association and the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine related to inclusive pedagogy and high-quality teaching in the virtual environment. I supported my colleagues in applying these tools and participated in five college-wide sessions on strategies for online engagement, and I led a sixth session in use of clickers to liven up Zoom sessions. Additionally, my department determined that the nature of my course made online teaching of the class size impossible. At my department chair’s request, I agreed to teach double the sections with half as many students each, so although the amount of grading was the same, I spent twice as many hours in actual class time. One section was early in the morning, to accommodate students in Asia, and one section was at night, to accommodate students who had to share computers with younger siblings and/or parents also learning/working from home.”

“Online teaching remained the norm into the first half of 2021. Summertime, normally devoted to advancing research activities, became a time to learn how to be effective at remote teaching.”

“The situation required not just one pivot to online learning, but repeated pivots as the mode of instruction alternated not only between semesters, but class to class depending on the number of COVID-19 positive students. In reality, teaching the same course Spring 2020, Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 was really three different preps.”

“Mentoring and advising students online also required learning new strategies to connect and maintain engagement. Although teaching has now returned to an in-person format, COVID impacts linger still as outbreaks require students to stay at home. Developing strategies to accommodate common student absences now demands an additional effort that was not necessary pre-COVID.”

“In addition to changes and increased demands in providing students mentorship, I feel my own experience obtaining mentorship and establishing relationships in this period was a challenge. Having just arrived to campus a year prior, I expected it to take some time to become embedded into the collegial fabric of our department and campus. However, the switch to remote work and isolation protocols when on campus has led to fewer strong department and university network ties compared to the experiences of colleagues of non-pandemic cohorts. This disconnect has impacted or stalled the development of my local reputation as a researcher, as senior and established colleagues have mostly (and generously) been interacting with me as someone who needs support. I've found and taken avail of several national online communities to remain intellectually connected. While building my scholarly identity this way took additional work and time to sustain online research relationships, I have been able to receive research related mentorship while growing my network of critical external mentors and colleagues who are knowledgeable of my scholarly potential and contributions.  My internal research relationships are now, several years later, starting to slowly come into being.”

Impact on Service, Leadership, and DEI Work

Here are some examples of the types of impacts that you might describe related to your service, leadership, and DEI work:

  • Increase in service workload due to staffing shortages and increased demand by students, and the resulting time taken away from scholarship.
  • Delays or other difficulties in coordinating committee meetings, obtaining external resources, etc.
  • New committees formed to respond to pandemic-related challenges.
  • Additional trainings, workshops, or other preparations that you undertook in response to the pandemic.
  • Social-emotional mentoring of other faculty, staff, and students who needed additional support.
Sample Text

“I served on a newly created committee, which met once a week for 12 weeks to discuss accommodations that could be made within the department related to the extra burden to faculty and staff in caregiving roles during the pandemic.”

“As the director for undergraduate studies, I led the transition of all campus visits to the virtual environment, including training 10 undergraduate student ambassadors on how to host virtual campus visits for incoming students.”

“I facilitated 3 college listening sessions on the climate for Black students in May and June of the year after the protests for racial justice. I have subsequently hosted two Zoom sessions from noted diversity, equity, and inclusion experts in our field to give department members strategies for enhancing DEI in their classrooms.”

“In confidential surveys, over half of my students indicated increased stress and anxiety due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The emotional toll of the pandemic manifests in some students as a difficulty to concentrate, sleep issues, and increased worry about their own health and well-being as well as that of their friends and family. Students at all levels have experienced social isolation that has limited their ability to make professional connections at a pivotal time in their career paths. They are keenly aware of this loss. These situations impact learning and discovery in negative ways, and they have increased the time I dedicate to supporting students.”

“The pandemic also required unprecedented effort to develop protocols to gain and maintain access to university facilities, while preventing the spread of the virus and keeping everyone safe. I dedicated significant efforts in summer 2020 to develop protocols that were used as a model to safely use research laboratories in the department; and these models helped others across campus.”

Personal Impacts

In general, we advise against dwelling on personal information, impacts, and situations in your COVID impact statement. It is certainly true that faculty members’ personal lives were deeply affected by the pandemic, especially if they had caregiving roles. It is also true that BIPOC and female faculty members suffered disproportionate impacts during this time. At the same time, personal impacts from COVID-19 are not always relevant to a candidate’s narrative about the impact of the pandemic on their career.

Guidance for Evaluators

(The following guidance is aimed at both internal evaluators (i.e., Lehigh faculty who are evaluating other Lehigh faculty) and external evaluators.)

Lehigh University’s standards for tenure, promotion, and other reviews have not changed on account of the pandemic. However, we recognize that the pandemic affected all faculty members’ productivity in research, teaching, and/or service in some way. We also recognize that faculty members experienced many different effects—both positive and negative—and that the magnitude of these effects varied greatly based on factors such as academic discipline, research methods, personal and professional obligations, and personal identities. 

The COVID impact statement is not an excuse-making document; it is not an explanation for not meeting tenure and promotion standards. Instead, it can provide important context about a faculty member’s accomplishments and the timing of those achievements during the pandemic, given the changing constraints and available opportunities. 

Please use the following guidelines in reviewing COVID impact statements:

  1. The COVID impact statement should be acknowledged as an important part of the candidate’s dossier. Read it carefully to contextualize the candidate’s case.

  2. Accept the stated impacts as truth. Extend candidates the benefit of the doubt and assume that they prioritized their efforts in reasonable ways given their unique situation.

  3. Evaluate the candidate’s accomplishments based on the information that is provided. Do not make inferences or judgments about the candidate’s situation.

  4. Do not consider the candidate’s time to tenure/promotion in your evaluation. Tenure extensions have been granted for a variety of valid reasons, which do not require any further assessments of validity.

  5. Consider each impact statement only in relation to the faculty member who submitted it. Making comparisons among candidates (current, past, or future) is inappropriate and can introduce bias.

  6. Recognize that impacts may be ongoing and/or changing over time. Some impacts may affect a faculty member’s work for many years to come.

  7. As argued in a report by the University of Michigan’s ADVANCE program, do not let the 25% of faculty who were able to be more productive during the pandemic set the standard for the 75% who were not able to do so.

Additional Resources
Notes

  • This overview is intended to supplement the information contained in Lehigh’s Rules and Procedures of the Faculty (R&P). If there is a discrepancy between the guidance on this page and R&P, the provisions of R&P govern.

  • Feel free to contact your Department Chair, Associate Dean for Faculty, the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, or the Director of Faculty Affairs with any questions or concerns.