UNC faculty want more protection and COVID-19 testing before returning to campus
As leaders at UNC-Chapel Hill make decisions for the fall semester, many students and faculty have concerns about returning to campus during the coronavirus pandemic.
More than 650 faculty members, graduate teaching fellows and teaching assistants have sent a petition to administrators making three requests. The petition comes as reported hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients in North Carolina continue to climb.
The demands:
▪ No instructor will be required to teach in person or disclose personal health concerns.
▪ All members of the UNC-CH community will be required to wear masks and practice physical distancing in classrooms and public settings.
▪ All UNC-CH students, faculty and staff on campus will be tested for COVID-19 during the first weeks of classes, plus a plan for regular and ongoing testing.
UNC students, health experts, administrators and faculty members discussed these questions and concerns at a Faculty Executive Committee meeting Monday.
Expectations for fall classes
UNC-CH faculty members are expected to develop their courses both to be taken in-person and remotely for students to access online. And they all need to be prepared to immediately move their classes to remote instruction, if necessary.
Classes will be delivered through a combination of face-to-face instruction, recordings of the class or lecture and meeting at a certain time online. In the College of Arts and Sciences, which serves the majority of UNC undergraduate students, all courses over 50 students will be taught online, according to faculty. Faculty were also told that UNC administration want students to take three of their five classes in person this fall and have Carolina’s First Year Seminars be a face-to-face experience. The different options are available to maximize flexibility for students. Deans and department chairs will determine how the different courses will be offered.
At the meeting Monday, Student Body and Undergraduate Student Government President Reeves Moseley said students are more concerned about their health and safety than getting back to Chapel Hill.
“Students want to come back to campus, being on Zoom is not ideal in any circumstance,” Moseley said. “There’s the mental health aspect of it, but there’s also just the educational aspect of it. And students don’t want to be paying tuition dollars for online guidance and teaching.”
“However, I think students are more still concerned about their well-being,” Moseley said.
He said he supported the enforcement of wearing masks in classrooms to protect students and faculty, particularly those who are immunocompromised.
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Faculty want to make teaching decisions
Faculty have been instructed to discuss concerns about teaching on campus with their department chairs, but health-related requests to teach remotely need to filed with the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office.
“We will have a process which people can seek that form of accommodation and we anticipate those accommodations will be made very liberally to our community,” Provost Bob Blouin said Monday.
He said there will be “reasonable accommodations” to stay off campus for other factors, including circumstances in their personal lives or anything that would put them at “undue risk.”
Some faculty raised concerns about not having the autonomy to decide what’s best and needing to ask permission to teach remotely.
“Our faculty are asking UNC administrators don’t you trust us to do the right thing?,” journalism professor and faculty executive committee member Deb Aikat said after the meeting. “If we decide to teach remotely for whatever reason why do we have to go through this extra layer of going to my chair and HR?”
Ultimately, faculty say they want the power to decide how they will teach their classes and the privacy about why they’re making that choice.
“Our point is not that we don’t want to teach in person, we want to have the ability to choose,” English professor Maria DeGuzman said in an interview with the News & Observer.
DeGuzman and other faculty have noted that Duke University made that blanket statement that no faculty will be required to teach on campus and won’t have to disclose their personal health concerns.
That process is a bit more complicated for UNC because it’s part of the UNC System, which is made up of 17 public institutions, and Duke is a private entity.
Enforcing use of masks and social distancing
Health experts made it clear at the meeting that masks are one of the most important tools to reduce the risk spreading COVID-19.
Dr. Myron Cohen, director of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, said masks make an ‘incredible difference’ in terms of the probability of getting COVID-19 or infecting someone else.
“There should be no mixed message that masks work,” Cohen said.
UNC-CH is developing “community standards and policies” that students, faculty, employees and visitors are required to follow, including physical distancing and wearing a face covering or face mask.
Preeyanka Rao, undergraduate vice president, said most students she’s talked to are comfortable and want to be wearing masks around campus and in classrooms.
“I think given all of the scientific research that has been done with coronavirus as well as the epidemiological and health behavior findings, students understand the necessity of needing to wear masks to reduce transmission of the disease,” Rao said.
UNC-CH will be providing face masks to anyone who needs one and professors should be able to tell any student who walks into their classroom to put on a mask. However, it’s not clear how those rules will be enforced.
There’s no way to ensure students will abide by these rules at off campus residences or social gatherings, which worries some student leaders and faculty.
Maian Adams, Chief of External Relations and Advocacy of the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, said “with almost near certainty” that the “vast majority” of students won’t wear masks at parties.
“I say this because I have seen some students out and about now over the summer, you know, who aren’t necessarily practicing social distancing,” Adams said. “They are going to bars, and they aren’t wearing masks even if the bartenders are wearing masks and there are other people around them.”
Routine testing to return to campus
In the petition, faculty raised the idea of mass COVID-19 testing when people return to campus. UNC health experts said they have the capacity to do that, but it wouldn’t be productive and has drawbacks.
The virus has a 14-day incubation period, so a person could test negative today, but then test positive tomorrow and that could make things worse, said Dr. David Weber, medical director of UNC Hospitals’ Departments of Hospital Epidemiology.
“Sometimes it gives people a false assurance of ‘I’m negative so don’t have to follow physical distancing or masking or other protective mechanisms,’” Weber said.
And then, those people could be infected with the virus the next day, Weber said.
Dr. Erica Pettigrew, medical director of the Orange County Health Department and the medical director of Occupational Health at UNC Health Care, said the “testing everyone” strategy has given rise to some issues in hospitals.
“As we do more and more testing of patients, we see that people may get a little bit more lax in their PPE, in their masking or symptom monitoring,” Pettigrew said.
Pettigrew said the test is also less useful when there’s a low prevalence in a certain population because those may be false positives.
Duke University is testing all students living on campus for COVID-19 before they can start classes, and all students, faculty and staff will have to do daily health checks.
Pettigrew said testing asymptomatic people is a strategy they’ve been considering, but from a public health standpoint, it’s more useful to focus on the interventions they know work. That includes masks, physical distancing, symptomatic people staying at home and making sure there’s access to testing for people with symptoms.
Uncertainty in preparing for fall
Some faculty are frustrated that they don’t have more answers about how to prepare for the fall. At the meeting, administrators and health experts continued to relay the point that they are working through different scenarios and can’t predict the future with this pandemic.
The petition was not organized by the Faculty Executive Committee, but there is a separate survey that was sent to UNC-CH’s nearly 4,000 faculty members to get a more clear picture of their thoughts and fears. It asks for feedback on the pandemic safety precautions for teaching on campus set by the university in its Roadmap for Fall 2020 on the Carolina Together website.
“It’s not a plan, it’s a prayer,” Aikat said.
That roadmap raised more questions than answers, Aikat said, and faculty members will continue to hound administrators about the metrics for taking an “off-ramp,” details about course delivery and the safety risks of returning to campus.
More than 1,000 faculty have already responded to the survey, and the results should be discussed at the next Faculty Executive Committee meeting on Monday.
This story was originally published June 10, 2020 at 1:53 PM.
