March 16, 2020

TO:       President Janet Napolitano

FROM: Council of UC Faculty Associations

We write to ask you to delay the start of spring quarter by two weeks, to begin on April 13 rather than March 30. We came to this solution following an intensive discussion among our members about the challenges of moving to remote teaching, at least through the spring quarter, and gathering information from other universities around the country on how they are adapting to the COVID-19 emergency. Our campus learning centers and instructional technology staff — typically the least funded departments on our campuses — are valiantly trying to make it possible for instructors to remotely deliver the best approximation of the pedagogical quality of our renowned in-person and residential classes. But we all need more time for faculty to get the training we need to adapt our classes, IT departments to increase their bandwidth, staff to support our emergency efforts, and students to get the adequate technology and appropriate settings they need for remote learning. On top of these challenges, we are also aware that we need to create multiple contingency plans for faculty, staff, and students who may get sick.

Universities that are moving to remote learning and are extending the spring break by one or two weeks to allow adequate preparation include Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Tufts, Stony Brook, Duke University, Ohio State, Northeastern, University of Alaska, University of Wyoming, University of Texas-Austin, and almost twenty other Texas colleges and universities, among many more. Surely the great University of California system can manage to respond as creatively as other universities around the country.

We know that what is most important is to stay in touch with our students, to assure them that we care for them and are doing everything we can to give them a sense of continuity and help them complete their education. For many of our students, the university is their lifeline. We can reach out to the students registered for our classes to let them know that we are using the two-week period to ensure that they and we are ready for the switch to remote learning. We can even get them started on readings and exercises to get them primed for the class, something many of us already do. Using both synchronous and asynchronous delivery systems, we can pack ten weeks of teaching into eight.

We call on our UC leaders to recognize that administrators, faculty, students, and staff — especially IT units — need a breathing space between the hyper emergency end of this quarter and the beginning of the next, so that everything can run as smoothly as possible, given how much unpredictability we are all facing in our daily lives.

Give us the chance to demonstrate the extraordinary effort, compassion, and resilience that UC faculty, staff, and students can bring to the COVID-19 disaster by providing us the time we need to succeed.

Sincerely,
Constance Penley,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UCSB

cc:  The UC Campus Chancellors