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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