Spring semester began last week at the University of Florida with a huge expansion of face-to-face classes and growing levels of faculty unease.
Following a fall term that was taught mostly online, the university increased the number of undergraduate in-person classes by more than 600 percent this semester, even as Covid-19 conditions in Florida (and across the nation) deteriorated to dangerous levels.
Increasing in-person classes is good for the university’s bottom line — and its relations with Florida’s Republican leaders.
More than 25,000 students are attending classes on campus in Gainesville, with a roughly equal number taking courses online.
Faculty complain of pandemic teaching burnout, but they also increasingly voice concerns about a lack of appreciation from their bosses. The university’s ramp-up to additional in-person classes came as more than 50 faculty members were denied health-related requests to teach remotely.
Then last week the university made headlines for what critics called a “tattle” button on the Gator Safe mobile app. The button allowed students to report a “course concern” if their professor changed a scheduled in-person class to online.
Faculty recoiled at the notion that their own university doesn’t trust them to make such decisions.
“They should treat us like professionals,” Susan Hegeman, a professor of English, said of the administration. And they should “assume that we’re trying, to the best of our abilities, to address how best to teach our students with these strange limitations that we’re dealing with.”
Employee morale has plummeted to the worst she’s seen in 25 years, Hegeman said. “It’s been a tough start to the year, for sure.”
Money and Politics
There’s a lot on the line for higher education this spring. Students and their families are weary after months of remote learning, and colleges that add more in-person classes can bring in needed tuition dollars, along with dining and dorm revenues.
In an October message to the campus, Florida’s president, W. Kent Fuchs, said that in-person courses represented the “best shared opportunity” to protect employee jobs.
It also helps the university stay in the good graces of Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature and the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has pushed aggressively for businesses of all types, including schools and universities, to open their doors and resume normal operations.
Universities that stubbornly limit their offerings to online classes risk getting punished during forthcoming state budget negotiations.
But DeSantis’s desire to move past the pandemic doesn’t match the Covid-19 situation on the ground in Florida, where the coronavirus caseload remains high.
On the first day of fall semester last year in Gainesville, the state of Florida’s seven-day average of daily new reported Covid cases was 2,949. When spring term began on January 11, Florida averaged 15,985 new cases daily.
University officials say the state’s Republican political leaders have not asked for more in-person classes. But faculty have nevertheless noticed a persistent pull in that direction.
“There could be some pressure coming from the top, to be sure, that at all costs, those face-to-face classes are happening,” said Vincent Edward Oluwole Adejumo, a senior lecturer in African American studies. “The execution is very poor.”
In a response to questions from The Chronicle, Joe Glover, the university’s provost, wrote: “When we began offering some in-person classes in the fall, we heard from thousands of students and families expressing a desire for in-person learning. Our fall experience demonstrated no evidence of virus transmission in the laboratory or classroom.”
Expanding in-person learning is both “feasible and safe,” Glover wrote. “The university’s COVID protocols are guided by CDC and UF Health, which determine our campus health procedures.”
The New York Times reported that as of December 11, the University of Florida had recorded 5,630 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, placing it among the highest at any college in the country. Meanwhile, in-person enrollment at the university went from just under 14,000 in the fall to more than 25,000 in the semester that began last week, according to university figures. At the same time, the number of face-to-face class sections for undergraduates rose from 649 in the fall to 4,143 in the spring.
Disputing the ‘Tattle’ Label
The provost defended the inclusion of the button on the university’s Gator Safe app that allowed students to report when a faculty member moved a scheduled in-person course online.
“Our first commitment is to our students: to provide instruction in the format they requested, whether in person or online, Glover wrote. “If students aren’t getting the course in that manner, they need a vehicle to report that.”
But by late last week, the university had removed the button from the app. Students can still report faculty members who reschedule a course, but they now must fill out a form to do so.
As the university expanded the number of classes on campus, it also began biweekly testing of students who live in dorms, participate in fraternity or sorority life, or take in-person courses.
But even with the university conducting an average of 2,600 tests a day, it still takes considerable time to test thousands of students. After the first week of classes, the university had tested the vast majority of undergraduates taking in-person classes, but not all of them.
Faculty who look at their roster and see a “cleared” designation next to a student’s name are supposed to admit that person to class. But assuming the student had tested negative would be a mistake.
To the alarm of some faculty, the university declares students “cleared” immediately after the Covid-19 test, even if they are still awaiting results — so long as they’re not showing symptoms and have not come into close contact with a person known to be positive. The wait for test results is generally 24 to 48 hours.
On Thursday a group of political-science faculty, including the department chair and associate chair, complained in an email to the dean of liberal arts and sciences, “Forcing us to teach face to face in the classroom increases our probability of contracting the disease, and contracting the disease exposes us to enhanced probabilities of premature death or long-term health problems.”
“It is hard for us to understand this decision given that in several months’ time, with widespread inoculation, the threat posed by the disease will be considerably diminished,” the email continued.
Emilio Bruna, a professor of Latin American studies and ecology, said the university hasn’t done enough to make faculty feel completely safe.
Bruna acknowledged that administrators took steps like upgrading air filters, making hand sanitizer available, and enforcing social-distancing rules in classrooms. But bringing so many people back to campus last week was “inherently risky,” the professor said.
And faculty, he said, feel left out of the planning conversation. “At no point have they said, Here is the situation, these are some options, none of them are great, and since they affect you, you could be involved in the process of making a decision.”
Katherine Mangan contributed to this report.
