Colleges in the 2021-2022 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 2)

Parents Forum
3618

No, he stayed with a relative for a few days (maybe traveled by Uber?). Also went to an activity on campus (remember if you are vaccinated and exposed but test negative you don’t actually have to quarantine, these rooms are for those with nowhere else to stay because someone else is infected, so maybe “quarantine housing” is not the right word). So could be various possible sources (and seems likely there’s a lot of spread).

And he now has to move out of this “quarantine housing” to another set of rooms with only infected people and strict isolation (or back to his original apartment with my S) after the positive test.

3619

A Clemson professor is organizing a walk out by tenured faculty tomorrow over the lack of masking.
Collective action might work

3620

Do you think these professors can be terminated for walking out given your prior comments below?

“Fear of getting sick from in person work is not grounds for requiring accommodation, per federal law. So employees are free to refuse vaccines, or refuse to work in person, but either can be grounds for termination.”

“I was referring to termination for not following college policy regarding teaching in person”

I would have thought refusing to work based on not having a mask mandate is not that dissimilar and your second statement could apply?

3621

Seems like there is a difference between what may be legal for an employer to do versus whether the employer has the power to do it. One employee striking can be fired at little cost to the employer. Many employees, or enough important-enough employees, striking are basically daring the employer to fire them at substantial cost to the employer.

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3622

Would you mind saying what school this is? I doubt most schools are rapid testing close contacts every day.

3623

This is at UCLA. To be clear this testing is only required for those staying in the on campus “quarantine” (really exposure) housing. Not sure how that will translate once school begins in late September or who will get relocated (from what will be full capacity triple dorms) in the case of outbreaks.

They do plan to undertake weekly (rapid/PCR?) testing of everyone living on campus this coming quarter (and offer to everyone else) which I expect will require a much higher volume (30-40K per week?) than the daily rapid testing of close contacts. S is actually glad he got COVID now, since it is far less disruptive (to his online internship work) than it would have been after (in person) classes start.

Over the last few weeks (since the first one of them got COVID) S and his friends have been using BinaxNow rapid tests of their own (that they bought at CVS) as a check every few days because it takes time out of your day to go and get the PCR tests on campus and you then have to wait 24 hours.

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3624

according to Clemson professors who posted on reddit – that is not true.

3625

https://www.thestate.com/news/coronavirus/article253518304.html

From today’s State Newspaper…

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3626

for some reason this post just made me think of what a friend told me about her daughter’s school last year; and the covid housing. the students could all get together there because they were all positive. after being sick, it turned out pretty fun for the kids as they could go in and out of each other’s rooms and walk around freely.

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3627

The university can dock the faculty salaries.

For untenured faculty, usually the contract includes a set number of courses to teach. If the faculty member doesn’t uphold that end, then there might be grounds for an immediate pay reduction. There is also the specter of your tenure recommendation being turned down. Tenured faculty will have more bargaining power; however, the provost holds the cards when it comes to salary increases, department budget, hiring and so forth. Frankly, if the provost can replace a few troublesome (deadwood?) faculty for permanent instructors at a fraction of the cost, this might be the means to make that happen, especially for some of those soft majors that don’t attract a whole lot of undergraduate interest at the moment. So some faculty might want to tread carefully.

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3628

A walkout by the faculty and staff could give the president the political cover to issue a mandate for masks indoors. That’s assuming that the president is willing to do it. The fact that he’s tweeting pictures of a full convocation indicates that he may not buckle to faculty pressure. An easier solution would be to cancel convocation. I never found it to be that useful.

3629

He is in a tough position, and needs the state legislature on board for a mask mandate. That seems unlikely. If he waits a week, they might have enough cases to close school.

3630

And this just happened an hour ago…

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3631

I think what might be missing from the picture here is that admin walks a fine line when it comes to university instructional faculty and staff, union or no union.

Universities essentially rely on free labor. In no way are non-tenure track faculty compensated for all the labor they do, and in general they’re paid a small fraction of what tenure-track faculty make for much more teaching. They also teach the majority of contact hours. In the last year, we’ve done an obscene amount of work with no extra compensation, sometimes with cuts, to keep school going. Like I said upthread, the situation now is more fragile than I’ve ever seen it before. It’s not as though you can replace a lot of people, offering to pay them ridiculously small money, no job security, often no benefits, with a side of physical danger, at the drop of a hat.

