BY AMIT BAISHYA AND JULIE ANN WARD
“OU Days of Action” was organized on September 20 and 21 to coincide with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents Meeting. This action was the culmination of a months-long process of appealing to OU’s upper administration to adopt basic, common-sense policies of COVID-19 mitigation, with little to no response. The OU administration’s consistent line has been that they have little wiggle room because of State Bill SB-658 and Governor Kevin Stitt’s executive order 2021-16. Upper administration claims they cannot mandate masks in classrooms or impose a vaccine mandate. The validity of this interpretation has been questioned by legal experts. As two of the tenured faculty organizers of this event, we recount the steps that led us to this action as a record and resource for other campus activists. We emphasize that while the authors are executive committee members of OU-AAUP (Ward is the vice-president; Baishya is the secretary), “OU Days of Action” is not an AAUP action. OU-AAUP strongly endorsed the actions, but the work of organizing this event was a grassroots effort conducted by a group of concerned university citizens and included tenured, tenure-track, contract, and adjunct faculty members; staff; graduate and undergraduate students; and community members.
The groundwork was laid by the OU-AAUP’s consistent advocacy for clear COVID-19 protocols for over a year. In August, our chapter released an open letter to state and university leadership with a list of demands. The letter has been signed by more than six hundred people, with no response by the administration. Frustrated by this nonresponsive attitude, a group of faculty, staff, and students (comprising both AAUP members and nonmembers) formed a “COVID Organizing Committee” with the goal of taking next steps to push for the CDC-recommended mitigation policies that most of our peer institutions have adopted. We chose the first regents meeting of the academic year as our goal, since we had been unable to get the attention of upper-level administrators or the university president.
The first task we set ourselves was to find out if faculty members would be willing to walk out of classes on the days of the regents meeting. But very soon it occurred to us that giving a general walkout call was laden with risks, especially for junior and nontenured faculty. The State of Oklahoma has antilabor laws in place, and its strong tradition of labor activism has been quashed by the neoliberal state government in the past decades . Our discussions centered around a range of options that could potentially make the participation of the university community more broad-based. We decided to create multiple options for participation, depending on the various pressures faced by university personnel. While a walkout was kept as the preferred option for tenured faculty, other steps included moving classes online, dedicating the two days to a teach-in session on worker health and safety, writing letters to the regents demanding measures for public health and safety, attending the public portion of the board of regents meeting on September 21, amplifying visibility by showing public support for the action on social media, and attending a public rally in front of Evans Hall (the president’s office on campus) on September 22.
Members of the organizing committee were designated specific tasks through a series of video chat meetings. Some were tasked with one-on-one outreach to potentially interested faculty members, some with designing a website and opening a Facebook page, and others with media relations. The organizing committee was pleasantly surprised to see the enthusiasm with which faculty and staff members responded to our initial outreach efforts, given the fact that OU has rarely seen mobilization at this scale. Encouraged by this, our website and Facebook page went live on Tuesday, September 14. People began to RSVP for the event. We also got a shot in the arm when departments like anthropology voted to endorse our action. The action also got the full support of OU’s First Year Composition (FYC) program. The OU-AAUP also endorsed it unanimously.
From the accounts we have gathered, a number of faculty participated in the walkout. We can speak in greater detail about the two actions we directly participated in. Around fifteen faculty members attended the public portion of the board of regents meeting on Monday. The protest was covered extensively by the local media and by the Washington Post. Our two media representatives—Susan Kates and Jennifer Davis—were interviewed both at the meeting and throughout the two days. Both of us got the chance to speak at the end of the regents meeting. There is no publicized process for commenting at the regents’ meetings, and so Julie Ann Ward raised her hand and asked to be recognized. The chair of the board obliged, and Ward strongly reiterated her Oklahoma roots and read out the open letter. Amit Baishya was also recognized and made comparisons with the devastating spread of the Delta variant in his home country, India, requesting that the regents enact good public policy to avoid a repetition of that tragic scenario in Oklahoma. The protest was covered quite favorably in the media.
On September 21, a public rally was held in front of Evans Hall at noon. There were more than one hundred people present with signs and posters. The rally included speeches by two undergraduate students, a statement by an anonymous adjunct, two moving appeals by celebrated OU faculty authors Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Rilla Askew, and a speech by Susan Kates. Finally, Joseph Thai of the OU Law School delivered a speech outlining the legal weaknesses of OU’s official position on masks and vaccines.
While we feel the mobilization of faculty, staff, and students was a big success, OU’s official position on the issue remains the same. In this case, we have to ask: What is to be done? Indeed, the struggle to get these basic and minimal safeguards in place will continue. What encourages us though is the enthusiastic response given by the OU community to our call. A public action of this scale is relatively unprecedented in the OU campus. We believe that our organizing project has been successful because our demands are extremely popular: common-sense workplace safety measures that will allow us to do our jobs. That, if nothing else, gives us hope that there will still be singing in these dark times.
Amit Baishya is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma and secretary of the OU-AAUP chapter. Julie Ann Ward is associate professor of Latin American literature at the University of Oklahoma and vice-president of the OU-AAUP chapter.
