At least seven different student groups across Oregon have formed a student-led coalition on campus safety, according to an Instagram post from the University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation on Feb. 14.
“Students around the state are getting sick and putting their health and safety in danger every day to receive an education due to administrations’ insistence on maintaining crowded in-person classes while we still face an urgent need for improved data transparency, in-person protections, and worker-student involvement in decision-making,” the post said. “By working in solidarity, we hope to determine the best course of action moving forward to protect student lives while ensuring that we continue to maintain our access to higher education that we deserve.”
The coalition started in the last few weeks of January. The Oregon Student Association took note of the GTFF’s “activism,” particularly on social media, regarding COVID-19 safety at the height of the Omicron variant’s surge in Oregon, Evelyn Kocher, the executive director of OSA, said.
OSA represents over 80,000 Oregon students in post-secondary education. The group reached out to the GTFF to say, “These are issues that we’re seeing across the state that students are concerned about,” Kocher said.
In the month that followed, OSA contacted other student organizations and held Zoom meetings to compare COVID-19 responses at different institutions. It found a lot of similar frustrations, which led to the four main focuses in the Feb. 14 statement: increase remote instruction, increase in-person protections in class, provide transparent public data and engage student workers in COVID-19 decision-making processes.
Now, ASUO, the Associated Students of Portland State University, PSU Graduate Employee Union, Oregon Health Sciences University Graduate Researchers United and Oregon State University Coalition of Graduate Employees meet over Zoom monthly. They share strategies for achieving their COVID-19 safety goals at their respective campuses.
“A lot of times we’re so siloed as students on our own university campuses that we forget that there are folks doing the same work up in Corvallis and Portland,” GTFF President Mel Keller, said. “It’s important to keep those connections alive, which I think is something that this coalition could be really valuable in doing.”
Together, the coalition hopes to use its strength in numbers to fund more COVID-19-safe learning options. This would be similar to how universities used money from the CARES Act, which allocated federal funding for COVID-19 relief in higher education passed in 2020. Kocher said the group will push for funding from each university and from the state.
“If we can collaborate with university administrations and government relations on the common goal of getting state money into infrastructure programs, it would be a win both for student safety and the university,” she said.
Everything about the coalition is unlike anything Oregon has seen in the past. Undergraduate student governments don’t often overtly partner with graduate student unions, nor do this many universities across the state. But undergraduate students learn where graduate students work, so working together on this made sense, Kocher said.
“We should absolutely work on having more solidarity between these groups in the future,” she said. “We are, if not siblings, then at least cousins.”
The next meeting will be on April 1 and will be the first meeting after Oregon lifts its statewide mask mandate. Kocher predicts there will be a lot to talk about in that regard, but both Keller and Kocher are optimistic that the partnership could extend beyond COVID-19 issues.
“I think it’s an incredibly useful and important venue for future conversations to be held,” Keller said. “That’s not something that’s limited to COVID, even though that’s where it started.”
