Open letter on COVID-19 from UNC Chapel Hill tenured faculty to undergraduates
An open letter from thirty tenured Chapel Hill faculty members to UNC undergraduates:
Your experience as a Chapel Hill undergraduate is a journey we are delighted to join and feel fortunate to be a part of. We want to be in the classroom teaching you.
However, we cannot, in good conscience, perform that role on campus this semester. We need to stay safe from Covid-19 by staying at home – and we need you to stay home in order to protect yourselves and your fellow students, your teachers, the many workers who serve you on campus, the residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and your own family members and loved ones.
University leaders developed their Roadmap to reopening on the basis of a key assumption - namely, that a “first” viral wave in spring would be followed only by a (hopefully) smaller “second” wave in fall and winter. Subsequent events have shown that that was a faulty assumption. Now the country’s oldest public university must not repeat the tragic errors of this summer by reopening too quickly and completely. Under current conditions, it is not safe for you to come to campus--to live in dormitories and apartments, to sit in classrooms, and to socialize with your peers in the way that college students usually do.
We recognize that some of you will have to live on campus this fall semester for financial or personal reasons, and we want to help ensure that campus is safe for you. We implore the rest of you to stay home this fall. We believe that this will result in a better fall semester for most of you. It is also a tangible way for all of us to contribute to the health and safety of our loved ones and the Carolina community.
Keeping one another safe and healthy over the next several months has to be our collective goal. We are teaching online as part of our contribution to that effort, and we invite you to join us. We have spent much of the summer working hard to ensure that our online classes are the best that they can be. We are confident that what we offer you, safely, online, will be better than what we can do under the compromised conditions of the face to face classroom during the pandemic.
As tenured faculty, we are among the most privileged members of the UNC-Chapel Hill community. One of the greatest benefits of our position is having the chance to share ideas, and discover new knowledge, with you. But neither our research nor our teaching is as important to us as the health, safety, and well-being of our students and our colleagues, including the staff and campus workers who make our teaching and research possible.
Once we can all safely resume face-to-face instruction we pledge to do our utmost to make your education at UNC-Chapel Hill one of the most fulfilling educational experiences that a student -- or teacher -- can have anywhere in the world. On-campus experiences with you, our students, are as dear to us as they are to you. We are all in this together.
Signatories (listed alphabetically):
Emily Baragwanath, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
Karen Booth, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
Patricia Bryan, Henry P. Brandis Distinguished Professor, School of Law
Daniel M. Cobb, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Sciences
María Deguzmán, Eugene H. Falk Distinguished Professor, Arts & Sciences
Thurston Domina, Professor, School of Education
Maxine Eichner, Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor, School of Law
Carl Ernst, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Arts & Sciences
Sue E. Estroff, Professor, Social Medicine
Donna Falvo, Professor Emerita, School of Medicine
Deen Freelon, Associate Professor, Hussman School of Media and Journalism
Erik Gellman, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
Glenn Hinson, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
Sharon L. James, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Mark Katz, John P. Barker Distinguished Professor, Arts & Sciences
Sherryl Kleinman, Professor Emerita, Arts & Sciences
Beth Kurtz-Costes, Zachary Taylor Smith Distinguished Term Professor, Arts & Sciences
Michael Lambert, Professor in the School of Social Work
John McGowan, Professor Emeritus, Arts & Sciences
Hassan Melehy, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Jennifer Morton, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
Raúl Necochea, Associate Professor, Social Medicine
Don Nonini, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Michael Palm, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
C. D. C. Reeve, Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor, Arts & Sciences
John T. Roberts, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Maria R. Servedio, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Ryan Shaw, Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Sciences
Jay M. Smith, Professor, Arts & Sciences
Patricia E. Sawin, Associate Professor, Arts & Sciences
This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Open letter on COVID-19 from UNC Chapel Hill tenured faculty to undergraduates."