The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation at the University of Oregon have released an open letter to demand better working conditions at UO, claiming the need to hold the university’s “administration accountable for their ineffective and unsafe management” after February’s spike in COVID-19 cases.”
While the letter acknowledges the UO providing more testing opportunities for students, it also claims that this response was not enough. 
The letter states that the UO failed to protect the UO community because of their lack of effective PPE for the entire community, and lack of effective communication for campus users. The letter also states that the UO has failed to take accountability for the COVID-19 cases off campus, as well as the lack of safety in the residence halls and dining halls.
The letter includes five demands for immediate attention from the Oregon government, as well as Eugene and Springfield officials. 
These demands include safer experiences for residence hall employees such as PPE, hazard pay, vaccination priority; and using current COVID-19 case amounts to establish boundaries from a rising campus population. The letter also demands consequences for large student gatherings and heightened accountability and transparency from the UO administration — including disaggregated data from MAP testing, PPE availability, and protocol. Lastly, the letter floated a potential policy requiring vaccines for public universities. 
Rhiannon Lindgren, the GTFF vice president of organization, said that this has been an issue for a while, citing a press conference last fall about the UO simply tracking cases, not minimizing them. 
“We want people to recognize that the UO has the power and the capacity and the money to provide much better protections and mitigation strategies for COVID,” Lindgren said. “And why are they not doing so?”
For Lindgren, transparency is the real issue at stake. Wanting to know the plan for mitigating COVID-19 cases, as well as locations of higher density cases as well as how many cases in Lane County are coming from UO.
In response to these claims, UO spokesperson Saul Hubbard said that the UO Monitoring and Assessment Program has had a robust effect in mitigating COVID-19 spread on campus. 
Additionally, with the MAP testing, Hubbard says that the weekly testing for students in residence housing catches positive cases quickly and allows for students to be moved to isolation housing. Hubbard says that the UO was anticipating a spike in cases at the beginning of winter term after the holiday break. 
The statement did not mention anything about off-campus students.