Lee, an administrative assistant at a small private college in the Northeast, awoke last Monday morning to an email that made her feel “angry and not terribly valued.” It was from the human-resources department, instructing all staff members to “report to campus as regularly scheduled” despite the coronavirus outbreak.
The college had taken health and safety precautions, the email said, and with no students or faculty members on campus, the risk of exposure was low. Workers who needed to stay at home with children or at-risk relatives were told to use vacation or sick time.
Her direct supervisor was flexible, Lee said, but she wondered why she needed to be in the office. Most of her job was done by email, and there would be little foot traffic. She had ordered a six-pack of disinfecting wipes and was regularly cleaning office surfaces, but still she felt vulnerable, especially because she has asthma. (The Chronicle agreed to withhold the full names and institutions of some people quoted in this article who fear that speaking publicly could jeopardize their jobs.)
As a staff member, Lee said, it was hard not to feel that “our health and safety are being taken less seriously, that we’re being treated as expendable.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
It wasn’t until the end of the week, with mounting pressure for more Americans to stay at home to stop the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, that Lee and her co-workers were told to telecommute.
Even as classes have moved online and students and professors have been told to stay off their campuses, many staff members have been expected to report to work as usual. Custodians and cafeteria workers, security guards and residence-life staff members, librarians and IT specialists — they do jobs deemed essential to helping colleges navigate the abrupt transition to online teaching and to supporting those students who remain on campus. If they didn’t clock in, could colleges continue to run?
Yet some campus workers who shared their stories with The Chronicle said they, too, could do their jobs remotely and wondered why colleges had been quicker to put in place safeguards for students and faculty members than for those on the staff. Some said they felt pressure to report to work even though they felt uneasy; others said they had been told to take vacation days or sick leave to work from home.
The coronavirus outbreak underscores what many see as a pre-existing labor divide on campuses, where the rules that apply to those who teach in the classroom don’t always extend to those who mop the floors or serve the meals. For now, at least, the support staff of the knowledge class is reporting to work.
‘It Feels Like There Is a Divide’
As higher education moved online, most colleges made provisions for students who could not go home — such as international students and those who are homeless — to stay on campus. Their presence means maintaining a basic level of services and support. And that work falls to people like Sam, a residence-life staff member at a university on the West Coast.
During his shift, he walks through the dormitories, checking on students’ mental and physical well-being and answering their questions. But he has many of his own: How long will it be sustainable, he wonders, to run the dormitories with a skeleton crew, many of whom, like him, are in their first jobs out of college?
“The administration sends the message that we’re all in this together,” Sam said, “yet it feels like there is a divide.”
He worries about exposure. The final days of classes, after the university announced it was going online, were one big party — could that have spread the coronavirus? His supervisors have told him to speak up if he feels uncomfortable, but he thinks they might try to talk him into working anyway. And where would he go? He lives and works on campus.
To ease his stress, Sam goes for walks and schedules virtual hangouts with friends. He talks with his therapist on Zoom. “It just feels like I am on the front lines,” he said.
Other staff members on the front lines include janitors and housekeepers. When Clara Han, an associate professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, went to her office, on March 16, to collect books and files she needed to work from home, she was surprised to find custodial-staff members working in her otherwise-empty building. Several approached her, asking for information. One woman said she had seen faculty members “moving out” while she was “still here, worried about her safety and with children at home with no one to look after them,” Han said.
Han and some of her anthropology-department colleagues began to advocate for the custodians. Alessandro Angelini, an assistant professor, and Nicole Labruto, a postdoc, said one staff member had told them that he had to take public transportation to and from work and was concerned about the risks of the close quarters of his commute. Others worried about whether they would have adequate protection when cleaning and sanitizing campus spaces.
Heidi Conway, vice president for human resources at Johns Hopkins, said the university was limiting on-campus work to all but essential employees, such as custodians, security guards, and clinical staff members at its medical center. With just a handful of students permitted to stay, workers would be asked to cover fewer shifts, to minimize their time on campus. Those who are pregnant, have underlying medical conditions, or are otherwise not comfortable coming to work can ask to be excused, she said. Despite the reduction in hours, staff members will receive their regular pay.
