Members of the graduate student union gathered in front of the Johnson Hall in support of its winter 2022 “demands for a safer UO” today.
The 18 demands are divided into four categories: increasing remote instruction options, improving in-person protections against the coronavirus, providing transparent public data about COVID-19 cases and engaging workers and students in decision making.
GTFF’s remote instruction demands include moving all courses remote until Lane County COVID-19 transmission rates are low; expanding options for remote classes during spring term; eliminating requirements for instruction to be delivered in multiple, synchronous options — like teaching an in-person class that’s also live for students via Zoom; and allowing professors to pivot to asynchronous teaching when it works best.
GTFF’s Vice President for Organizing Tali Bitton said teaching in multiple modalities is difficult for graduate employees because they haven’t received resources or training on how to do so. “In the end, it’s not really fair to the students,” he said.
Bitton said the university needs to eliminate the requirement that instructors record in-person classes because it limits open conversations.
“For instance, I’m teaching a feminist philosophy class on love and sex at the moment,” he said, “and if I had to record my class, none of my students would be open to discussing their own experiences with love, sex, relationships or anything like that, for good reasons. Who knows where that recording is going?”
Demands for improving in-person protections involve maintaining a paid, 10-day quarantine and isolation period for those who test positive, allowing GEs to transition to remote work as needed for underlying health risks, providing hazard pay at 1.5 times the normal rate of pay for in-person instructors, requiring the use of N95 or KN95 masks on campus, increasing on-campus testing capacity, requiring weekly testing for in-person and on-campus employees and students and providing COVID-19 vaccine boosters.
GTFF also asked that UO provide clear, actionable instructions and standardized COVID-19 guidelines to all supervisors, direct all unit heads to encourage GEs and students to report violations of standardized guidelines and re-assign in-person courses to empty university classrooms and lecture halls to maximize social distancing.
Stuart Steidle, a GE in the department of geography who attended the rally, said he has sympathy with his colleagues who express fears for their safety and their students’ safety due to an inability to social distance in crowded classrooms.
Steidle said the university accepting these demands would be a “notable expression of goodwill from the university to show that they would make policy that’s in accordance with the stakeholders of the campus who are on basically the front lines of this every day.”
GTFF’s demands for transparent public data ask that UO implements a COVID-19 notification process that informs all close contacts and affected employees within 24 hours of exposure, publishes all active cases reported on campus daily and provides clear thresholds for when the university will introduce policy changes that affect GE working conditions will change.
Bitton said the demand for a process notifying close contacts within 24 hours stems from GE’s concerns about Corona Corps, UO’s contact tracing and case management program. He said he has never been identified as a close contact by Corona Corps even though he has received emails from students informing him they were positive for COVID-19.
“That’s definitely a noted tendency among all of our members who teach,” Bitton said. “So we’re pretty concerned. I mean, we’re just not hearing of anything coming from Corona Corps about our classroom.”
GTFF also demanded that the university enter negotiations with GTFF when it proposes changes to GE’s working conditions that fall outside of the GTFF collective bargaining agreements and that UO forms a labor and management working group to provide faculty and students with decision making power.
After the rally, UO’s Twitter account announced the university is making a limited number of KN95 masks available to faculty, staff and students.
Members of the GTFF make speeches in front of Johnson Hall on the University of Oregon campus. Graduate teachers, students, and community members gathered outside Johnson Hall on Tuesday, Jan. 18th to protest unsafe learning and working conditions following the increase of COVID-19 cases on the University of Oregon campus. (Will Geschke/Emerald)
