Who Gets to Teach Remotely? The Decisions Are Getting Personal

Courtesy of Jason Helms

Until recently, Jason Helms had been confident that he would be able to teach remotely this fall. He’s a tenured associate professor of English at Texas Christian University, and his 2-year-old daughter has a congenital heart defect, so he had planned to do his job virtually so as not to bring the coronavirus home, he told The Chronicle in May.

Now, he’s not so sure. On Wednesday, Helms was informed by TCU’s human resources department that his request for an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act was denied because he did not meet the criteria.

Helms was confused and frustrated. He tweeted about the ADA denial, which went viral. After getting a call from the head of human resources, Helms said he learned that he should have requested something called intermittent leave through the Family Medical Leave Act. He clarified the tweet but said he still has unanswered questions. He plans on applying but doesn’t know if he’ll be approved.

In a statement, Yohna J. Chambers, chief human-resources officer, said that TCU has a comprehensive plan to address health and safety, including accommodating faculty members who are high risk and not able to return to campus, as well as protecting the jobs of those who are caring for high-risk family members. The university is working on a case-by-case basis “to address all needs.”

Helms’s case is one of many under consideration at colleges across the country. Early promises made by administrators to listen to faculty input are now making way for actual rulings on faculty requests. And like everything else during the coronavirus pandemic, the process is complicated and the results vary from institution to institution.

Federal agencies have issued some guidance on how employment protections apply during the pandemic, including for people who don’t have high-risk health conditions but are in regular contact with those who do. The ADA does not require that an employer accommodate an employee without a disability based on the disability-related needs of a family member or acquaintance, according to information from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, though the webpage notes that an employer is free to provide such flexibilities if it chooses to do so.

Under the FMLA, leave taken by an employee for the purpose of avoiding exposure to the disease would not be protected, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Instead, employers should “encourage” sick employees and those with sick family members to stay home, and should consider flexible leave policies.

And under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, employees are permitted to refuse to work if they believe they are in “imminent danger,” said Mark H. Moore, a partner with the law firm Reavis Page Jump. That’s a tough standard to meet, he said. Moore noted that a university is typically a more “collegial” workplace than, say, a meat-packing plant. It may be more difficult to tell a professor with tenure or with union protections that they have to return to work than it would be in other industries, he said.

That hasn’t kept some prominent college leaders from making the ask.

Some, like Christina H. Paxson, Brown University’s president, have stumped for a return to in-person instruction, arguing that without face-to-face instruction, students will suffer. On Thursday, the chancellor at North Carolina State University made a similar case to deans, directors, and department chairs. The amount of in-person instruction slated for the fall was “insufficient” for appropriately serving students, W. Randolph Woodson wrote in a memo. Though Woodson noted that there are faculty and staff members with underlying risk factors who “won’t be able to contribute to the on-campus experience,” he asked that everyone else return.

At the University of Iowa, Steve Goddard, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, addressed a faculty member who had submitted a question saying that she’s a woman of color with an autoimmune condition and felt “tremendous anxiety” about re-entering the classroom. During a virtual town hall, Goddard urged the woman to start with “mental-health counseling” to deal with her anxiety and also said, “I’d also encourage you to think about trying to manage that because — as an underrepresented minority, a woman of color — you have a tremendous impact to students if you can overcome some of that anxiety and fear,” The Gazette reported.

But faculty organizations at other colleges have contested the idea that it’s preferable to teach in person. In an open letter to Pennsylvania State University administration, faculty members affirmed that they “believe in the importance of the university as a physical site of face-to-face dialogue and debate.” Nevertheless, all people “have the right to protect their own well-being,” the letter said. Should students return to campus, instructors should have autonomy over how they want to teach, attend meetings, and hold office hours, the letter said, and no one should be obligated to disclose personal health information as a justification for such decisions.

At the University of Notre Dame, more than 140 faculty members signed a petition, arguing the same. Faculty members “should be allowed to make their own prudential judgments about whether to teach in-person classes,” it said. Notre Dame’s vice president for public affairs and communications said the university expects faculty members to be available for in-person classes, unless an individual person’s circumstance “results in an exception,” The Chronicle previously reported. Faculty members can fill out an accommodation-request form, which asks employees to disclose if they fall into one of the categories identified as being high risk for Covid-19 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Faculty members have complained that those accommodation-request forms offer a narrow interpretation of who is at risk from face-to-face instruction. What about faculty members who have concerns because they are older but not yet 65 — the age group specified by the CDC as high risk? What about those who fear getting infected, regardless of their own underlying conditions, and who feel they can perform their jobs remotely? Or those who aren’t caretakers but regularly interact with aging parents?

There’s evidence that some colleges are considering those broader questions. Sean D. Ehrlich, an associate professor of political science at Florida State University, said on Twitter that his dean had assured faculty members that no one will be made to teach in person this fall.

At TCU and elsewhere, instructors waiting to hear if their accommodation requests are approved may ultimately face difficult choices.

Helms, at Texas Christian, already told his family that he won’t teach in person this fall no matter what. Even if his second accommodation request isn’t approved through the university’s FMLA plan, it’s not worth the risk, he said. Since the beginning of June, coronavirus hospitalizations in Texas have climbed and hit record highs for a full week, The Texas Tribune reported on Thursday. Texas Christian’s own general counsel, Larry Leroy “Lee” Tyner Jr., told a U.S. Senate committee that when colleges reopen, there will be no way to assure that no one will bring the virus onto campus.

“Spread is foreseeable,” he told the committee in May, “perhaps inevitable.”

Naomi Ekas, an associate professor of psychology at Texas Christian, feels like she’s between a rock and a hard place. Ekas said her husband has multiple medical conditions that place him in the CDC’s high-risk category for Covid-19 complications, and, like Helms, she applied to be able to teach remotely this fall. And like Helms, Ekas received word on Wednesday that her request for ADA accommodation was denied because she didn’t meet the requirements. The email also told her that employees who are “the primary caregiver” of an individual with disabilities might be eligible for job-protected leave through the FMLA.

Ekas, too, said she was confused and unsure about what recourse she had. Chambers, TCU’s chief human-resources officer, said in an emailed statement to The Chronicle that the university does not comment on personnel matters but they are working with individual concerns “to find solutions, correct misinformation, and resolve misunderstandings.”

Ekas said she’s worried that she won’t qualify because she’s not technically a primary caregiver for her husband. If she isn’t permitted to teach her one class remotely, Ekas said she’ll be faced with a choice: Breach her contract or teach in person and put her husband at risk.

But they need the paycheck. Her husband receives disability payments through Social Security, but they’re essentially a one-income household, Ekas said. So on Wednesday evening, after Ekas got the email, she and her husband discussed who would move out of their home to keep the other safe.