We are required to submit a statement on how the pandemic has affected our work. And now the administration has the power to terminate unproductive people. Putting those two things together, it would be unwise to point to one's lack of productivity in a "Covid impact statement." This is the problem with the supposedly benevolent will of the institution. They have to take into account what you say in your statement for the annual evaluation, so they could go easy on you for that, but still fire you.
The constant drumbeat of DEIB (with "belonging" the new term here) is also at cross-purposes to the new power of dismissal. Wouldn't the dismissal of a single tenured person in a protected category severely undermine all pretense of caring about diversity?
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Caring about diversity isn't caring about diversity. It's putting on a show of caring, primarily to attract new graduate students and also, importantly, to provide plausible deniability in case of any lawsuits or other complaints.
If someone says in a COVID statement that they had to do 24/7 childcare while teaching from home, then they can be fired for having children while female, right? And we're back to the pretty recent past.
The problem for us isn't that we can be fired for being unproductive, it's that we can be fired for ANY reason, for the sake of "flexibility" and "agility" on the part of the institution, and we do not get to know why we, in particular, were chosen.
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