COVID Safety Work Action Follow-Up
For folks who committed to going online 2/2-2/4:
Dear fellow grad worker,
We appreciate your willingness to move your classes online this week to protest UIUC’s COVID-19 policies and demand safety protections.
As you may have heard, the university administration has moved classes online Wednesday through Friday due to inclement weather. We wish that they showed this much concern for disabled, immunocompromised, elderly, and caretaker members of our campus community by responding to our demands for safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the massmail announcing the move to online classes, Chancellor Jones suggests the decision was made in the interest of health and safety. Why do thousands of COVID-19 cases on campus and in the CU community not warrant the same response?
In addition to this hypocrisy regarding teaching modalities, the inclement weather has also provided administration with a convenient excuse to ignore the online work-action that was publicized this morning, which hundreds of TAs across several departments have committed to. We will not let the inclement weather distract from our demands for a safe learning and teaching environment for everyone on our campus. Our Learning. Our Labor. Our Choice!
To keep our community’s attention focused on the university administration’s response to COVID, we encourage you to do the following during your online classes this week:
Use one of the Zoom backgrounds at bit.ly/GEOCOVIDRESOURCES during your classes and meetings to demand safety and spark conversations.
Use the lesson plan or online teaching slides at bit.ly/GEOCOVIDRESOURCES to have a conversation with your students around COVID-19 safety.
Encourage your students and their parents to sign our petition at https://tinyurl.com/UIUCSafetyPetition and to email the chancellor and provost using our templates at https://tinyurl.com/EmailforSafety and https://l.linklyhq.com/l/iYzd.
We fear that Provost Cangellaris and Chancellor Jones may use this weather-related change in modality to ignore our online action and continue to refuse to collaborate on developing a plan for COVID-19 safety. For this reason, keeping our classes online next week, Feb. 7–11, may be necessary for the administration to take our concerns seriously. Graduate workers came together in a strong show of collaboration and solidarity to move our classes online this week to protect our graduate workers, our students, and our faculty and staff. We can only achieve a safe campus community and quality education if we all continue to join together in action. Please fill out this form to indicate whether you are willing to extend our online action and commit to moving your classes online next week, Feb. 7–11: https://bit.ly/COVIDACTIONS2.
In Solidarity,
Graduate Employees’ Organization
809 S. 5th St., Geneva Room
Champaign, IL 61820
Email: geo@uigeo.org