BY MATTHEW BOEDY

It’s been a long week here in Georgia. I write at the end of weeklong, statewide protests about our university system’s poor COVID-19 policies. You might have seen media coverage splashed across many platforms and networks. 

It’s also been a long month here as our hospitals are overrun and our campuses saw expected but preventable COVID-19 case spikes as the semester started (though they now are declining). Our university system leaders—both the administrators and the board of regents—refused to retreat in light of the Delta variant. Instead, they took away all public-health mandates from our schools. It has been “back to normal” with filled football stadiums, large campus events, and tight classrooms. 

As Delta began burning through our campuses, many people asked me as the state conference president what more the conference could do to change the status quo. And, frankly, in a state like ours, there is not much. We can’t strike or walk out. We don’t have unilateral power to move classes online. Because of the governor’s executive order, we can’t have a vaccine mandate. And we live among a populace where, at best, some are indifferent toward vaccines (only 46 percent are fully vaccinated) and some, sadly, are downright hostile to any mandate, move, or push by any official for better public health. 

Our university system ignored several one-day protests at different campuses, and its presidents told faculty again and again, in response to faculty senate resolutions, that they simply did not have the power to mandate masks because of system policy. 

Our executive director suggested that if we as a conference took action, it needed to be large and wide enough to make students and faculty feel like the system itself was at stake on an ongoing basis. We had to shake the system. 

So a weeklong, statewide protest was born in early September. And our overworked, underpaid, and frankly just angry faculty around the state pulled it off. 

By the end of the week of Labor Day we had point people at many schools and added a few more as the effort got going. We ended up with events at twenty campuses and eighteen of the twenty-six public colleges and universities in the state. And while we had, as expected, declining attendance across the week, we had events from Dalton to Savannah, Dahlonega to Albany, and all parts in between. Even the rain on Thursday didn’t dampen the spirits.

Our leaders on campus spread the word, organized their events each day, and served as contacts for local media. I contacted the national higher education media and did a lot of Zoom interviews with TV stations around the state. I was pretty close to doing a nightly cable news show, but they preempted me for better news. 

We wanted this to be a statement for students, so we pledged not to move or disrupt class. I had to miss the first two days of my own campus protests to teach. 

By Wednesday, the enormous and embarrassing media attention forced a response from the university system. Its late afternoon press release was both inaccurate about COVID-19 cases and a fine example of how to spin bad facts on the ground, like a lack of surveillance testing across state schools now eighteen months into a pandemic. It failed to mention any protests or our singular demand: a mask mandate. 

We did not and will not get that mandate. We knew that going in. After we announced our protests, the regents and the USG chancellor said they were following the governor’s “expectations” concerning mask mandates. Brian Kemp never had one, never wants one, and won’t stand to see the university system get another one. It had a mandate last school year but lifted it this summer before Delta roared through the Peach State. The regents bucked him last year but won’t this year.

Through their inaction, the overseers of our university system proved what we knew for some time: we are not valued people. Yes, they use our research and our work to sell schools and programs and entice students at all levels. But we are expendable, replaceable, and sadly unrecognizable as endangered by a pandemic in its fourth and most virulent wave. 

There was a feeling from the top to the bottom last year that indeed we were all in this together. From a rush to go online amid closed campuses to a long prep for a COVID-19 fall semester and even to a spring semester of mandated 50 percent in-person teaching. But now a new fall filled with despair and anger has pushed us to protest. I only provided the dates and times. The voices of so many faculty provided the siren. 

The long-term effects of the pandemic are beginning to show even now as we face what we hope is its last round. Some faculty retreat more so into individual oases on campus. Some push on with little or no hope of any change in their situation. Some find another way to earn a living. Some quit not sure of how they will earn a living. Some turn even more cynical. And for those who protest, what else is left for us to do except to stand as a witness amid our beleaguered campuses? 

I called our efforts a public shaming of our university system. And it was.  

The movement of faculty opposing shameless and careless actions by state leaders is expanding. More on that in the days ahead. We in Georgia gave it our all for a historic moment in time. 

Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia state AAUP conference and associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia.