Dear Colleagues,
External disruptions — such as industry strikes, natural disasters, and global health crises — have the potential to impact faculty teaching, research or service. During the challenging times we are currently facing, external disruptions can also include abrupt grant cancellations and changes to funding priorities at the federal level. In recognition, we remind faculty that they may apply Achievement Relative to Opportunity (ARO) when preparing and reviewing academic personnel files for merit and/or promotion reviews. ARO principles, originally outlined in the Joint Senate-Administration Mitigating COVID-19 Impacts on Faculty Working Group Final Report (2022), “enable merit and promotion reviews to evaluate candidates fairly based on their individual review-period professional accomplishments by taking into account unexpected or disruptive circumstances during that period that may have curtailed the candidate’s normal ability to achieve expected outcomes."
If you have encountered such circumstances, we encourage you to describe impacts in your candidate self-statement to contextualize these disruptions while highlighting your adaptive strategies, alternative contributions and overall academic impact. Faculty are also encouraged to consult with their chairs to explore potential opportunities to adjust their file in response to disruptions.
It is recommended that evaluations and letters from review committees, chairs and deans provide context on department-wide or discipline-wide impacts and should evaluate academic files holistically, ensuring that ARO principles are integrated into considerations for a proposed merit and/or promotion action. Specifically, they should:
