A spike in new cases of COVID-19 is worrying some faculty members at the University of Arizona.
Less than one week into a mostly in-person fall semester, more than 50 faculty members at the UA are calling on the administration to make it easier for individual instructors with health concerns to move their courses online.
“The uncertainty and inflexibility of the current system alone poses significant risk to students, staff, and faculty's mental health,” said the letter dozens of faculty members signed and emailed to President Robert Robbins Tuesday afternoon. It was also addressed to Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Liesl Folks, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Andrea Romero, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, who leads UA’s pandemic response team, and the Pandemic Academic Coordination Work Group.
According to a previous statement from the provost’s office, “Decisions regarding course modalities will be made on a university-wide basis by University leadership in consultation with public health officials.”
And that’s what the 50-plus faculty members who signed Tuesday’s letter want to change.
Campus operating
at full capacity
“We urge University administrators to implement a clear and transparent pathway for instructors (including graduate teaching assistants) to flexibly shift to online teaching modality,” the letter said. “We believe this modality pathway is critically necessary when circumstances require a class, but not necessarily the whole university, to move to remote learning.”
The letter proposes that instructors should be able to submit a request to move their classes online and receive acknowledgement from the university within two days. That request, the letter said, should be automatically granted if the instructor has one or more of the following medical concerns:
- Has a medical issue, such as, but not limited to, heart disease, diabetes, cancer or a weakened immune system, and/or is at a significantly higher risk of becoming significantly ill from COVID-19;
- May not be able to get vaccinated for medical reasons;
- Has a household member in the above high-risk group;
- Has a household member who cannot be vaccinated;
- Is ill with COVID-19 or quarantined based on household illness or exposure;
- Has learned about disease outbreaks in their class.
“This localized response will enhance the safety and well-being of instructors and students, reduce stress and anxiety of the uncertain times, and improve the learning experience for all,” the letter said. “Importantly, it will help prevent the depletion of our limited health care resources by forestalling the bed shortage, which should not be viewed as a leading indicator, but as a community emergency to be avoided.”
The start of classes Monday — of which about 63% are being delivered entirely in person and 9% through a hybrid of in-person and remote modalities — marked the first time the campus has operated at full capacity since the campus shut down at the onset of the pandemic. At the close of last spring semester, when the number of new COVID-19 cases were falling and people were lining up to get the vaccine, Robbins publicized his commitment to offering any student who wants it a “full on-campus experience.”
In the lead-up to reopening this fall, however, the pandemic’s outlook changed.
Case counts in Pima County, where 63% of people 12 and older are fully vaccinated, have doubled since last month, and 87% of those were cases of the delta variant. Further, a state law signed in June prevents the UA or any other public college or university from requiring students to get the vaccine, disclose their vaccination status or take a COVID-19 test. (The UA is requiring all students and staff to wear a face covering indoors when social distancing is not possible in addition to other pandemic safety precautions.)
Despite those changes, the UA, which reported a preliminary total enrollment of more than 47,000 students this fall, has not wavered on its commitment to offering mostly in-person courses.
And in response to the letter faculty sent the administration Tuesday, Provost Folks told the Arizona Daily Star via email that the UA continues “to work to balance the diverse needs of many individual employees and our commitment to our students’ needs and our education mission.”
Folks reiterated the effectiveness of mask-wearing in large groups and said that “Our campus leaders, in close consultation with public health experts, faculty representatives, human resources and other stakeholders, have worked diligently for many months to ensure that a wide array of modifications and adjustments have been implemented to support employees with evolving health-related and care-giver concerns, without adversely impacting the students’ learning experiences.”
ICU beds
filling up
But for some of the approximately 3,000 faculty members working at the UA, those efforts are not enough because, according to the letter, “Many who were prepared for pre-delta disease levels and are now returning to face-to-face teaching find themselves exposed to heightened risk.”
A memo from the provost’s office sent to faculty shortly before the semester started emphasized that “instruction must be delivered in the modality students selected when they signed up for classes. Individual faculty members are not permitted to change the delivery mode of their class.”
At a news conference Monday, Robbins, a cardiothoracic surgeon, said the university has not established an exact threshold of new cases that would prompt it to reevaluate offering the majority of classes in person.
“We’ll follow the cases as we did last year,” he said. “The things that we’ve always used as the bellwether for how things would change is if our isolation dorms become overwhelmed. If the local hospitals don’t have any ICU beds — and we’re very, very close to that with the hospitals.”
As of last Friday, there were seven ICU beds left in the county. On Wednesday, the chief clinical officer of Banner Hospitals, the largest hospital chain in Arizona that has two in Tucson, said facilities are so overwhelmed with new patients (the majority of which are not COVID-19-related due to a backlog in care over the past 18 months) that staff are treating them in hallways and waiting rooms.
'It's only going
to get worse'
Hearing the UA’s game plan of waiting until the medical system is overwhelmed to consider moving classes online prompted Leila Hudson, an associate professor of modern Middle East culture & political economy and member of the UA Faculty Senate, and several of her colleagues to draft the letter sent to Robbins and other top-level university administrators Tuesday.
“By the time ICU beds fill up, so much damage will have been done. So many people will have gotten sick,” Hudson said. “Just because your average student doesn’t see the downstream effects, that’s no reason why policymakers and administrators shouldn’t be looking out for those downstream effects.”
Hudson, who lives with an immunocompromised family member and arranged last spring to teach all of her classes online this semester, said several of her colleagues asking to teach remotely now are running into pushback. Many of them, she added, are non-tenured employees who don’t feel like they have the job security to keep asking, much less sign their name to a public letter.
“For every person that signed that letter,” Hudson said “there are many more who don’t dare sign it — people who are really nervous and who ideally would have their situations accommodated.”
And the potential ramifications of not immediately accommodating those faculty members concern her.
“I’m thinking of instructors who might fall ill, their family members who might fall ill and health care workers, who are completely overworked might fall ill,” she said. “It’s only going to get worse as we wait for that indicator of the ICU beds to fill up.”
University of Arizona students are returning to the Tucson campus and filling up dorms just in time for the fall semester, which begins Monday, Aug. 23.
