In announcing its plans to resume in-person instruction as of August 10, the University of Notre Dame became one of the first major institutions to answer the question on higher education’s collective mind: How will we approach the fall semester? Weeks after that announcement, Notre Dame’s president, John I. Jenkins, doubled down on the importance of face-to-face education in a New York Times op-ed, writing that “the mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young.”
But in doing so, Jenkins and the administration raised a second, equally thorny question: What if faculty members don’t want to take those risks? That’s the concern shared by 140 Notre Dame faculty members who have signed a petition asserting that “all faculty members should be allowed to make their own prudential judgments about whether to teach in-person classes.”
At Notre Dame and colleges across the nation, faculty members argue that they’re not being given a say in a decision that could have consequences crucial to their own health and livelihoods. Even on campuses where administrators have solicited faculty members’ thoughts about a return to face-to-face education — often through surveys asking about how they’d prefer to teach their fall classes — those efforts have generated a backlash. The way administrators try to gauge faculty opinion, many instructors say, feels coercive.
‘Accommodation (for Being Human)’
In South Bend, the plan is clear: “The university expects faculty to be available for in-person classes, unless an individual’s circumstance results in an exception,” Paul J. Browne, Notre Dame’s vice president for public affairs and communications, told The Chronicle in an email.
Eileen Hunt Botting, a professor of political science who signed the faculty petition, took issue with that stance. “This is a matter of civil rights and social justice,” she said. “Faculty members are not soldiers. Faculty members are, first and foremost, civilians, and civilians with basic civil rights to protect their lives and their health in the workplace.”
Health and safety may not be the only reasons that faculty members opt not to return to the classroom this fall. John Duffy, who directs the University Writing Program at Notre Dame and signed the petition, said courses like his are “incompatible with recommended social-distancing practices” and would be better suited pedagogically to online instruction.
Faculty members who are parents and whose children’s schools will move online for the fall may face extra child-care responsibilities, especially if class sessions extend into evenings and weekends to allow classrooms to be cleaned, said Karen B. Graubart, an associate professor of history at Notre Dame who signed the petition.
“I’m not refusing to teach face to face, but I want to have a conversation about what that would look like for me,” she said. She got her wish — at least in part — when the dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters asked department chairs to survey their faculty members’ fall preferences with a “nonbinding straw poll.”
Graubart’s chair shared the results for the history department, which revealed that more than half of the faculty members there were willing to teach either in-person or using a combination of in-person and remote instruction. Graubart said a “fairly small percentage” expressed a preference for fully online teaching.
Faculty members at Notre Dame can fill out a COVID-19 Reasonable Accommodation Request Form to request permission to work remotely, explained a letter sent Monday night by provost Thomas G. Burish, provost-elect Marie Lynn Miranda and executive vice president Shannon B. Cullinan. The form, like several others reviewed by The Chronicle, asks faculty and staff members to disclose if they belong to one of the populations that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified as being at high risk for Covid-19.
I’m not refusing to teach face to face, but I want to have a conversation about what that would look like for me.
Respondents are asked to indicate if they are “requesting an accommodation because you are 65 years old or older.” They can check boxes for underlying conditions such as cardiac problems, chronic lung disease, diabetes, and severe obesity. (The university also requires faculty and staff members to submit medical documentation for such conditions.) Respondents can check another box to request accommodations for online teaching if they have a family member who is at risk, and an “Other” field allows for written responses.
A similar form was sent to Vanderbilt University faculty members on May 28, and a Monday-morning message to faculty members at its College of Arts & Science from John G. Geer, the dean, promised to grant an accommodation to any faculty member over 65 who requested one. As of last Friday, he wrote, 72 of the college’s faculty members had requested accommodations. Twenty-five of the requests came from faculty members over age 65, Geer wrote, but with the college employing 85 faculty members in that age group, he expected more accommodation requests to be forthcoming.
“We understand that faculty are requesting accommodations for a variety of reasons, including personal health, age, health of a family member, and others,” Geer wrote. “We also know that many departments have requested specific courses be taught online due to the course content, class size, instructor expertise, or other reasons. Please know that we are considering many factors and doing everything we can to honor the preferences you have submitted.”
But Mark A. Wollaeger, a professor of English at Vanderbilt, called the process — which is headed by the campus Equal Employment Opportunity Office — “pernicious, problematic, and kind of coercive.” He criticized “the notion that we had to apply, and offer medical information, for some accommodation rather than it being our right simply to say, ‘I do not feel comfortable doing this.’”
“I could not check any button that would automatically grant me an ‘accommodation’ (for being human, I guess) because I am 63 and have no underlying conditions,” Wollaeger wrote in a letter to his English-department colleagues. “I don’t think I should have to make a case for not entering a classroom this fall, not just because I’m close to 65 but because ... no one truly knows how this virus works, who is always most vulnerable, or how it may have evolved by the fall.”
Vanderbilt has not yet announced its plans for the fall, but “the process seems to be to assume that we will be teaching on campus in the fall unless exceptions are made for certain people in the form of accommodations,” said one faculty member, who asked to remain anonymous because of the personal impact of the policy.
