SBFA–COVID Protocols Open Letter

To the UCSB Chancellor, EVC, Academic Senate & Covid Working Group For Clarity, Caution & Flexibility on UCSB COVID Pandemic Protocols

Final version:

The UCSB Faculty Association appreciates the UCSB administration’s efforts to steward our community through the ever-changing conditions and circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past 24 months. Everyone has endured much, including critical illness and the death of loved ones, and we still face much uncertainty. Many faculty remain concerned over lingering dangers and inadequate classroom equipment and technological support to do their jobs safely and effectively. They share Teaching Assistant and student questions and concerns over a premature return to in-person instruction in light of incomplete data and limited staff support.  As a representative body of UCSB faculty, we are calling for caution and clarifications on policy, and nuanced flexibility on pandemic protocols concerning:

• Transparency: The current COVID-19 variant behavior model is based on England and South Africa data.* We request you share the data showing that the variant spike in California is adhering to predictions of a sharp decline rather than a high-level plateau.
• Booster Protocols: Clarify vaccine booster protocols to ensure UCSB community members return to campus and in-person classrooms following the minimum-required time for the booster to become effective, ideally mid-February at the earliest since the booster can take up to two weeks to become effective.
• Testing and Personal Protection Equipment: Clarify access for testing and the availability of sufficient personal protection equipment that adheres to nationally-updated recommendations for appropriate use, particularly regarding N-95 masks.
• Trust: Allow individual instructors the authority and latitude to assess the safest and most prudent approach to teaching their courses for the remainder of the 2022 Winter Quarter–since classroom technology and ventilation vary so widely across campus.
• Workload: Recognize that hybrid options are not the ideal solution for all teaching scenarios since this mode frequently doubles workloads, which threatens to violate Lecturer and Teaching Assistant Union contracts signed for the 2022 Winter Quarter.
• Equity and Flexibility: Recognize that the pandemic has had differential impacts across various racial and age demographic groups and among students who must work at jobs in the community where they face greater exposure, which requires nuanced flexibility of UCSB COVID protocols.
• Educational Achievement: Recognize that a return to in-person teaching midway through the 2022 Winter Quarter can constitute an additional disruption to instructors and students; it will compound, rather than alleviate, the detrimental impact of the pandemic on student and instructor well-being and academic performance.

Given all the scientific unknowns, we call for flexibility and attention to the needs of individual instructors necessary for best practices of classroom instruction. We thus urge the UCSB administration to adjust its previously-announced January 31 return to in-person teaching so individual instructors can exercise their judgment to continue with on-line instruction until at least Feb 14^th without having to request a formal health exception.

This adjusted approach would support everyone’s goal to bring students to in-person classrooms safely and without overwhelming technological and health services. It also gives people who feel they need a formal health exception to submit requests in sufficient time for adjudication. All members of the UCSB community are deeply committed to supporting each other in this time of need, and we call upon our leadership to take up our recommendations for the benefit of all and UCSB.

 

*UCSB’s recent decision to return to in-person teaching apparently was in fact influenced by data on Southern California: “Clinical outcomes among patients infected with Omicron (B.1.1.529) SARS-CoV-2 variant in southern California,” available at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v1.full.pdf).
The key points from this difficult-to-read paper are nicely summarized by Scott Grafton, starting at time-point 9:00 of the presentation at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gbCH_k9fxOQhSM8we3DbIXWFnG_cZMG4/view

SBFA appreciates that the COVID Working Group is basing these difficult decisions on the latest regional data on this highly contagious virus.