Like many colleges, Johns Hopkins outsources its dining services, and Conway said the university was “in conversation” with the contractor, the Bon Appétit Management Company, about maintaining wages and benefits for those workers as well.
Of 180 food-service workers at the university, just 12 are to stay on the job, said Lisa Brown, a shop steward for the union that represents the dining staff. Many are worried about their precarious financial future. But at the same time, she said, “a lot of them are really scared to come back to campus.”
A week earlier, dining-hall staff members had shown up to work to find all the chairs on the tables, as the university moved from sit-down food service to grab-and-go meals. A schedule was posted instructing them to wash their hands every 15 minutes. Although students wore masks, Brown said, she and her colleagues weren’t given any. “I tried not to let fear take over,” said Brown, who has worked at Johns Hopkins for 29 years, “because I had a lot of students to feed.”
Jobs That Could Be Done Remotely
While some jobs, like Brown’s, are in person, other employees say theirs could be done remotely. Alison, a mental-health provider at a university in Colorado, said she and her colleagues had been counseling students by telephone but nonetheless were expected to come into the office, since some students were still in the residence halls.
On Thursday members of the staff received an email from the university that they may have been exposed to Covid-19 by someone in an adjoining office who was exhibiting symptoms. Still, the email said, they should come into work after the building had been specially cleaned. Alison and her colleagues refused. “None of us feels OK with that,” she said.
After they pushed back, administrators agreed to ask just a skeleton crew to report in. But Alison said it shouldn’t have taken a co-worker’s falling ill to put safeguards in place for staff members.
“The hierarchy of higher ed — it’s infuriating,” she said.
Likewise, J.B., an admissions officer on a City University of New York campus, questioned why he was expected to report to work even as the city began to shut down around him. While employees could ask to work from home, his colleagues who came in without complaint were “celebrated,” he said. When he expressed concerns about meeting with students, he was told to use a conference room so they could sit farther apart. “It’s just irresponsible in the face of everything that’s happening,” he said.
By later in the week, as New York officials ordered nonessential workers to stay home, CUNY had transitioned to remote work. In a statement released on Thursday, the university system said 95 percent of its workers were telecommuting.
Policies Change as Virus Spreads
The evolving approach is typical of many institutions. When Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, coordinator for information-literacy services and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, manager of surveys and research at the higher-ed consultancy Ithaka S+R, began a survey of university libraries’ response to Covid-19, on the evening of March 11, few libraries had significantly changed their operations. Most said they had increased cleaning, made hand sanitizer available, and canceled public events. A week later, three-quarters of the libraries reporting had closed all of their physical locations.
At Illinois Wesleyan University, for example, administrators first limited public access to the library. By March 16, they had stopped face-to-face library services, keeping the building open for only online-learning workshops. Within 24 hours, additional restrictions were imposed. Training sessions went online, and professors were allowed into the library only to use the multimedia studios to record lectures — by appointment and escorted by a member of the library staff.
It was hard not to feel that “our health and safety are being taken less seriously, that we’re being treated as expendable.”
For most of last week, the library has been empty except for Scott Walter, the university librarian, and his staff, who have been digitizing materials for classes, handling interlibrary loans, and fielding reference questions.
Walter said some of his colleagues initially had been apprehensive about plans to keep the library open, but their worries subsided once the college restricted access to the building. Administrators, he said, “were willing to take our input on what to do.”
Ron, an administrative staffer at a small private college in the South, said his supervisor had been responsive when he petitioned to work from home. Ron is asthmatic and the father of a small child, and members of his household have autoimmune diseases. But as of Friday, other staff members on his campus were still expected to report to work.
Why, Ron wondered, should administrators’ default expectation be that staff members work on campus in the midst of a public-health crisis? “I wish they had been proactive, rather than wait-and-see,” he said. “It can feel like the administration doesn’t care about the people making the wheels turn at the university.”
