For Immediate Release:

February 15, 2021

The Campus Faculty Association (CFA) stands in solidarity with and supports the successful efforts of the UIUC Graduate Employees Organization and hundreds of undergraduate students, demanding that the UIUC terminate its use of Proctorio. We celebrate their victory in pressing the university to decline to renew its contract with Proctorio after the summer session. Until Proctorio is fully removed, we strongly encourage all CFA members and tenured faculty to refuse it. 

Unfortunately, Proctorio is only one of several classroom technologies that raise serious concerns about faculty and student privacy and pedagogy. Other forms of technology, like Packback and Turnitin, which already have significant footprints on campus, threaten student and worker privacy in ways that are not upfront and clear to users. They also endanger the quality and quantity of academic labor. The University’s increasing approval and contracting of such classroom technologies also signals a troubling, undemocratic trend in administrative approaches to academic labor and pedagogy that damage its relationship with faculty and students.         

As teachers and mentors to UIUC students, we understand that effective pedagogy requires trust, open communication, and strong relationships among all members participating in a course. Surveillance technologies like Turnitin openly violate that trust by assuming students will cheat and install preemptive measures to discipline their behavior under the already stressful conditions of an exam or paper deadline. Packback, which purports to be a “Digital TA,” poses additional threats to our community’s shared educational mission, not to mention the livelihoods and careers of many of us.

Without any real consultation with faculty, the university has become increasingly reliant on surveillance technology and automated pedagogy. In some cases, the turn to technology has been an obvious and necessary response to the pandemic. In others, the crisis has clearly created an environment of “disaster capitalism” that serves private interests at the expense of UIUC students, workers, and faculty. We believe that outsourcing education to private corporations is not only an irresponsible use of limited funding and resources, but also exposes UIUC constituents to serious threats to their privacy and well-being. Most important, it undermines the foundations of a strong, resilient campus community–now needed more than ever in this moment of multiple crises.

As the organization representing the most privileged and secure class of workers on campus, the CFA calls on all instructors, especially tenured faculty, to refuse to use these technologies. The CFA further demands that the university administration honor its purported commitment to shared governance by seeking serious consultation and input from faculty and other relevant campus workers before committing to contracts  for any future “university-approved” classroom and surveillance technologies. 

Who We Are

The Campus Faculty Association (CFA) is an advocacy organization for faculty and other campus workers committed to shared governance, academic freedom, and a strong faculty voice on campus. The majority of CFA members are tenure-stream faculty. Non-tenure stream faculty in most campus units are represented by their union, the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition Local #6546.

CFA supports the principles of faculty unionization and represents a clear and organized faculty voice. We provide an independent perspective on the university and higher education. <something like that? Or remove>

CFA has been active on the UIUC campus for more than forty years, working on issues of academic freedom, faculty working conditions, and racial and gender equity.

To the University of Illinois community:

The Campus Faculty Association opposes the re-opening of our campus in Fall 2020 in order to protect the health and well-being of all UIUC students, employees, and community members. 

If our campus returns to in-person instruction, students will arrive in Champaign-Urbana from all across the state, nation, and beyond. They will live and socialize in close quarters and will interact with community members, academic and support staff, maintenance workers, and others. These are the conditions for what epidemiologists call a “super spreader event.” We appreciate that the university administration is making efforts to prevent a fresh outbreak of COVID-19 cases in the fall, but adequate protection on a residential campus the breadth and size of ours is nearly impossible. We unequivocally oppose any plan to reopen campus that poses lethal risks to our community. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has also catalyzed an unprecedented economic crisis. As tenured and tenure-track faculty members, we have the privilege of receiving our paychecks and benefits through the crisis. We believe all workers deserve the same, and we support the university administration’s leadership in establishing the “COVID-19 Pandemic Pay and Benefit Continuity Protocol.” This protocol must be extended throughout the crisis to ensure the continuity of pay and benefits for all UIUC employees, including those unable to return to campus. 

Even under the forecasted budget contractions, our University has the resources to avoid layoffs. We should take all possible measures — including drawing emergency funds from our endowment — to do so. This crisis demands a deliberative budget allocation process that involves all stakeholders, including faculty and other workers. CFA members stand ready to help create an emergency alternative budget that will allow our community to weather this storm intact. 

