BY ALEX ZUKAS
Like many other university administrations across the United States, National University in San Diego, CA, is using the COVID-19 crisis as cover to enact draconian measures, some of which were mentioned on this blog in July 2020. Most recently, the university is requiring faculty to sign a liability waiver to access their offices or teach on campus. Moreover, they have sold an administrative building off campus where many faculty had offices, and faculty have been ordered to vacate their office space by the end of May 2021. However, they will not let faculty in to clean out their offices unless they sign the waiver. The waiver goes well beyond the threat posed by congregating in the era of COVID-19. Here is a relevant section:
1. ASSUMPTION OF THE RISK. My choice to participate in this Activity is knowing, voluntary, and made through my personal preference. I understand that participation in the Activity involves inherent risks and dangers of accidents, exposure to contracting infectious and potentially deadly diseases, including but not limited to, COVID-19, rescue operations, emergency treatment, property loss or damage, serious personal or bodily injury, death, severe personal and economic losses. These may result not only from my own actions, inactions, or negligence, but also from the actions, inactions, or negligence of others, or the conditions of the facilities, equipment, or vehicles. Further, there may be other risks not known to me or reasonably foreseeable at this time. I understand and I have considered the risks involved, and I voluntarily choose to assume these risks.
2. RELEASE FROM LIABILITY. I fully and forever release and discharge NU and its respective affiliates, directors, officers, trustees, employees, agents, and insurers, and all others involved in the Activity from any and all injuries (including infection or death), losses, damages, claims (including negligence claims), demands, lawsuits, expenses, and any other liability of any kind, of or to me, my property, or any other persons, directly or indirectly arising out of in connection with my participation in the Activity, even if it is due to the negligence, injudicious act, omission, or other fault of NU.
Though the preamble states that the university is “committed” to fulfilling its legal obligations to maintain a safe work and school environment, the document appears to be a way of releasing the university from liability for any harm that might happen to someone on campus or in their office, whether related to COVID-19 or not. That is, the release absolves NU from any responsibility or liability that may occur when a faculty member enters his or her office or classroom and, say, a ceiling tile falls on their head and injures them. This waiver has the most tenuous connection with COVID-19. If it were truly a COVID-19 waiver, it could be limited to any liability that might arise from contracting COVID-19 on university property. Clearly, the pandemic is simply a pretense to require faculty to assume all liability for any problems with the condition of the university’s physical plant. It is not only unacceptable; it is also a violation of the university’s obligation to provide a safe and secure workplace for faculty and learning space for students. I have it on good authority that students have to sign a similar waiver to access physical classrooms and lab. While signing the waiver is repeatedly stated as “voluntary,” this is a fiction. Many students and faculty assigned to onsite classrooms and labs at NU, and faculty wanting to access materials in their offices, believe they have little choice but to sign the waiver.
The practice of requiring a liability waiver at universities is so widespread that, starting last year, lawyers started giving advice to students and faculty not to sign these waivers. While it appears that the waivers may not hold up in court, they are part of a larger trend among American universities to use the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the erosion of commonly-accepted governance and workplace-safety norms and to provide cover for actions that reduce faculty’s sense that the university is working with them and not against them, that higher education is a common enterprise. National University took this trend farther by including in its waiver situations that have nothing to do with COVID-19 to enhance a general sense of insecurity and unease among faculty. Imagine going to a workplace that says above the door, “Enter at your own risk.” If the university will not guarantee a safe work environment as a basic provision of academic labor, what other basic provisions of faculty life and work (shared governance and academic freedom, for example) will it also no longer guarantee? The waiver that National University is asking faculty and students to sign is not reasonable risk management in the era of COVID-19; it is an abdication of responsibility.
Guest blogger Alex Zukas is president of the National University Chapter of the AAUP.
Could their be a more heinous representation of the “corporatization of higher education” than these waivers?
When I saw the headline ““Egregious Administrative Action..” I immediately thought of National U. I was a “Core Certified” online Full Professor adjunct for NU for over 11 years, until I was not renewed a few years ago. Although I had EXCELLENT student evaluations (and won several teaching awards) and an INCOMPARABLE Research and Service, I was let go without explanation The Chair wrote: “Take care.”).
I speculated on the reasons for this injustice and thought it may have had to do with my legitimate filings for overtime pay, after California’s Labor Board decided that adjunct were entitled to it. Finally, after shaming the NU Attorney to state the reasons on the record, I was sent a letter that basically said that I had given a few students grades of “F” for failing to complete their coursework, actions that were MANDATED by university policy documents. Even if those students were offered an Incomplete, most never finished so they failed. That caused them to appeal the grade through channels and my grade was ALWAYS upheld by the administration. So, in short, I was non-renewed for following proper procedure and maintaining academic standards. (For the record, NU is a FOR-profit institution that relies heavily on tuition dollars, so if students flunk out, funds are lost.)
So, using COVID as an excuse for demanding waivers is no surprise to me.
I am sorry to hear what happened to you, Frank. While the NU administration prides itself on having an entrepreneurial approach to education that resonates well with the for-profit sector of higher ed, NU was incorporated in 1971 as a private, non-profit university and has remained so ever since. However, even in San Diego where NU has been headquartered for 50 years, folks think it is a for-profit university because of the entrepreneurial, “business-first,” ethos and practices of its administrators. its over-reliance on adjuncts to teach courses, and its practice of putting the full-time faculty (who, by the way, have agitated for tenure over the past few years to no avail) on long-term contracts. None of this changes the substantive points you made. I just wanted to clarify the more narrow point of NU’s legal status for the public record.
Excellent post; thank you for reporting on what is, indeed, a very troubling act by university administrations. It is important to appreciate that this waiver is, however, part of what is effectively, a “waiver chain letter” that starts with the pharmaceutical companies themselves: the vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson, were filed as “experimental.” They are not approved, are registered as “gene therapy” and administered (actually printed on the bottle) strictly under an “emergency” authority, and they have blanket legal immunity from the US DOJ. Moreover, most high-profile college Board of Trustee, Regents, Fellows and Directors, have already demanded and received liability protection and legal immunity for any legal actions related to campus biosecurity including vaccines, or even psychological effects from distancing or quarantine. Then, all the university officers have been likewise “immunized” and have protections far beyond those of the academy. For them, the real “vaccine” is a corporate Board-certified Indemnification without limit. The waivers being forced on faculty are otherwise legally violative and torts. You are being asked to waive your rights, and blackmailed to do so (refusing access to your office, work, or personal files and property). I would recommend that faculty retain competent legal advice before even acknowledging these documents. The entire “Covid” campus strategy is a proverbial “third rail” of legal liability that no one wants to even touch. What should this tell you? Readers may appreciate my recent article on this larger matter: https://www.dissidentprof.com/8-home/169-why-are-universities-pushing-covid-vaccination. Regards, ’96, University of Chicago; ’84, University of Texas at Austin. Former Guest Lecturer, Northwestern, Boston, and DePaul Universities.