Similarly, staff. Without the work that rank/file staff do, departments fall into chaos pretty fast, especially if they’re big departments or have particularly bumbling faculty. Much runs on Nancy’s making a call to Sue and knowing 25 years’ worth of arcane ins and outs, and Nancy’s been thinking pretty hard in the last year about retiring early. Most staff are not well-compensated for what they do, and they’re also fried and not especially happy about breathing your kids’ air.

Although admin tend to be a little removed from all this, they’re not so far removed that they want to start a serious fight.

eta: One of my bosses let me know today that they’ve applied for another, non-university remote job; they’re currently protecting a few other people who are on the verge of just up and quitting, and making life tolerable enough for them, so if that person goes, a few others might go, too, I don’t know. This is also the person who’s managed to keep our classrooms staffed at below market rate for the instructors’ degrees because it’s all we’re allowed to pay. We’ve already got empty jobs all over the place and stacks of brand-new expensive admin who don’t know their jobs yet. I’ll likely be volunteer-teaching an independent study because the scheduled faculty member jumped or was pushed the day of campus return – they’ve got a medically fragile child, and I guess that was the last straw. I’m the only other person in this whole place available to teach that subject, but there may be no mechanism for arranging it so I can get paid for teaching. I’m willing to volunteer 1 credit’s worth for this kid, but not 3. Pity, because the kid seems like a good and eager student, very well-prepped. The meetings will be zoom-only, though.

I mean these are just stories in my immediate circle. The circle’s not that unusual.

3632

This really applies only to not-yet-tenured tenure-track faculty: assistant profs mostly. I think JB’s orientation is very much “tenure-track faculty are the faculty”, but at most US universities this is not the case. While tt faculty…well, governance isn’t what it used to be, either. Suffice to say that non-tenure-track faculty and grad students, on the whole paid far less than tt, teach most of the contact hours in the US.

In terms of what there is to lose for non-tt, it’s not such a big deal. The salaries are mostly low (higher in some specialties and renewable lectureships with promotion ladders convertible to “professor of practice” lines), there’s little or no job security, and dept budgets, hiring, all those aspects of dept-running that involve the provost are things you’re usually excluded from. You’re also easily let go at the first hint of budget trouble, so while people will hang on for a while for the students’ sake, there isn’t the kind of overlap with institutional interest you see among tt.

It would take some doing to fire a tenured faculty member for going to zoom, and an admin would have to decide if it was really worth the trouble, especially since it’d mean they’d get no end of grief about readvertising the line, possibly losing grants, trouble with grad students if there was a grad program, etc. I’d think salary docking for part of the teaching component of the contract would be about as far as it could go, which for many profs is nbd. My guess is it’d just be one of the many things that was pointedly overlooked with some minor revenge served cold later if affordable. Or the revenge might go the other way if there was salary-docking. That’s the thing, you don’t know who you’re going to have to be nice to in ten years.

3633

They have reserved rooms on-campus to isolate students who test positive and rooms to quarantine unvaccinated close contacts.

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3634

Walkback here has started when it comes to f2f. I’m reminded of this (annoying subscribe button goes away fast): The BBC Cannot Give In To Government Pressure | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats - YouTube

3635

Oh I agree with that but the answer is pretty simple if they are non-tt instructors, because in that case they were just hired to teach. You don’t teach, you are not paid at all. Whether that matters to them might be another question, in which case the separation sounds like it’s mutually beneficial. There are many waiting in the wings for the chance to teach at a college. There always are. Colleges and universities should try hire those who are eager to do the job well (which of course means that they first have to show up).

In the article on Clemson, the profs mentioned had standard titles associated with tt faculty and so I focused on that sub-group. It’s a more difficult question in that case in part due, as you mentioned, to the institutional investment.

Last I checked there seemed to be way more grad students trying to get into some of these programs than space available. So not sure what sort of “trouble” might emerge but perhaps I misunderstand.

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3636

This is the case for some tt-faculty as well. At our local flagship everyone took a pay cut.

Hmm. Not sure about this. Maybe timing and volume matter - if everyone ups and quits that might be a problem. However, part of the reason why many colleges can get away with paying so little per course . . . is because there are always people available to step in when someone quits.

