POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

AAUP-OSU Statement on the COVID-19 Crisis: What Does OSU Value and How Should It Respond?

COVID-19 has led to unprecedented challenges to the work and wellbeing of those at The Ohio State University, and these pressures will continue to be felt in the months and years ahead. In their communications over the past several weeks, President Michael Drake, Provost Bruce McPheron, and other university leaders have emphasized community and the need for flexibility as a way of managing the ongoing crisis. They have also emphasized that the university’s main goal in crisis management plans will be to protect its mission of excellence in research and teaching. We at AAUP-OSU strongly support these principles of community, flexibility, and the centrality of the research and teaching mission and would like to see them as the foundations of all decision-making going forward.

To those ends, we are holding a Day of Solidarity on Friday, April 24^th on behalf of adjunct faculty and graduate students, who have been undercompensated during the crisis.

Additionally, we ask three things of university leadership:

(1)   that budgetary decisions prioritize the security of the most economically vulnerable members of our community, including adjunct faculty and graduate students;

(2)   that strategic financial planning, as well as changes to methods and timelines of instruction, be fully transparent and coordinated with those most affected (faculty, staff, and students), continuously and at multiple stages of the process; and

(3)   that the current necessary, systemic rethinking of operations be considered as an opportunity to recommit to the university’s academic core mission of teaching and research, and an opportunity to reverse administrative bloat and to curb spending on athletic buildings and other capital projects.

The AAUP-OSU endorses the budgetary approach offered in a recent petition to ASC College Dean Gretchen Ritter, “Trim the Branches, Not the Roots,” as a viable strategy and the most just program for going forward, and the one most mindful of the university’s core research and teaching mission. Leaders at several other institutions have already committed to making cuts to high-earner administrative salaries, raises, and bonuses as an essential crisis-management strategy. We urge this solution as an alternative to starting with cuts in compensation where they are likely to be most deeply felt. We are especially concerned for adjunct faculty, many of whom lack adequate pay and healthcare benefits and whose employment insecurity has been exacerbated by the current crisis. As the chair of the national AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession states in an article this week on contingent faculty precarity, “The present crisis offers an opportunity to pause and imagine a better way forward, as the adjunct status quo is not sustainable.” We are also concerned for graduate students, who have received no assurances of compensatory long-term funding for interrupted programs of study.

The AAUP-OSU recognizes the dramatic financial uncertainties that the pandemic situation entails. Yet The Ohio State University community deserves a full and ongoing accounting that does not simply use a projected decrease in state funding as a rationale for cuts to its central teaching and research mission.  Such decreases need to be considered in the larger context of all revenues, all expenditures, federal stimulus aid, and the relatively small percentage of funding derived from the state.

For the benefit of our students, the AAUP-OSU requests timely notice of changes to instructional methods, such as a shift to full or hybrid online teaching in Autumn 2020, along with the necessary resources for implementing these changes and a collaborative consideration of differential effects. If The Ohio State University is to continue to be a leader in education, instructors will need fair warning months in advance in order to deliver the best instruction possible, as well as access to adequate equipment. Additionally, the effects of online instruction on regional campuses and in departments that traditionally rely on face-to-face instruction will need to be carefully weighed so that all units remain capable of offering excellent, versatile instruction.

Finally, the AAUP-OSU requests that all members of The Ohio State University’s post-pandemic operations task force be publicized and that this committee issue regular and timely updates, as it is making vital decisions about the life and working conditions of faculty, staff, and students.

We are eager to chart a path forward that will maintain the strength of The Ohio State University for all.

Signed,

Executive Board, AAUP-OSU

John Blackburn, Associate Professor, Fisher College of Business

Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Molly Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of English

Richard Fletcher, Associate Professor, Department of Arts Education, Administration and Policy

Margaret Flinn, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian

Jill Galvan, Associate Professor, Department of English

Pranav Jani, Associate Professor, Department of English

Douglas Macbeth, Faculty Emeritus, Department of Educational Studies

James Mulick, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pediatrics

Andrej Rotter, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pharmacology

Julianne Taaffe, Instructor, English as a Second Language Program

Lisa Voigt, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Charles Wilson, Professor Emeritus, Moritz College of Law

 

Actions

On April 24, we ask supporters to participate in any and all of these actions:

–Read, sign, and share the AAUP Statement (LINK ABOVE) as an individual or representative of an organization. We are collecting signatures until May 15.

–Write an email to the OSU Board of Trustees — board@osu.edu — asking them to compensate contingent faculty and graduate students for their extra week of teaching. (See this letter to the administration for an example: http://ow.ly/9CaK50zmrSR).

–Social Media Action #1: Wear red and share a photo, a solidarity statement, and/or your own story about teaching at Ohio State (or elsewhere). Use the hashtags #OSUSolidarityDay, #OneFaculty, #PutPeopleFirst, #Buckeyes4Teachers and #Red4Ed

–Social Media Action #2: Post to hashtags being used by the university community, including #TogetherAsBuckeyes, #InThisTogetherOhio and #BuckeyeBound

–May Day Teach-in. Make plans to attend a state-wide teach-in on May 1, organized by the Ohio Conference AAUP: http://ow.ly/c1XS50zmrSQ

Contact

Please email us at osuaap@gmail.com to list your organization as an endorser of this call, or to join the AAUP.

AAUP-OSU Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/osuaaup