POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
The following video press conference featured faculty members from AAUP chapters in the Midwest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL3NIwdQDsk&feature=youtu.be.
This coalition of AAUP chapter’s has a website at https://midwestaaupdocs.wordpress.com/about/.
That website prominently includes the following statement on “Protecting Lives, Promoting Education: Principles for Reopening Campuses”:
We are a coalition of American Association of University Professors chapters and other faculty organizations representing faculty from universities across the Midwest. Faculty, staff, students, and community members at our schools are profoundly concerned that so many of our campuses are planning to physically reopen campus in the Fall, given the almost assured potential to launch a superspreader event that will harm, or even kill, members of our communities.
As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the US, and as ordinary people express their grief and rage against systemic police brutality against Black and Brown people, we recognize that the crises we face today are connected. Universities are among the largest employers in our states. Outbreaks at our universities will affect not only our campuses, but our entire regional communities—especially people who are structurally disadvantaged. Working-class communities of color, particularly Black communities, disproportionately suffer and perish from systemic inequities in all arenas, including public health and “public safety.” Our concerns are rooted in our responsibility to ensure our students an excellent education and to promote the well-being not only of students, faculty and staff, but also of the communities in which campuses are embedded.
Universities’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis are imperiling public health and the future of higher education. Our coalition calls on university, regional, and state leadership to safeguard our communities with the following actions:
–Defend shared governance. Faculty participation in decisions affecting the educational mission has been inconsistent, incomplete, and inadequate during this crisis. Outside mandated collective bargaining, institutions are soliciting only informal expressions of opinion from the faculty, or individual faculty members, rather than formal procedures of joint action or determination. Most concerning, some institutions act as though, because of the urgency of making decisions posed by the COVID-19 crisis, they must suspend the norms of shared governance. Indeed, some institutions are mandating that faculty and instructors meet for face-to-face classes despite the public health risks and violations of faculty and instructors’ academic freedom.
As the AAUP has long held, an institution’s faculty “has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” Because of this vital and foundational responsibility, faculty members must maintain the ability to teach their courses however they determine best helps their students meet their learning objectives, and to deliver those courses in a manner that they see fit. In addition, faculty bodies, not administrators, must continue to govern the development and oversight of all curricular programs.
–Engage employees in decision-making. Just as faculty must be primary agents in any decisions regarding academic programs, other employees must be core constituents in any reopening plan that affects their working conditions and expectations. Employees in maintenance, dining, residence halls, transportation, offices, and all areas of our campuses must have a say in how we move through this crisis together.
–Ensure workers’ economic security. Given the dire economic recession the COVID-19 crisis has catalyzed, universities must protect the employment, wages, and benefits of all their workers. During a pandemic, in an employment context where universities are regional drivers of economic stability and health insurance is usually contingent on employment, protecting the economic security of university workers is critical to sustaining regional communities. We are particularly concerned about protecting hourly, temporary, and contingent workers who may have high exposure risks to both coronavirus and economic instability, and workers who are managing additional caretaking responsibilities for children, elders, and ill family members.
–Prevent workload increases. Universities must recognize the new burdens that the pandemic foists upon faculty, including increased class sizes, greater course preparation time as faculty are often asked to create both online and face-to-face models of the same class, and the extra workload of managing an online and/or socially distanced university setting. Savings achieved through faculty cuts not only harm the often lower-paid faculty members losing their jobs during a pandemic, but increase workloads for the remaining faculty who teach their students.
–Reject false economizing. The current health and economic crisis should not be used as an opportunity to justify more cuts to our already endangered public education systems. Nor should our institutions’ missions be further swerved to benefit private investment at the expense of students and our communities. Especially in times of uncertainty, education and research pursued at institutions of higher learning must be supported as crucial to the future health and prosperity of the Midwest.