That very last part may be true. However, if Nancy is hanging around for 25 years it’s because her compensation, seniority and quality of experience in that job surpasses what would be had in others. It’s true that some staff - particularly the experienced ones in an academic department - are simply invaluable. Not all are - it depends on what department they are effectively running. Not sure I’ve come across “fried” staff, but YMMV depending on the school - and of course the past year has been particularly taxing for most.

Why don’t they not hire more admin and raise the salary of the teaching staff? Seems too many admin and not enough academic types . . .

One odd benefit of the pandemic is that it might hasten the ultimate demise of many struggling institutions (not saying that’s the case with Bennty’s school, of course). There is a demographic cliff hanging around out there and it’ll hit in a few years’ time. The sooner that some institutions see the writing on the wall and either figure out some sort of merger or wind up their affairs, the better.

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3637

This is true in big cities with a lot of universities and PhD/master’s flotsam. It is not, unfortunately, true in great big parts of the country, where you just don’t find a lot of people hanging around with advanced degrees so anxious to teach that they’re willing to cut their earning capacity by half or more to do it. We routinely struggle to staff our classrooms. In some places, they have to turn to advanced undergrads who’ve done well to teach freshman/sophomore classes.

If you’ve been near a university in the last year, you have.

When I was hired, a very senior staffer told me she hoped I could be a bridge between faculty and staff. Willy-nilly, I am. I’ve got all the ego and grants capacity of faculty; I teach, do research, publish, etc. But I don’t have their commitment to institutions, I’m capable of life outside universities, and I talk a lot with lots of staff, up and down the line. Staff will in general not tell faculty about problems they’re having because it’s not worth the trouble: you’re likely to take it wrong, especially if you’re from a generation that views admission of weakness as “can’t do the job”. Also, they’re managing you, topping from bottom, and don’t want to mess that up and make more work for themselves in the process. Fortunately, you guys don’t pay them much attention. A thing I’d recommend, though, right about now: respect. Respect them now. Cut out some of that upstairs/downstairs game you play. Go for a socially-leveling Blitz mode: you’re all in it together, and try to mean it. You can’t afford the disgruntlement and neither can the students and families who’re trying very hard to have a functional on-campus year. Non-university jobs do exist, and they won’t be treated like second-class citizens there. Really think about that one. That is the thing I hear most anger about at the moment from people working at a pretty good range of institutions: respect. From faculty, the lack of it. Normally it’s a background thing but it’s right out there after the last year. I’m surprised by the brightness of it, haven’t seen it like that before.

It’d be nifty, but even if they stopped throwing so much money at admin (and I’m guessing they have to or at this point…cripes. I was on a hiring committee for a dean recently and everyone was shocked that the guy we chose actually went for it. He’s actually smart and good and productive. Collects awesome students, too, had one in a class. But I’m sure the money put a great big fat thumb on the scale) – even if they did stop throwing the money, it wouldn’t start paying real instructional-staff salaries. Too many people. This probably isn’t the thread for getting into it, but it’d take some serious money-moving.

I have to say, I’m not really a believer in “the cliff”. I read Grawe’s book when my boss gave it to me, which put me miles ahead of every presentation-giver I heard talking about it afterwards, and I describe it as “lightly racist”. Dude is an economist looking at about four variables in the rearview and assuming that them durn Mexicans don’t believe in eddycation so much. He’s essentially saying that the white middle class is drying up some, which is true, but doesn’t seem to have noticed that the rest of the world also wants education, and that we seem to be adding jillions of humans all the time. But you’ll get this with economists. Now, do I think that people will start figuring out ways of not spending $100-300K to get from 18 to 22? Or to get into a new field? Yes. Yes, I do. And covid is making it happen much, much faster than it might have otherwise. What you see here on cc, where the main fury is about losing the opportunity for cotillion socialization and initiation into the money and power clubs – I mean, you’re talking about clubs. If this goes on long enough, rich people will find other clubs. That’d be a disaster for a whole sector of higher ed. I do trust the most central power-elite university clubs to maintain themselves, that is after all their speciality and they’re super well-equipped, but the others will have serious trouble.

But I don’t see a crash in the number of people looking for an education past high school. Not just a vocational education, either. An education. There’s a whole lot of new people, and while the shine’s off American universities, my inbox says it’s not off that much.