BY CAROLYN BETENSKY

On Friday, I posted the first part of this survey of what faculty face this fall at institutions in COVID-denialist states.  Part I discussed conditions in Louisiana and Georgia.  Here, I report what I heard from colleagues in Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas.

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At the University of Florida, where no social distancing, masking, or vaccinations are mandated – President Kent Fuchs sent the following remarkable message on August 4 to graduating students and their families:

Dear Graduates, Families and Friends,

We are expecting large crowds for the graduation ceremonies in the O’Dome this Friday and Saturday. On Saturday we expect over 10,000 attendees with every seat occupied and the ceremonies on Friday will each have 3,000 attendees.

Due to the rapid increase in COVID cases, as evident in the graph below, we are making the following changes for the graduation ceremonies. We urge everyone to wear a mask at all times when inside the O’Dome, even if you are vaccinated. Graduates may remove their masks when they are recognized on stage. I will wear a KN95 mask at all times, except when speaking from the podium. We ask anyone who is not vaccinated to reconsider whether you should attend the ceremony. You may place yourself and others at considerable risk if you attend the ceremony and you are unvaccinated. We will accommodate any graduate who wishes to participate in the December ceremonies instead of the ceremonies this week. Guests may watch the ceremonies and recognition of their graduate live online. There will be no processional nor recessional for the graduates. Graduates and their guests will be encouraged to leave the arena as soon as the graduate is recognized on stage in order to minimize crowds at the end of the ceremony. There will be no shaking of hands on the stage. No concessions will be available for sale. I ask every graduate and their guests to do everything possible to keep themselves and those around them safe from this highly contagious and deadly virus. Despite the disappointing impact of COVID on our ceremonies, I offer my many congratulations to all our August graduates.

Warm regards, Kent

This email urging graduating students and their families to stay away was the closest a university leader had come to defying COVID-denialist state authorities.  Then, on August 12, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida offered faculty the opportunity to request to teach their courses online for the first three weeks of the semester; this shift in policy was echoed in a communiqué to students from the university’s vice president for Student Life, D’Andra Mull.  The change was especially good news for faculty with medical vulnerabilities, who had encountered difficulty in acquiring accommodations to exempt them from in-person instruction.  Yet on August 13, the president reversed this decision, announcing that all classes not scheduled as online courses would meet in person.

Currently, COVID positivity rates in Gainesville, and Florida, generally, are skyrocketing, with few beds available in local hospitals.  One faculty member told me how worried she was about the chaos she expected to see unfolding when students return next week.

A young member of the University of Florida faculty told me of their own breakthrough case of COVID.  A family member who worked at the university over the second summer session had tested positive after coming into contact with unmasked students on campus. At least two other vaccinated people known by this family member were infected in a similar manner. Over the summer, they told me, masks had been worn sporadically.  Now they and their family member, both fully vaccinated, are battling “mild” cases of COVID.

Faculty at the University of Wisconsin face a special obstacle in their quest for COVID protections.  While in the initial stages of the pandemic the state legislature did not concern itself with university policies, this year the legislature has passed a law sponsored by Republican State Senator Steve Nass that requires public universities to submit all campus rule-change plans for their approval.  The law passed on August 4, the same day that the Madison campus announced a masking and social-distancing policy.  The former may well overturn the latter.

At the University of Houston, where like at all Texas public universities, vaccination and mask mandates are prohibited, David Mazella, Associate Professor of English, suggested that the political climate is as worrying as practical issues like ventilating classrooms.

Our local government and admin have been pretty good at mitigating risk, but let’s face it, this is Texas. Everyone knows our state government has zero interest in protecting its people, whether it’s floods, power grids, or chemical plants.  So ventilation is a problem, even if we know that people here are scrambling to put stuff in place. Because when faculty and students spend significant time with each other in classrooms that were basically set up to crowd people together as closely as possible, the virus will spread rapidly.

“We are not protected, especially when you start thinking about students, staff, or librarians,” he added.  Mazella holds out little hope that governors or state legislators of his state or Florida will change their position on COVID protections.  “The concept of the breaking point is for us, not for them. What they show is that there is basically no level of mortality that is unacceptable.”

A colleague in Texas who asked me not to identify him said, “We’re no more protected than the people in the meat-packing industry were.”

One thing I heard from nearly everyone else I spoke with was that the protection of faculty in COVID denialist states was effectively left up to individual department chairs.  In the 2020-2021 school year, chairs worked valiantly to keep their colleagues safe by giving them online teaching assignments or basically looking the other way as their department colleagues took the initiative to put their own courses online.  Naturally, while all the people I spoke with expressed gratitude toward their chairs for their actions, this system of ad hoc COVID policy at the department level is ripe for all kinds of abuse.  Depending on favors from one’s chair for one’s survival is hardly an ideal scenario for anyone, but it’s even less optimal for nontenure-track, contingent, and graduate student instructors.

Jonathan Senchyne, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, put the existential threat COVID poses in a larger context that speaks directly to the mission of the AAUP:

It’s so sad that American universities – and not just the University of Wisconsin — have not just come out and said, ‘We’ve got peer-reviewed research, clinical trials, and data from tracking.  We know what to do, and we’re going to do it.’  We teach by example, and the example we’re giving is, ‘Well, you’ve got to triangulate what you do based on the political dreams of a small-town state legislator who now has the wind of his party at his back.’  What is the state legislature going to do?  Sue you?  Cut your budget?  Surprise!  They’re going to cut your budget anyway.  If it’s not this that they’re going to get mad at you for, it’s something else.  My feeling on this is that we should get caught teaching the right thing.

As I listened to Senchyne, I began to wonder whether he was talking about COVID policies or academic freedom.  And then I realized that, for many of my colleagues teaching in COVID denialist states, there is no way to distinguish the one from the other.

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Correction:  I wrote in Part I of a faculty member in a public college in Georgia with compromised health who resigned when she was not allowed to teach remotely.  I have since learned that she did not resign but remains employed there, still without protection.

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.