–Protect the vulnerable. Our most vulnerable workers disproportionately represent racially minoritized communities who bear the risks of COVID-19 and economic inequality more heavily. We ask that universities and colleges draw from reserves, cut only when necessary only from the top, and restructure budgets, redistributing funds downward to maintain educational quality and cover shortfalls for the most vulnerable workers. Lower-paid, economically vulnerable workers should be protected from layoffs and furloughs.
We know that university administrations recognize the moral and economic position they serve for our communities. Given the poor federal leadership and variable state leadership in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic recession, and the outpourings of collective grief and rage rippling through the nation and world, universities and colleges have a responsibility to lead ethically. Again, even as we focus on our response to COVID-19, we recognize the interconnections among these crises and their deep roots in systemic, structural inequalities. We call on our universities and colleges to enable future flourishing of our communities by protecting health, safety, and economic well-being in ways that leave no one behind.
Signed:
Chapters and Unions
Bowling Green State University AAUP Chapter
Indiana University, Bloomington AAUP Chapter
Indiana University, South Bend AAUP Chapter
Miami University AAUP Chapter
Northeastern Illinois University, University Professionals of Illinois (faculty union), NEIU Chapter
Northwestern University AAUP Chapter
Ohio State University AAUP Chapter
Ohio University AAUP Chapter
Purdue University-Fort Wayne AAUP Chapter
Purdue University-West Lafayette AAUP Chapter
School of the Art Institute of Chicago AAUP Chapter (pending)
University of Cincinnati AAUP Chapter
United Faculty-AAUP at the University of Northern Iowa
University of Illinois, Chicago United Faculty-AAUP
University of Iowa AAUP Chapter
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee AAUP Chapter
Wright State University AAUP Chapter
State Conferences
Georgia State Conference of the AAUP
Indiana AAUP State Conference
Ohio AAUP State Conference
Wisconsin AAUP State Conference
It is important to appreciate that the AAUP, and other teacher’s unions, are the Top Three biggest contributors to the DNC. They have turned the “Covid” phenomenon into a labor grievance opportunity, even demanding a laundry list of commitments including the removal of competitive charter schools, a wealth tax, and medicare for all. The Nation’s teachers and professors have turned into an arm of the DNC, and are using students as bait, and a sacrificial offering. Moreover, by forcing parents to home school, or host at-home learning, the unions–and DNC–are trying to extort compliance with their demands through economic disruption. It is really a fantastic mendacity, and underscores why families are fighting back, and why higher education is fighting a desperate, losing battle. The union members will all be replaced: Permanently, like Reagan’s successful confrontation with federal workers who went on strike.
First, this whole ideologically fevered but very tired argument is based on a fundamental inaccuracy. The national AAUP does not make political contributions, never mind contributions on the scale that you are asserting. Some state conferences and chapters may make such contributions but they are in the minority. For instance, in Ohio, the state conference has made only its second endorsement ever–of Joel D’Orisio, a member at BGSU who is a candidate for a state Senate seat–and has never made any direct political contributions except to defeat Senate bill 5, Kasich’s attack on the union rights of public employees in Ohio that singled out faculty for the complete elimination of their bargaining rights. The only AAUP-associated PAC in Ohio is one that our chapter formed three years ago, the SmartALEC(k) PAC whose mission is to support candidates for state office who have records of supporting public higher ed and collective bargaining rights. Period. I believe that the only chapter that has sometimes made direct contributions to political candidate has been the University of Cincinnati chapter.
Given the constant revelations of rampant corruption and abysmal academic results among for-profit universities and corporate charter schools, including massive double-dipping on the stimulus aid in response to the pandemic, given the incredible federal mismanagement of the response to the pandemic and the enormous cost in lives and the enormous economic impact, and given how little of the average university budget is now allocated to instruction since our institutions began to be operated, supposedly, as businesses are operated, with students directly bearing the bulk of the cost, your defense of all of these “innovations” in education policy rings very hollowly, at best.
Your assertions about being out of touch apply more to your own truisms than to our attitudes and positions.