AAUP meeting on 9/11 via Zoom
Present: Christine Harker, Bill Alexander, Marc Becker, Laura Bigger, Anton Daughters, Taner Edis, Jack Davis, Andrew Kauffman, Carlo Annelli, Stacy Davis, Stephanie Russell, Jennifer Jesse, Kathryn Brammall, Ding-hwa Hsieh, Stephen Quinn, Elizabeth Wiles, Henna Ahmad, Emily Long Olson, Heidi Cook, Kafi Rahman, Craig Hennigan, Stuart Winikoff
COVID-19 at Truman, open discussion
- 25 students and one faculty/staff are currently under quarantine
- The “task force” Campus COVID Committee came to be after AAUP pushed for it over the summer.
- One thing that recently came from this committee is the tip sheet PDF that should have been shared with faculty this week.
- Christine and Nancy Daley-Moore made a PSA video about the COVID-19 numbers
- Many of the new cases were a result of household spread.
- BUT many students went home over the weekend so we could see jumps from that and want to keep an eye on this.
- The task force will be talking to students about pods.
- There will be a place where PSAs like this will be housed
- Questions?
- Stephanie: What is the understanding about students going home to quarantine? A student told her that he was discouraged from being tested and instead encouraged to go home and quarantine.
- The president may have said that students could consider this as an option.
- Is there any sense that students are not being encouraged to get tested if they have symptoms?
- Our testing capacity is roughly 20 kids per afternoon and there may be some backing up.
- If students are tested outside of TSU then we may or may not hear about the results from that so that could account for discrepancies in perceived numbers versus the posted numbers of positive cases.
- Many students are reporting being in quarantine due to having been in contact with someone who tested positive.
- One faculty member reported an anecdotal case of one of his students who had a very bad experience with quarantining that involved not getting food that they could eat due to allergies, no breakfast because their meal plan didn’t include it, and not enough warm blankets or heat with this cool change in weather. Ultimately someone drove up from Columbia to bring them food every day to get her proper nutrition.
- What are we going to do about this?
- We need to address this food situation ASAP.
- This seems like easy fodder for a lawsuit.
- If we send students home we run the risk of spreading COVID-19 to other communities.
- Now students who have symptoms get a test but students who have been in contact and are asymptomatic do not get tested. Higgins said we were following the old CDC not the new CDC guidelines. But direct contact counts as being masked and within 6-feet for 15 minutes or longer, so class conditions shouldn’t qualify for contact tracing.
- We want to know the quarantine conditions, what qualifies students for testing and clarification on the power that we have as faculty have to change our course format to online if not many students are showing up in person
- Bill was exposed by way of his wife to COVID-19 and inquired with his chair and Dean. He was told that if he were to preemptively switch his classes to online he would be disciplined.
- Kathryn: There is flexibility when the reasoning for changing the teaching method is a pedagogical issue. The chair can inform the Dean and the Dean has rights to refuse. But if pedagogically it makes sense to teach all of the students in the same modality then that should be a good reason to switch the class online.
- Elizabeth Wiles: “We CAN encourage students to get tested for known contact even if they are asymptomatic. But I think the recommendation is to wait and get tested several days after the contact (ie, don’t get tested 2 days after your direct contact or it will show up negative regardless).”
- Bill was exposed by way of his wife to COVID-19 and inquired with his chair and Dean. He was told that if he were to preemptively switch his classes to online he would be disciplined.
- Reminder about online courses from Craig Hennigan: “If you go online, syllabi have to be approved by Kevin Minch. If your course has been taught online before, then you don’t have to get it approved. There’s a deadline for next semester’s courses and I believe it’s sometime this month.”
- Stephanie: What is the understanding about students going home to quarantine? A student told her that he was discouraged from being tested and instead encouraged to go home and quarantine.
At-will language and Chapter Six changes
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- AAUP asked the admin to remove the at-will language from faculty contracts. Contracts were reissued without the language because the Board of Governors rules override the at-will language.
