Yesterday, the administration made the decision that TAUP members and others have been urging them to make for months, shifting non-essential classes online. But this happened only after over 200 COVID-19 cases were identified.
Since March, TAUP members have come together and worked to ensure the safety of colleagues, students, campus workers and the surrounding communities during this pandemic.
Together, we fought alongside student groups, elected officials, and coalitions with clear and justifiable arguments for an online fall term. We’re all left with much uncertainty at this moment while feeling everything from relief to frustration and anger.
Temple’s administration has been faced with many extremely difficult choices–thanks, among other things, to the profound failures by the Trump Administration in combating the pandemic. There were no and are no painless options among damage to the financial health of the university, its workers, and its students, and threats to health and safety.
But due in part to the administration not listening to its own workers and students, we are now left with worse outcomes among the admittedly limited range presented to us. Temple made us prepare to teach in person and online, and we showed up prepared; so much time, labor, and money expended by faculty, librarians, academic professionals, administration, staff, and students.
Yet to what end?
Temple is now forcing students to decide whether to stay in their current housing and risk further exposure to the virus, or break leases (if living off campus) to go home and potentially risk exposing their families and communities. Temple has also made the members of the surrounding communities more vulnerable to exposure as well, and today’s decision does not reduce the risks they have been exposed to. And, now, our City must divert resources to contain this current Temple-made COVID outbreak.
Our members are left with many other questions: Who are the “essential” workers who must continue to work on campus? How were decisions about this work made? Are there people who feel that they are being forced to work in an unsafe workplace? We need to hear from you. If you have been deemed “essential” and feel unsafe, reach out to us taupaft@gmail.com
We do not know how many will end up infected, how many will get sick, how many will be permanently injured, or how many may die. Temple must take all necessary steps to keep these numbers as close to zero as possible for all the members of our community.
Temple has also damaged relationships with its workers, students, their parents, homeowners and renters in the surrounding communities. Faculty and staff have committed their life’s work and careers to upholding Temple’s reputation. That work has been jeopardized.
We cannot turn back the clock and pretend that serious errors have not been made.
But we must also look toward the future. As we work through the Fall and plan for the Spring, we urge the administration and Board to learn from their mistakes, among them the unwillingness to bring stakeholders, including the university’s unions, into the decision-making process.
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TAUP’s members stand ready to do what can be done to help fulfill Temple’s core missions to teach, create knowledge, and serve the community. We worry that our students and their parents have lost or will lose faith in the institution as a whole, with terrible consequences for all of us, though they will be felt disproportionately. We will do whatever we can to reassure them that our members remain dedicated to their learning and their safety.
Yet for our members to do this work as effectively as they can, we require a real dialogue with the administration that will yield a clear, safe, and equitable plan. And our work must be properly acknowledged. Without this, further damage will mount, and it may be irreparable.
As we look toward Labor Day, a day set aside to acknowledge the struggles of workers, we know that the struggle continues. And we know that Temple can and must do better.
