BY JULIE SCHMID
The AAUP has issued the following guidance on the reopening of colleges and universities this fall, consistent with existing AAUP policies and standards.
A number of colleges and universities across the country are considering whether to reopen their campuses in the fall. Much of the discussion about reopening has focused on the financial challenges and on the potential impact on enrollments of continuing to offer instruction remotely. The decision to reopen a campus raises not only logistical and health and safety concerns but also concerns about how best to achieve the academic mission both during the COVID-19 pandemic and in its aftermath. The AAUP offers the following guidance on reopening campuses to our chapters, faculty governing bodies, and administrations. As with all the AAUP’s resources related to COVID-19, we will continue to update this guidance as new information becomes available.
- The health and safety of students, faculty, and staff should be the primary consideration in decision-making about when to reopen a campus. Institutions should provide reasonable accommodations for members of the campus community who have underlying health conditions.
- Decisions on how to reopen campuses safely should be driven by guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state departments of health.
- The AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities notes that “the variety and complexity of the tasks performed by institutions of higher education produce an inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students, and others. The relationship calls for adequate communication among these components, and full opportunity for appropriate joint planning and effort.” Decisions related to “such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, . . . and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process,” the Statement also points out, are matters in which “the faculty has primary responsibility.” The faculty and academic staff—through their shared governance bodies or, when applicable, their unions—should accordingly participate in decisions related to how best to implement a return to on-campus instruction. In order to ensure full participation, administrations should be transparent, should keep the faculty fully informed, and should consult meaningfully with existing faculty governance bodies.
- Some institutions are considering moving to a blended instructional model for the 2020–21 academic year. The appropriate faculty governance body and, when applicable, the faculty union should have primary responsibility for determining institutional policies and practices around this form of instruction (for more information, see the AAUP’s Statement on Online and Distance Education).
Julie Schmid is the executive director of the AAUP.
The academy, and especially students and their parents, do not fully understand and appreciate what protocols are actually being designed, and will be enforced, in order to “re-open” college campuses. This applies equally to graduates and undergraduates, faculty, staff and (even) middle administration.
In that regard, it is an especially poignant administrative breakdown–including by Trustees, Regents, Fellows and as in Brown’s case for example, its “Corporation”–in their capacity to conform to standards of professional and other responsibility for their institutional members, by communicating forward plans–that is, what exactly is in store for the university community (in some cases they are financially conflicted by investments in biotech, security systems and software, and sensitive investments in department of defense and DHS projects).
Senior administration, especially at the R1 level including institutions such as the University of Chicago, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, California and others, all know–and are fully cooperating in and even designing– exactly what policy is being formulated and implemented involving a set of oppressive new procedures that will be instituted across the higher education complex (and others). They include testing, screening, inoculating, tracking, REAL ID processing, and full individual data capture including body and facial mapping, and a complete dossier on all congregation, association, affiliation and proximity contact networks. If this sounds “Orwellian” or fascistic, it is.
But it underscores the extent to which the State is running the higher education sector; in this case the CDC is the new Department of Education. Indeed, the university complex was “first out of the gate” back in March (and far earlier in its planning and research roles) in its full and eager cooperation with the Covid program.
And if you don’t cooperate with the new university control standards? Then no degree, no stipend, no classes, no teaching, no salary, no benefits, no retirement; no scholarships or sabbaticals; no leaves of absence; no inter-university visiting privileges; no fellowships, no sports teams; no dorm and dining access; no library entrance; no graduation; no transcripts or recommendations: you are an outcast. The university campus is finally becoming explicitly what it always has been: a processing, control, training, and conditioning center.
There are two new classes in society: safe and unsafe; approved and unapproved; cleared and uncleared; members and outcasts. In a word: your entire world will be turned upside down unless you comply. This is on top of a radical restructuring of knowledge development, capture and transmission by intelligence routines that will largely upend all assumptions concerning Medieval university cultural artifacts such as tenure. Costs are being radically adjusted downward due to university oversupply, endowment losses; student debt market implosion ($2 Trillion, most in default) and especially, the tech sector’s strategic plans to replace human knowledge sourcing with AI (Microsoft’s CEO is not a University of Chicago Trustee because he likes to stroll the Gothic buildings and dine at the ivy and oak Quad Club). Regards, ’96, University of Chicago; ’84, University of Texas at Austin; ’83, Yale University