VCU-AAUP Resolution on Online Education in the Fall 2020 Semester

WHEREAS, the members of VCU-AAUP appreciate that President Rao, Provost Hackett, and the rest of the administration have worked diligently in the Spring and Summer of 2020 to help the VCU community cope with the COVID-19 pandemic;

WHEREAS, in many cases, the administration has provided departments and units with welcome flexibility in our ability to tailor class modality to meet community needs;

WHEREAS, for professors in some departments, constant adjustment of expectations and schedules creates an enormous burden, especially for faculty with less independence than tenure-track faculty in longstanding academic departments;

WHEREAS, the spread of COVID-19 has sadly continued to increase in recent months, and no vaccine or significant treatment modality is expected soon, such that the current situation in the US is worse than it was in Spring 2020 when all classes were moved online;

WHEREAS, the American Association of University Professors has declared that “The health and safety of students, faculty, and staff should be the primary consideration in decision-making about when to reopen a campus,” that “Decisions on how to reopen campuses safely should be driven by guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state departments of health,” and that “the faculty and academic staff—through their shared governance bodies or, when applicable, their unions—should accordingly participate in decisions related to how best to implement a return to on-campus instruction. In order to ensure full participation, administrations should be transparent, should keep the faculty fully informed, and should consult meaningfully with existing faculty governance bodies.”

WHEREAS, the CDC has not yet issued guidance that colleges and universities should reopen campuses, in contrast to its guidance for K12 education, and even this guidance specifically references communities not experiencing current outbreaks, which describes neither Richmond nor Virginia;

WHEREAS, VCU administration has conducted surveys of students (though has not shared this data with faculty), and has worked with Faculty Senate and other bodies, it has not presented data to suggest that there is widespread faculty or community agreement that in-person education is safe;

WHEREAS, many local school districts, including Richmond Public Schools itself, have already indicated that the Fall 2020 semester will be conducted entirely online;

WHEREAS, in-person education requires residential housing that is far more dangerous than the classroom itself, and makes in-person college education far more dangerous than K12;

WHEREAS, residential colleges and universities are emerging as especially potent sources for spread of COVID-19, even before they open for the Fall;

WHEREAS, VCU is located in a large urban center, so that an outbreak centered at the university would likely spill over into the community for which VCU has significant responsibility;  

WHEREAS, many of the country's leading college and universities have indicated that they will shift to all-online education in the Fall (more than 800 are currently listed as “fully” or “primarily” online for Fall 2020);

WHEREAS, President William R. Harvey of Hampton University, a nearby historically Black institution, has recently written that there is only one question universities should be asking right now, and that it must be asked broadly in the community, namely “Is this safe?”--a question that the members of Hampton’s community resoundingly answered “no”;

WHEREAS, VCU-AAUP recognizes that some classes (for example, studio and lab classes) can only be conducted in-person;

WHEREAS, in-person education will almost certainly result in outbreaks on campus early in the Fall 2020 term, and such an outbreak would not only have negative financial and health consequences that may well be worse than restricting in-person education in the first place, and will result in those necessarily in-person classes being restricted as well;

BE IT RESOLVED, that VCU-AAUP calls on President Rao to immediately declare that classes for the Fall 2020 semester should be held exclusively online, except in cases where in-person education is deemed absolutely necessary;

BE IT RESOLVED, that such measures should remain in place until evidence can be provided that a significant majority of the VCU community considers in-person education to be safe.