Dear President Cauce and Faculty Senate Chair Laws,

Our thanks for this reply to our letter.   With all due respect, it appears to us that your reply devotes considerable space to addressing concerns we did not raise – and leaves largely unanswered the many concerns we did.  The faculty do not need to be persuaded about the value and, indeed, the urgency of returning to campus this fall and resuming largely in-person instruction.  The point of our original letter to you was to ask for the conditions that would ensure a safe and supported return to campus, not to advocate for postponing the return.  Indeed, one of our primary concerns with the current plan of vaccine attestations, undocumented exemptions, and optional masking is that it substantially raises the chances of large-scale outbreaks that might require us, once again, to pivot to remote in the middle of the term.  Our concern is precisely to avoid that scenario, which would be devastating for students and faculty both. 

The circumstance that vaccinations cannot yet be checked against a national database does not alter the fact that submission of proof sets a higher bar than mere attestation.   Quite simply, falsifying a vaccination card requires a notably larger tolerance for risk than submitting a false attestation.  If we are putting in a place a vaccine requirement, why not put in place the most robust requirement we can? This is certainly what our peers (University of California; University of Oregon – and many more) have done.  Why are we not doing so? 

Your reply also does not address why faculty, students, and staff claiming medical, religious, and “philosophical” exemptions for the Covid-19 vaccine are not required to provide documentation. If one can claim and receive an exemption simply by clicking on a box, as is currently the case, then there is, in effect, no real vaccination requirement in place.  According to the UW website, students claiming exemption from other required vaccinations must submit documentation that is assessed by a “trained healthcare professional.”A  Why is there no such standard for Covid-19 exemptions in the midst of a pandemic?

Other urgent issues raised in our letter are likewise not addressed in this reply, including concerns about faculty accommodations and expectations for multi-modal teaching. As we have already laid these out, we will not belabor them again here.  

Instead, the burden of your reply is simply to reassure us that UW leadership is tracking shifting conditions, consulting with all the relevant experts and will notify the faculty in a timely manner of policy decisions regarding our return to campus.  It seems to us, however, that in a university, the experts are the faculty.  Hence our continuing concern over the virtual absence of faculty on the back-to-work and back-to-school task forces. Why are there no faculty from Public Health serving on those bodies? Why no faculty from IHME?  Why is there only a single representative from UW Medicine? And crucially, why no faculty with first-hand experience of what crisis teaching has entailed and of what is needed for faculty to be adequately resourced and supported moving forward?  There is room on both task forces for a representative from UW Advancement, as well as UW Finance and University Marketing and Communications, but no room, it would seem, for more than a single Faculty Senate representative, to speak from the perspective of those of us actually headed back to the classroom in September.

As an instructive comparison, at UCLA, The Covid Response and Recovery Task Force is co-chaired by the Administrative Vice Chancellor and the 2019-2020 Chair of the Faculty Senate (a Professor of History).  In addition to faculty and administrators, among them a Professor of Epidemiology, this taskforce also includes a representative of the Staff Assembly and the Presidents of both the Graduate and Undergraduate student associations.  At UC Berkeley, the Recovery Management Team consists of a series of subgroups:  the Public Health and Testing Advisory Committee (whose recommendations guided vaccination policies) is chaired by a Professor of Biostatistics and staffed by infectious disease experts, public health epidemiologists, and physicians.  At both institutions, it is precisely through the mechanisms of shared governance that faculty expertise is activated.  Our call for a joint AAUP-Faculty Senate Task Force was to create a mechanism (albeit belatedly) for a comparable level of faculty input in decision-making here at UW. It is disappointing to see this call dismissed out of hand. 

Respectfully, the UW-AAUP Executive Board

Eva Cherniavsky

Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Literature and Culture

Director of Graduate Studies

Department of English 

Box 354330

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195

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