From Shared Governance to Shared Leadership: Our COVID Response to Faculty Evaluation, Support, and Advancement

Abstract

As a state comprehensive university in a small, midwestern metropolitan area, “Students First” is more than a slogan. The preamble to our Faculty Constitution and our University’s mission statement both specify that students and their flourishing are the justification for our institution’s existence. We have learned, however, that a precondition to robust attention to students’ well-being is parallel attention to the well-being and development of our faculty. This article chronicles the principles and practices by which our shared leadership team responded to unique challenges presented by the COVID crisis and its ripple effects. A closing theme acknowledges that COVID revealed latent, pre-existing gaps in our care for faculty and students as well as introducing new and temporary challenges, and that some of our resulting solutions may require institutionalization as permanent fixtures.