Editor’s note: The Emerald interviewed four UO GEs for this story and two of them wished to remain anonymous. In cases where employment could be impacted by someone telling their story, the Emerald allows the use of anonymous sources to avoid retaliation.
The University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation posted a call for testimonials on its Instagram page last November. “We would like to invite GEs to share their concerns and experiences (COVID-related or not) with GTFF once again,” it said.
GTFF made 12 testimonial posts over the course of three months. This generated traction, becoming some of its most liked posts and inspiring other graduate student unions across the state to use social media to put pressure on administrators and demand a safe work environment.
In one post with almost 200 likes, a GE said it was unethical for UO to prevent GEs from telling their students when there was a confirmed positive case in a class. Others identified cramped learning spaces and a lack of hybrid flexibility as barriers to a safe and fair working environment.
“The COVID testimonials are a very important and really powerful part of the GTFF social media campaign,” GTFF President Mel Keller said.
The Daily Emerald spoke with four rank-and-file GTFF members across UO to hear their COVID-19 testimonials.
Cramped classrooms are a byproduct of GEs’ lack of power: Robin Brackett, a political science GE
Robin Brackett was late to her international relations class on the first day of fall term because she couldn’t find the classroom. When she arrived, the room didn’t feel like a classroom at all.
“It sort of seemed like a weird shack,” she said. “It was like, built on the side of a building, and there weren’t any windows and the ceilings were really low.”
The class enrolled about 40 people, a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, and the desks were so close together that Brackett had trouble entering the room.
Brackett teaches political science courses as a GE, but she was a student in this class. The GE here, a colleague of hers, sat in the hallway rather than face the classroom conditions.
“He immediately made an appointment to get a booster shot because if he had to sit in this classroom with all of these people, he said, ‘I’m going to get sick,’ and that was how I felt, too,” Brackett said. “It was shocking.”
The course’s professor put in a request to change rooms with input from the GE and Brackett herself — Brackett encouraged him to take a photo of the classroom and include it in the submission. The class was moved to a new room with “adequate windows and ample seating” by the next class, Brackett said.
But this was not the only course with inadequate classroom conditions, Brackett said. Another one of her classes had her rubbing elbows with classmates. There was one window that had to be propped open with books. This course also moved locations after a week.
In one class Brackett helped teach, she told her professor she was nervous about teaching during the height of the omicron variant’s spread. The professor handed Brackett N95 masks out of her own backpack.
“I appreciated it from her, but I didn’t think that she was the right person to be doing that,” Brackett said. “We were expected to be in class, and we weren’t being provided with adequate safety equipment.”
Brackett is concerned about lifting the mask mandate spring term because of safety concerns, but she also worries about classroom culture. She said the classroom environment could be tense, with those who choose to continue to wear masks mixed in with those who don’t.
Brackett said they have not received university guidance on how to successfully conduct class spring term. Like the cramped classroom environments she experienced fall term, it will be up to professors and GEs to decide, but Brackett said she would prefer to be included earlier on in the process.
“I think that the population of GEs is large enough in the university, and we’re an important enough part of how the university functions that we should always have input and not have to beg and push to make them listen,” Brackett said.
Labs can put progress over safety: a chemistry GE
In one GE’s chemistry class fall term, the lab was split into sections for each student to work individually and at a distance from other students. But this structured environment was difficult to enforce, they said. Students visited with one another at different stations, and hands-on teaching made it impossible to maintain distancing for the whole class.
“The thing with chemistry in a lab is that it’s almost impossible to teach anything without getting physically close to students,” the GE said.
The GE did his best to strike a balance between safety and constructive learning, but the work in finding that balance was his to do. Apart from the station set-up, he said there was little guidance from the university.
In the lab the chemistry GE works in, that balance is out of his control. Earlier this year, when one member of the lab was worried they had contracted COVID-19, the principal investigator, who leads the GE’s lab, set the expectation for everyone to show up for work regardless of COVID-19 status.
“The PIs, they don’t really like to follow COVID guidelines,” the GE said. “They want us to be in lab and be getting work done, and they’re not particularly interested in us being overly safe.”
The GE and other members of his lab found this ridiculous, he said. Thankfully, the coworker ended up testing negative, and the issue never became any more salient than that moment, nor did any expectations change. The GE said he is concerned with this tendency to place progress over the health of those making it.
“I hate the pressure: making progress in your research over everything else,” he said. “In that time, it was like, ‘Okay, we can set this aside for a second. It’s okay if we slow down a little bit for a second,’ but the PIs — all of them, not just mine — they get very hyper-focused on progress.”
UO will admit to poor communication, not poor policy: a history GE
“There’s some really dystopian aspects to education during a pandemic,” a GE in the history department said, but one of the most memorable moments was the first day of fall term. When he encountered different members of the history department’s leadership, they were all very enthusiastic to be back on campus, he said, but he was put off when they all mentioned their pride in UO’s policies.
He said his colleagues weren’t acting like themselves; they sounded “weird and forced.”
Later that day, in a department meeting, the leadership echoed these sentiments. After the meeting, they sent an email to the department.
“They didn’t explicitly say there’s no problem on campus, but the whole thing was just like, the university is doing its job really well, but what they could be doing better is communicating about it,” he said.
The history GE said the implicit argument that COVID-19 had little to no material impact on campus created an adversarial relationship between GEs and the department leaders who endorsed the message.
“That’s the line that our department took, and that’s bullshit,” he said. “There were literally 1,000 cases on campus in one week.”
UO’s inability to admit even small failures and listen to those most impacted by them has made the history GE feel anxious, he said. He feels like it’s up to him to keep himself and others safe, and he doesn’t feel supported by any particular body on campus.
“The one word I would use to describe my experiences, where it applies to me being at this university as a grad student, me in this department, it’s all across the board a super alienating experience,” he said.
The power to choose only goes so far: Pearl Lee, a comparative literature GE
When the omicron surge hit, Pearl Lee — a GE in the comparative literature department — opted to move their comparative motion picture class to Zoom. They felt supported by their department, which did not require classes to meet UO’s 20% threshold to transition to online learning. Some of Lee’s colleagues in other departments were forced to stay in-person despite their reservations, Lee said.
Lee was able to choose when to go online, but that power doesn’t extend to other steps to safe and comfortable learning.
When a student told Lee they wanted to come to class only a few days after testing positive for COVID-19 because they felt fine, Lee didn’t feel empowered to ask that student to stay home. Nor did they feel empowered when the same situation happened again.
“I was worried then because I can’t tell that student, ‘Oh, you probably shouldn’t come still,” Lee said. “That student was excited about coming to class in person, but I was worried about whether other students would be affected.”
UO’s COVID-19 Exposure Scenarios and Guidance page instructs students who test positive to isolate for five days after they started experiencing symptoms or, if they don’t have symptoms, after they tested positive.
After four weeks of teaching online, which Lee found “draining,” they transitioned back to in-person instruction and were met with issues conducting a hybrid class.
When it comes to in-person class, “I know that some students can’t risk it or don’t want to risk it, which is perfectly reasonable,” they said.
The audio-visual systems in each classroom vary. UO has classroom technology pages for each classroom and a few video tutorials, but the videos did not match the system in Lee’s classroom, they said. They ended up having to purchase an adapter to conduct hybrid class effectively.
“One time I had to just hold up my laptop and show the images I wanted to show students around the classroom because I couldn’t project things,” they said.
Another time, they called IT for assistance, and another time the whole system stopped working spontaneously.
“When you charge students that much money for tuition and other fees, why do you have subpar equipment in classrooms?” Lee said. “That’s my question for the administration.”
