BY BRIAN CONNOLLY
As universities across the country responded to COVID-19 with various austerity measures, including mass layoffs and furloughs, coupled with an insistence on returning faculty, staff, and students to campus, a group of faculty at the University of South Florida drafted a set of principles and submitted them to the administration. The aim was to emphasize a set of principles focused on health and safety, labor, equity, shared governance, solidarity, and the university as a public good that would critically engage the universities re-opening plans while situating the current crisis in the longer history of the decimation of public higher education in the United States. The principles were submitted to the USF administration on May 27. We share them here as a model for other campuses that may be of help as universities begin to issue their re-opening plans.
Principles for a USF Community Response to the Pandemic
The crisis facing higher education as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic is immense, and its effects will persist long past the 2020-2021 academic year. Public colleges and universities around the country are bracing for budget shortfalls. Some universities have made rash decisions in the short-term, levelling furloughs and across-the-board pay cuts, layoffs, and program closures. USF must be a leader in enacting balanced, ethical, and long-term solutions. Any policies going forward should be driven by USF’s commitment to the university as a public good.
As significant as the acute crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic is, it is situated in a much longer, ongoing crisis of higher education in the United States. This crisis is marked by diminishing state support for universities, enacting several decades of austerity in crafting higher education policy, both at the state level and internal to university management. This has resulted in a shrinking of permanent full-time faculty, an expansion of administrative bureaucracy, rising tuition, ballooning student debt, and assessment policies that do not clearly serve student learning. The response by the University of South Florida to the significant problems arising from the pandemic should not compound the unsustainable austerity measures that have governed public higher education in recent decades.
The following principles should serve as a starting point for USF’s short- and long-term response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Health
In considering the re-opening of the campus, the health and safety of faculty, staff, and students must be the paramount concern. While the financial state of the university is, of course, a significant concern, it cannot be put before the health of the university community. The reopening of the campus must be driven by the best public health advice. It must also consider the needs of various stakeholders in the university who may have concerns with face-to-face campus interaction not only in Fall 2020, but in the following semesters as well. All possible accommodations should be made for vulnerable faculty, staff, and students as long as there continue to be concerns regarding health and safety.
- Solidarity
Solidarity between all faculty, staff, and students is paramount. This includes all faculty (tenured, tenure-track, permanent, contingent, and graduate student instructors), students (undergraduate and graduate students), and staff (administrators, office staff, dining staff, grounds and facilities workers). We must respect all the positions in the ecosystem of the university. In this way, the university community must be approached as a community, in which all groups proportionately share the burdens of the crisis. In planning responses to the COVID-19 crises, all financial resources must be deployed to mitigate adverse effects on university community members. The response should not endanger the primary missions of the university – teaching and research.
- Shared Governance
In planning for both the short term and long term, genuine and critical voices from faculty, staff, and students should have an equal voice with administrators. This means that shared governance must be truly shared. The trend nationally has been for the rule of the university to be consolidated in upper-level administration, thus diminishing the power of other significant community voices. At such a moment of acute crisis, shared governance needs to be reinvigorated, and needs to include representatives from all stakeholders in the university community, as it is those members – faculty, staff, and students – who will be most directly affected by decisions made now and in the future.
- Labor
There should be a recognition of the changed labor conditions across the university. This includes not only the rapid conversion of courses to remote learning in Spring 2020, the conversion of all summer courses to online delivery, but also the uncertain status of courses in 2020-2021. While transforming practices in the short term is necessary, the distribution of labor must be equitable. USF should recognize the extra labor that all faculty have to put into preparing and delivering their courses as well as the increased amount of labor required of academic support staff, who have taken on an inordinate amount of work facilitating this conversion. Equitable principles should recognize the inherent exploitation built into the system – converting a course for a tenured faculty member is much different, from the standpoint of equity, than an adjunct or graduate student instructor doing so for a pay rate that barely meets a living wage. Recognizing that labor conditions for all university staff have been significantly altered, we ask that any new university policies reflect these changed conditions.
- Equity
Any planning going forward must recognize that the structural inequalities that have long marked higher education along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability, have been exacerbated by the pandemic. In all decision-making, the university’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion must be retained. Further, pandemic-enhanced inequalities, such as women being more likely to provide eldercare, childcare and conduct home school instruction than men, will have a significant impact on faculty, staff, and student labor and productivity, and the university must acknowledge and address these inequalities in planning and response. Moreover, students, staff, and faculty will inevitably be further affected by economic precarity, loss of employment or increase in the number of jobs held, and issues surrounding mental health.
- Evaluation
The administration should be lauded for extending the tenure clock and creating a policy for student course evaluations for the Spring 2020 semester. These policies must address a longer-term vision. Many faculty research agendas will be significantly affected for years to come, as new demands for childcare and eldercare impact the time available for research. Restrictions on travel will profoundly affect many research agendas. The significant time spent prepping courses for online delivery has also cut into research productivity. Moreover, these same issues affect graduate students and a policy must be developed that respects not only time to completion, but also potential for extended funding. These issues affect faculty at all ranks and require new policies to guide evaluations.
- Consolidation
In July 2020, USF will become “One University, Geographically Distributed.” The state-imposed mandate to consolidate our three campuses has not been a smooth transition. As one university moving forward, we need to act as one entity that embraces each campus’s individual character while prioritizing the needs of their local communities, shared governance, and an equality of voices to direct university policy. Consolidation in a pandemic should not be cause for disproportionate cuts, budgetary or otherwise, on any campus.
- Privacy, Surveillance, and Intellectual Property
As we move to on-line teaching and meetings, we need to be vigilant of surveillance technologies that encroach on our civil and political rights. The pandemic must not be used to embrace technocratic solutions that justify austerity technologies – increased bio-surveillance of faculty, students and staff, overreliance on standardization policies for teaching and learning, augmented assessment practices, and an outsourcing of labor and expertise to corporate entities that collect and source student, faculty and staff data. At the core of the university experience is the pedagogical relationship between faculty and students and as such the pedagogical principles driving the university through these crises should come from the faculty. The mass conversion of courses to online delivery should be a short-term prospect, ensuring that USF’s primary product remains world-class, in-person education. Finally, the university should respect and commit to transparency regarding each faculty member’s intellectual property rights to instructional materials prepared for remote delivery.
- Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is an essential principle of higher education. However, as the AAUP has demonstrated, it is in times of crisis that it is most frequently abridged. The preceding decade has witnessed multiple egregious attacks on the principles of academic freedom. The university must commit itself fully to the ethical principles of academic freedom, which secure not only individual rights of inquiry for faculty but also the presence of critical discourse in the university itself.
- Public Good
One paramount principle should govern all of our university actions: the university is a public good. As a public university, USF educates a massive number of students, many of whom are working-class, first generation, veteran or active-duty military, minority, and underrepresented populations. Our graduates in turn build and enrich the Tampa Bay region. USF is an economic engine that infuses the state with intelligent, hard-working, empathetic, global citizens. The university must not be governed by a competitive mindset that sets USF against other state universities and colleges. Instead, USF needs to be a leader in building public and political support for the university as a public good that serves all of Florida (and the nation). Acceptance of a zero-sum logic, where state universities compete for dwindling public funds and agree to it as “the new normal,” has had a detrimental effect on the university system and the state of Florida as a whole. In the light of the pandemic, USF must lead by example to offer a new vision that respects all within its ecosystem. A revitalized higher education will follow from the reinvigorated project of the public good and it is in this manner that USF can and should lead.
Guest blogger Brian Connolly is associate professor and chair of the history department at the University of South Florida.