The semantics of requiring an “accommodation” not to teach in person, the faculty member added, are troubling and could lead to disability- or illness-based discrimination. “It says that the right thing to do, the most healthy thing to do would be to be on campus,” the faculty member said. “And I just don’t agree with that.”
Vanderbilt officials did not reply to requests for comment.
Questions About How Results Will Be Used
In some cases, faculty members said, it’s unclear whether surveys of their preferences for fall instruction are binding, or how the results are to be used. A voluntary survey distributed to instructors in Yale University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences — the most detailed of those reviewed by The Chronicle — was clear that respondents shouldn’t consider their answers binding or “a vote on a preferred outcome for how undergraduate teaching should be organized for all next fall. We are simply trying to get a rough sense of proportions on discrete subjects as we think through a range of possibilities that might be available to us.”
Yale’s survey allowed faculty members to say whether they’d like to teach from home, from their campus office, from some other, private space, or “on campus and co-located with students,” with the latter option acknowledging that they’d need to “provide robust access” for remote students and to be open to flexible class times, capping class sizes to allow for social distancing, and wearing masks in the classroom.
The range of considerations included in the in-person option “seemed to indicate to me that the university might be pushing for that, or they devoted most attention to that option,” Terence Renaud, a lecturer in the humanities program and the history department, said.
Yale has said it will make a decision about reopening in the fall by early July, according to The Chronicle‘s reopenings tracker. Renaud isn’t sure how large a role the survey results will play. “I’m really skeptical that Yale would definitely follow the majority opinion of faculty in this poll, so I took the survey with that in mind, that my response might not even matter,” he said.
An incoming contingent faculty member at Auburn University said she’d been emailed a five-question survey by the department chair, asking whether she or someone she lived with or cared for fell under the CDC’s high-risk guidelines and what her ideal form of instruction this fall — online, face-to-face, blended, or a “high-flex” option with some students face-to-face and others remote — would be. If respondents to the Auburn survey indicated that they or those they care for were not at risk but that online teaching was still their preference — or that they were at risk but still wanted to teach in person — they were asked to justify their choice.
Are you asking for my preferences because you want to honor them? Or ... because you want to see how much I’m willing to put myself at risk for Covid?
The incoming faculty member said she didn’t know whether expressing a desire to teach online would guarantee that she’d be able to do so. In submitting her answers to her chair, she said, she wondered, “Are you asking for my preferences because you want to honor them? Or are you asking for my preferences because you want to see how much I’m willing to put myself at risk for Covid?” She worried that the way she responded could influence — even unconsciously — her standing and her prospects of contract renewal. “It just seems like a whole Pandora’s box of potential bias that you’re just soliciting, with names attached.”
Charles A. Israel, associate dean for academic affairs in Auburn’s College of Liberal Arts, said the survey was the result of a collegewide effort to assess how individual courses might be taught this fall, asking faculty members, “Knowing what you know right now, how would you expect to organize your class?” Israel gave chairs latitude on how to poll their departments.
The Auburn data would be treated as an “early estimate” of faculty sentiment, he said, but he understands why some might be hesitant about providing it. Without a formal announcement of Auburn’s plans for fall instruction and the safety measures the university might take, faculty members might feel that they don’t have enough information to decide whether they’re comfortable teaching in-person.
“The university president has started each of his talks about this with a mantra about protecting the health and safety of students and faculty,” Israel said. “I think there would be a reasonable expectation on the part of faculty to hold him to that, in any way that they decide to structure courses.”
The Prospects for Grad Students
The calculus about how to handle fall instruction is an even more complex one for graduate students, who may be more likely to teach in-person this fall because of their less-secure positions in academe and their relative youth.
A Vanderbilt graduate student in the humanities said he understood the logic that it might be safer for graduate students than for their full-time peers, who might be older, to teach in the classroom. But that argument, he said, “runs completely contrary to principles of equity.”
“The idea that we should be expected to be the ones sort of out there risking ourselves, risking our health just to sustain this mission — a mission into which we’ve had very little input — seems really unfair,” he said.
And reading a statement by Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, that while lectures were likely to be remote, “we hope to offer face-to-face section meetings,” Wendy Li knew what that meant. “OK, so it’s going to be the grad students that will have to show up and potentially get sick,” thought Li, a graduate student in sociology.
Li said she’d heard graduate-student peers say that, if their institutions force them to teach face-to-face, they’ll take a leave of absence instead. And if they have to decline teaching appointments in order to avoid having to teach in-person, they may have to forfeit stipends and face a greater tuition burden.
Both Li and the Vanderbilt student said they hadn’t received much communication from their institutions about what will be expected of them in the fall. The Vanderbilt student, for instance, didn’t receive the accommodation-request form that Wollaeger and other full-time faculty members did.
“I would certainly love to be given a survey, at the very least, if the survey was seriously designed,” he said. The reactions to surveys at other institutions make clear, though, that the definition of “seriously designed” is up for debate.
