BY CAROLYN BETENSKY

I’ve been spending the past two weeks speaking with colleagues who teach at public and private colleges and universities in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas.  All of these states are led by governors or legislatures that have demonstrated varying degrees of hostility to protective policies against the spread of COVID.  To the (not very great) extent that any of these institutions have faculty unions, the unions do not have the strength to take on their administrations, let alone their state officials.  This is not to say that faculty have not been vocal in their opposition to these policies; some have organized themselves and taken bold stands.

Institutions in the states I’ve named above are by no means the only ones at which faculty (and students and staff) face dim prospects for the prevention of the transmission of COVID.  Today’s news is that the University of Iowa is attempting to ban faculty from speaking about vaccination or mask-wearing in their classrooms unless they are teaching health-related material.  (The Academe blog will publish a piece on this shortly.)  At Cornell University, meanwhile, faculty – even faculty with health vulnerabilities — are being told explicitly that they will not be allowed to request virtual teaching assignments.  While faculty in red states tend to be the least protected, the example of Cornell suggests that Republican-led states do not the field to themselves.

My title comes directly from a Facebook posting by a colleague who wishes not to be identified.  He teaches at Louisiana State University, where vaccination is not required of any campus employees, students, or visitors.  Last year, the university instituted a policy of social distancing for classes of over one hundred students, regardless of the capacity of the classroom in which they were held.  This year, even this minimally responsible policy has been discontinued.  Whereas last year faculty officially taught in person, the administration did not insist on it; this fall, despite the fact that they are now going to be exposed to the even more virulent delta variant, faculty must be physically present.  Only with ADA accommodations – for which the committee reading applications is currently running at a three-week delay – may instructors be exempted from in-person teaching.  As the policy stands, if a student can’t show vaccination (or recent recovery from infection), they have to get tested once a month, far less often than the CDC recommends.  Not only is this testing regime essentially meaningless, but further, there appears to be no corresponding enforcement or accountability mechanism.

Courses requiring group transportation in close quarters (i.e., in vans) to research sites put faculty and students especially at risk.  Although there is a mask mandate, the lack of social distancing or vaccination protocols means that the fall semester looks hazardous for everyone, but especially for those with underlying health conditions or with immunosuppressed loved ones or young children in their care.  Faculty are currently struggling to make their demands heard.

At public institutions of higher education in Georgia, there is little local control.  Universities and colleges are controlled by the Board of Regents, all of whom are appointed by the governor.  This fall, at the University of Georgia, no vaccinations, masking, or social distancing will be required, and all faculty must report for duty in person.  Faculty may ask students politely to wear masks, but they are forbidden to ask them about their vaccination status.  Last year, a minority of instructional faculty at the University of Georgia were allowed to teach remotely, but this concession to those with medical conditions is not being made this year.  In at least one public institution in Georgia, faculty with medical vulnerabilities were not permitted to teach online last year, either, and the colleague I spoke with told me of a former graduate student who was forced to resign from her job because her livelihood had come in conflict with her wish to continue living.

Faculty at the University of Georgia have written petitions and formed committees aimed at creating safe, or at least safer, working conditions on their campus.  Organizing is hard in a state in which many think unions are illegal (they are not).  Graduate students and staff do have unions, but their power is limited.  The pandemic itself has made basic conversation among colleagues a rarity; the unsafe working conditions have succeeded at keeping faculty apart.

While faculty at public institutions in Georgia are facing exposure to COVID in their workplace, faculty at the private Emory University have had some success in organizing themselves and securing a safer campus for the fall.  The administration had already mandated vaccinations for students, but no such vaccination requirement existed for faculty and staff.  Clifton Crais, Professor of History, circulated a petition using a faculty-only listserv that had been set up after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Emory administration began shuttering academic departments and programs.  The petition demanded full vaccination for all campus constituencies, and it garnered numerous faculty signatures.  Crais reports that in the wake of the petition drive, the administration has changed its policy to include faculty and staff in its mandate, albeit with a somewhat vague deadline for its implementation.

To be continued…

Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, an AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.