- For reasons we cannot get clarity on, the schedule for when faculty who are Tenure track would need to be notified that they are not being renewed for the following year is being changed. The admin is focused on the review process and wants to change the review calendar if we want to maintain the notification date such that it is in line with the 1940 AAUP Guidelines. The administration seems reluctant to change this date back and the change seems to be a slow erosion of these principles.
- They are moving the 2nd and 3rd year notifications from December 15 to March 10th of the following year.
- The Fac Sen president said that no one has not been renewed after the second year so it isn’t really an issue. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t become an issue in the future.
- This risks sanctioning which would affect both the administration and the faculty by association with an institution that has been sanctioned.
- Mark isn’t aware of any legal foundation that would force the administration to issue contracts prior to the first day of class for non tenure-track folks. If we can hold the line on the tenure and tenure-track faculty rights then it can help preserve those of non-tenure track as well. The only thing that might help non tenure-track more is collective bargaining.
- It’s very unlikely that any non tenure-track faculty will get a contract before July. There used to be more verbal assurance given by spring break but now the budget is making it such that we don’t know what will actually happen. Not to mention that letters of renewal are not the same as contracts.
University survey
- We plan on sending out a University survey this year like AAUP used to do.
- Should we ask questions about demographics? In the past faculty have commented that they don’t like putting this information into the survey. We don’t usually do anything with this information. Does the broader AAUP group think this would be helpful?
- Bill is in favor of collecting demographic info because it might help build a model for anticipating broader campus support for certain issues. It is relatively easy to protect this information. If we use a non-University affiliated account to make the form, it wouldn’t be accessible to the administration. We could add a statement that all identifiers would be removed from data.
- Would the survey allow people to opt out of that question?
- This seems like a good option.
- We want the most people possible to participate. The more responses we have the more valuable the data will be.
- Are there any new questions we should add? Feel free to email Mark Hatala or any of the AAUP leadership if you have suggestions in the next few days.
Bylaws
- Reminder: Marc Rice abruptly retired. AAUP formed this collective leadership group in place of his presidency and the former leadership structure. Bill amended the boilerplate bylaws to include this new leadership structure. The main changes on the leadership structure is in Article IV. The seven leadership seats would be voted on by all faculty across campus. We want to validate the organization towards the greater faculty body. (one of the comments from a long-time professor said in their response to our open letter survey this summer: “AAUP, who are these people?” – which indicated to us that we need to reach out to the broader faculty more).
- This is the draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14g2fZ_IHr7V9GGa10pZsEqW0Z93UFG1vSS3OEIhoSdE/edit
- We spread out many duties and renamed some of the roles.
- With being this democratic we can run into issues. This will be solved with elections. There would never be a full overhaul of leadership. Leadership would rotate out on a two, two, three schedule on a three year rotation.
- AAUP will be voting on these Bylaws at the next meeting.
Open floor
- Stephanie Russell: What is the role of teaching evaluations among COVID-19?
- Another student anecdote: This student was told they couldn’t get access to breakfast during quarantine and chose to go home instead.
- How is it impossible to make adjustments to student meal plans?
- The food thing is a huge issue from a health and recovery standpoint as well.
- How is it impossible to make adjustments to student meal plans?
- There are a lot of inequity issues here – students who have family members that can house them or live nearby have different options open to them than other students.
- These poor quarantine/isolation conditions could mean that students won’t want to tell the admin when they are sick and might choose to self-quarantine instead.
- The option to pause the tenure clock due to COVID-19 is problematic because it is a worldwide condition affecting faculty everywhere and they are transferring the burden of this to faculty and postponing their job security and promotion as a result.
- There are statements coming out about this for dissertation advisors etc. We should have a forum before the next AAUP meeting.
- AAUP will continue to press the admin on contract language.
- AAUP will send out the survey next week.
The next AAUP meeting will be October 9th at 4pm via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/93943922876
Minutes recorded by Laura