More than 1,000 faculty and other employees raise concerns about Penn State’s fall reopening plans

“The university put out a statement that they would be as flexible as possible working with people. That’s not good enough because it leaves a lot of leeway.”

• By Jan Murphy/PennLive

More than 1,000 faculty, graduate students and others are calling on Penn State administrators to give them more input in decisions related to the plans to reopen the university’s campuses this fall, including autonomy in deciding whether their instruction is offered in-person.

In an open letter that as of Tuesday morning had been signed by 846 faculty and 303 graduate students and other employees, faculty members also are looking for a promise of job security for employees who don’t have the protection that tenure provides and a guarantee that faculty will play a central role in decision-making with regard to the university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Penn State President Eric Barron announced on Sunday a plan to resume on-campus, in-person classes and other activities this fall in a limited fashion. The university switched to remote instruction in the middle of the spring semester due to the coronavirus outbreak in Pennsylvania.

While some faculty see the return to in-person instruction as inevitable or necessary, Sarah Townsend, an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University Park campus, they also believe the mode of instruction should be left up to faculty members.

“The university put out a statement that they would be as flexible [with regard to work schedules] as possible working with people. That’s not good enough because it leaves a lot of leeway,” she said. “First of all, it’s left up to individual departments and individual supervisors to make these kind of calls. What we really want is for faculty to be able to make those calls.”

She and others who signed the letter attribute the root of their complaints about the university’s fall semester plans university’s plan for resuming in-person instruction this fallto a lack of transparency during the decision-making process and the lack of sufficient faculty involvement.

“The university has assembled task groups and claiming that faculty were involved but the number of faculty is very small and no one knew who was on these task groups until Sunday evening when we received the announcement from President Barron,” Townsend said.

It was then when she and others counted fewer than 20 members of the nearly 300 people on the task groups were faculty members; many of them were deans or associate deans who hold administrative duties, she said.

Penn State officials, however, pushed back on the faculty complaints about a lack of transparency and lack of input.

In a statement shared by university spokeswoman Lisa Powers, it said the university has been open and consultative in its decision-making throughout the crisis. It said Barron has issued open letters to the community, held four town hall meetings, organized 16 task groups, provided updates on the university website, engaged Faculty Senate and elected officials, and surveyed faculty and students.

“As we move forward, our plans will be shaped by new and continued collaborations, as we look forward to continuing to actively engage faculty, staff and students,” Powers said in the statement. “Their voices are an important part of these efforts.”

She later added: “Again, this is a process, and much more remains to be done together.”

Townsend said a group of 13 faculty members joined together in writing the letter last Wednesday and then talked about it with about 50 colleagues. They then began sharing it with others across the university’s 24 campuses and the number of signatures on it grew to 603 by the time it was emailed to Barron, Provost Nick Jones and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Kathy Bieschke on Friday.

The letter was left open for other faculty and staff members to sign. As of Tuesday morning, it had been signed by at least 12% of the nearly 7,100 faculty members who work on most of Penn State’s 24 campuses.

Gary King, a professor of biobehavioral health at University Park, said faculty understand that administrators had to make changes in light of the pandemic and worked with the administration during the spring semester when the decision was made to switch exclusively to remote instruction.

“These are things that we as faculty do and we do it naturally for the administration but we do it for our students as well,” King said. “We want everyone to be protected.”

That’s also why going into the fall, he said, faculty would like to have some latitude with respect to how they teach classes.

“What we want to be able to continue our role as academicians and scholars without in any way somehow jeopardizing our own health as well as the health of students,” King said.

Townsend said she is sure there are some students and parents who are equally concerned about the health risks posed by going back to in-person instruction and residential campus life during a pandemic.

At the same time, she is confident the majority of faculty, including herself, would prefer to be in a classroom under ideal conditions. Many who signed the letter she said are adamantly against broader shifts to online learning.

“But under the circumstances, we think faculty should have that option,” Townsend said.

Other issues raised in the faculty letter concern the lack of assurances about job security and benefits for all staff and contingent faculty; the possibility of additional furloughs and layoffs; and failure to guarantee yearlong funding for graduate students whose progress has been impacted by the pandemic.

Townsend and King said they expect the university administration to respond to the letter but at this point there has been neither a response or acknowledgment that the faculty concerns are under consideration.

“We’re going to deliberate and give some more thought and give them more time,” King said. “We know they have a lot on their plate and we know these things don’t oftentimes move very quickly. But clearly this is a major initiative on the part of faculty that we wanted to bring to the attention of the administration but also bring to the attention of the stakeholders as well as the citizens of the commonwealth. We’re concerned about this and we expect to hear something from them.”

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