Dear colleagues,
As we’re sure you know, the administration has decided to no longer require face coverings in classrooms and libraries, as of next Monday. Unfortunately, management didn’t discuss this important change with our unions; we didn’t even receive more than a few days’ advance notice of the announcement of this unilateral decision.
We know there are different (and often passionately held) views about masking at our university. But hopefully we can all agree that each of us must be able to weigh the concerns and make decisions about our classrooms and workspaces. The administration’s unilateral change to masking policy—at a time when the COVID pandemic is still taking 350 lives a day in the United States alone—does not allow us this individual right to do what we judge is best for the health and safety of ourselves and our families, students, and communities.
Yesterday, our union’s Executive Council passed a resolution about the masking policy change. Read it and let us know if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions; you can email us at aaup@rutgersaaup.org.
Our union is filing a grievance and demanding negotiation over this issue because the new masking policy represents an unnegotiated change to our working conditions. All of us made individual decisions about teaching and working in the Fall semester based on the masking policy set out last spring. The administration has upended those personal decisions with little warning and no input from us.
As the EC resolution states, we are calling on the administration to “empower and support all teaching faculty who retain and implement mandatory masking for all students in their classroom”; to “permit exclusion of Fall 2022 semester teaching evaluations…in anticipation of potential backlash for enforcing mandatory masking”; to “continue to mandate face covering in all libraries and clinical settings,” and to “allow for students to anonymously and confidentially request mandatory masking in their learning spaces.”
Again, we know that some of you will welcome the change in masking policy, while others are deeply opposed. We hope that there can be common ground on this: each of us must be able to make decisions for our classrooms and workspaces, based on our own reflection and judgment.
In solidarity,
Becky and Todd
Rebecca Givan, President, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Todd Wolfson, General Vice President, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
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