Responding to Your Questions About Summer

Over the last week, I’ve received questions about the Summer 2020 Full-Time Faculty Pay Plan. In the spirit of openness and transparency, I want to spend some space here addressing them and also look forward to your questions during this week’s Zoom office hours.

First, I want to set the pre-pandemic institutional context:

• Budget—Enrollment had not reached the optimistic target set last spring during the budget process, and as a result, when I arrived in January, NOVA was addressing a $12M budget shortfall for 2019-20. Our college managed the shortfall (chiefly by re-evaluating open positions) but was already anticipating revenue issues in the year ahead. The enrollment and financial results from summer session are included in the fall and spring that follow.
• Summer Enrollment Trends—From 2014-2019, summer enrollment at NOVA declined by about 20%. The continuous year-on-year decreases reflected the overall trend at NOVA and in higher education in general. Thus, even before factoring in the impact of the pandemic, NOVA was anticipating summer enrollment declining another 5%.
• Summer Schedule—NOVA’s published summer schedule has not aligned with its enrollment trends. In summer 2019, 25% of the sections initially scheduled were canceled outright; 15% ran with initial enrollments of fewer than 10 students; another 16% ran with initial enrollments between 10 and 15. A significant percentage of the students in canceled classes do not re-enroll.

Given this pre-pandemic context, when it came time to consider how to re-structure summer 2020 in light of the pandemic, I asked the Provosts and interim Chief Academic Officer to revisit the schedule and draft recommendations for a pay plan that, per VCCS policy, I could take to faculty for review and input (which I subsequently did). Here are the thoughts that framed each document.

Schedule:

• NOVA’s summer schedule needed to factor in both the historic decline (5%) and the larger decline now expected because of the impact of the pandemic.
• Uncertainty about fall enrollment in the current environment and the increasingly negative outlook for the state budget due to COVID-19 meant that the summer schedule would need sustaining enrollments.
• NOVA’s summer schedule should be programmed in a way that limited the number of cancelations. Course cancelations cause incredible disruption for both students and faculty in the best of times and would be especially difficult to manage now.
  The shift to remote learning for summer meant some hands-on classes had to be removed from the schedule and could not be offered.

Summer 2020 Faculty Pay Plan:

• The smaller summer schedule would not be able to support 10 full-pay credit hours for all requesting faculty. If this number did not change, faculty would compete against each other for summer assignments. It seemed more equitable to lower the number of full-pay credit hours on a temporary basis for summer 2020 so that the greatest number of faculty had the opportunity to teach at least six hours at their full-pay.
• Because the full-pay hours were being reduced and summer enrollment is uncertain, prorating courses with lower enrollment seemed like it could be a valuable alternative to canceling them. While certainly not ideal, this temporary measure would limit cancelations, thereby providing faculty with the ability to count on some compensation and students with the ability to count on their courses being offered.
• Full-time faculty should have maximum opportunity to get the six full-pay hours. So, for summer 2020, full-time faculty whose first two courses do not make minimum enrollment or must be prorated should be able to take on adjunct-assigned classes.

The resulting documents—the schedule and the pay plan—work to balance projected enrollment with support for our faculty during a summer session unlike any other, and I am grateful to all who helped draft and redraft them.

Because summer is not part of nine-month faculty base contracts, the pay plan for this session is set every year. The summer 2020 pay plan is a direct response to the impact of the pandemic; it is limited to this summer. I have no intention nor goal to make any of these changes permanent.

I look forward to receiving your questions on the summer pay plan, the overall budget, and all other topics this week. During the Zoom meetings, I’ll also share info about NOVA’s strategies for building the strongest enrollment outlook we can at this challenging time.

Please continue to take care during these difficult days and do not hesitate to reach out to me with any questions at any time—my email is always open.

(PS—If you still have a five ingredient recipe to submit, please send it in! I’ll post the NOVA Five Ingredient Cookbook next Monday.)