We oppose an in-person opening because of the dire public health risks to our entire community. Rather than allocating university resources to mitigate a crisis of our own making, let us work together to protect the lives and livelihoods of our entire community while providing the best online education and virtual campus life we can.

Signed,

The Campus Faculty Association at UIUC

The last week has been extraordinarily difficult for so many in our community. As we make sense of our new reality and confront the uncertainty of what lies ahead, let us affirm some core principles that guide our collective work on our campus.

Support for Our Colleagues

As an organization dedicated to supporting faculty at UIUC, we express our solidarity with all of our colleagues across campus. Together, we find ourselves scrambling to meet the educational needs of our nearly 50,000 students who are now themselves scattered across the country in the midst of a public health emergency. Let us remind each other that we are not in this work alone. As we prepare to do our very best for our students, let us rely on each other for help, sympathy, and support.

We are all confronting the enormous challenge of facilitating a transition to online teaching by next Monday. We object to the notion that all faculty members can or must comply with immediate calls for making this transition. Effective online teaching requires significant preparation. It is unrealistic to expect that faculty can move in-person courses online quickly while still providing the quality of teaching to which we are all committed. Such a transition is especially difficult for faculty who now have to care for children whose schools have been closed and for elder relatives who are practicing social distancing and thus need help in meeting their everyday needs.

We proceed from the position that all faculty on our campus are fully committed to our students’ education and their overall welfare under these dire conditions. We thus support any faculty or executive officer who delays in responding, or refuses to respond, to administrative requests for immediate Excel tracking of class transitions to online formats.

A growing body of evidence suggests that traditional forms of teaching evaluation — such as ICES scores — fail to effectively represent the work that faculty do in the classroom, even under the best of campus conditions. The extraordinary circumstances we confront today, including the sudden imperative to change how we teach on short notice, will render Spring 2020 ICES scores even less useful.

We also call on executive officers and campus leaders to ensure that faculty’s consideration for reappointment, promotion, and related matters will not suffer on account of the time they lose due the additional care they provide or inability to make progress in their research.

Support for Our Students

As we scramble to transition to alternative modes of instruction, our campus must recognize the reality of unequal access to distance learning technology among our students. While some of our students will have the technological infrastructure required for successful distance learning at their disposal, many will not. It must not be the case that a reliable internet connection, possession of a personal computer, or facility with new tools like Zoom are now prerequisites for inclusion in UIUC’s community of learners. It is the responsibility of campus administrators to address these critical issues of student access, and to recognize that, for many of our students, online education cannot replace the in-person classroom.

For many UIUC students, this campus is home. We support the decision to keep housing and basic services available for those students who need to be here, in contrast to the immediate closures of residence halls on some other campuses. We must also recognize the considerable labor and risk that this decision entails for other members of our community, including our staff colleagues across campus.

We know that students not only call our campus home, but rely on employment — both on-campus and in the broader C-U community — to support themselves and members of their families. As a university we must do everything we can to ensure that the current public health crisis does not create further economic hardships for anyone in our community. To this end, we call on UIUC to continue paying students and other workers their full wages, even if they are unable to work or prohibited from working.

Solidarity with Other Campus Workers

As always, CFA stands in solidarity with other campus workers. We are mindful of the enormous and mounting burdens that these circumstances are placing on everyone who works at UIUC. For example, building service workers — among the most underpaid and precariously employed of our campus colleagues — are working overtime to keep all of us safe during an unprecedented public health crisis. Graduate students, faced with carrying out their teaching and research under these rapidly changing conditions, are currently in negotiations over wages with the UIUC administration. We stand with them in their efforts to ensure excellence in our campus’s working and learning conditions.

We Want to Hear From You

As with our teaching, our organizing in the midst of this crisis brings great uncertainty and new challenges. We believe that in addition to social distancing, solidarity is more essential than ever. CFA can only be as effective as our ability to hear from each other about the problems — and solutions — that emerge in our various corners of campus. Tell us what is happening in your units, what issues you face, and how we can support one another.