FIU tells employees to return to campus by Monday, pushing for summer reopening
The board of trustees at Florida International University pushed school leaders Tuesday to reopen more of the state university by the start of the May summer session, despite a backlash from faculty and staff that such a move would heighten their risk of contracting COVID-19 on the two Miami-Dade campuses.
The board did not vote on the decision. Instead, Chair Dean Colson strongly recommended to FIU President Mark Rosenberg and his team that they increase the number of students, faculty and staff on campus, starting with FIU’s first summer sessions on May 10.
Colson asked if any trustee opposed the measure. None did.
“I have instructed the president and the provost to begin looking at how we can get more open,” Colson said during the board meeting, adding they “ought to try,” even if they fail.
Colson said the Florida Board of Governors, the body that oversees the state’s university system and which will meet Wednesday, wants the state’s 12 universities to reopen. He said he foresees that every other university in the state will significantly bring back its community to campus by June at the latest, noting FIU has to “start planning for it” now.
“We can’t be a ghost town,” he said.
FIU’s COVID restrictions hampering campus life, student says
Trustee Alexandra Valdes, a political science and international relations student at FIU and the student body president for the Modesto A. Maidique Campus, supported the initiative.
She said some of the restrictions, like closed campus restaurants and restricted use of classrooms, are making it harder for students to socialize or attend extracurricular events.
“The rest of our city is going about normalcy or relative normalcy, but our campus doesn’t seem to be adapting to that,” she said. “It’s worth looking at the different avenues that we can take to increase student presence.”
Faculty, staff have concerns over FIU reopening plan
Not everyone spoke in favor of the board’s move.
Trustee Joerg Reinhold, who doubles as a physics professor at FIU, proposed waiting to reopen until the fall semester, when a greater percentage of Miami-Dade’s population would be vaccinated.
Miami-Dade is lagging behind both the state and other large counties in Florida in the percentage of people 65 and over it has vaccinated, with recent vaccination rates at 39 percent for Miami-Dade, 47 percent for Broward and 53 percent for Palm Beach County, according to state records.
FIU spokeswoman Maydel Santana could not provide numbers Tuesday about how many employees have been vaccinated.
Some professors have reported that even though students have the option to attend class in person, they’re not all doing so, Reinhold said.
“People are feeling tense in the classroom,” he said. “People will not use the facilities if they don’t feel comfortable.”
Valdes countered the campus doesn’t feel welcoming and that not all students could choose face-to-face learning because FIU selected the class-delivery methods.
According to Santana, 25,930 of FIU’s 42,509 students — or 61 percent — are taking at least one in-person class in the spring (excluding online and dual enrollment students). For the spring, FIU offered about 54 percent of its courses on campus.
Staff asked to come to campus for ‘normal work week’
In an online town hall last week, El pagnier Kay Hudson, FIU’s senior vice president for human resources, announced to about 900 staffers that FIU would once again ask faculty and staff to increase their on-campus presence.
The meeting came two weeks after Rosenberg emailed faculty and staff stating every employee who could physically distance on campus should work in person at least three days per week, starting Feb. 15.
Starting Monday, March 1, Hudson said during the virtual event Friday, FIU will expect anyone who has an individual office to work in person all five days of the week or “return to a normal work week,” which is how she referenced it in an HR memo sent to staff Tuesday. Anyone who works in a cubicle or in an open space area can stay on a three-days-per-week rotation.
Neither of the mandates impact faculty members, because of an agreement signed for the spring semester between the United Faculty of Florida at FIU and the administration. Under that agreement, faculty who are at high-risk for COVID or care for someone who is vulnerable could attest and not be compelled to return to campus. About 500 to 600 of the nearly 1,400 FIU faculty members attested.
The staff who work in offices do not have that protection.
Trustee Marc Sarnoff, a former Miami city commissioner, chastised the disparity between faculty and staff.
“Last time I checked, they seem to have the same heartbeat, pulse, blood cells,” he said. “If the staff is here, why shouldn’t the faculty be transitioned back?”
During the fall semester, about 68 percent of all 5,624 faculty and staff participated in rotation schedules. During the spring semester, before Feb. 15, FIU had raised that to about 70 percent. By Tuesday, about a week later, the percentage stood at about 74 percent. FIU hopes to reach 100 percent.
Reinhold warned the board and the administration that employees were frustrated with directives asking people to return to campus when Miami-Dade County still is one of the highest-risk counties in the country for contracting COVID-19.
“The most important thing that we in leadership can do is transition back and do it in a way that faculty and staff feel comfortable,“ he said.
Santana, the FIU spokeswoman, said FIU has taken many steps to make the campuses safer from COVID.
“We have ample testing, robust contact tracing, social distancing in offices, classrooms and public spaces, facial covering requirement and a self-screening app to help members of the community decide when it’s best to stay away and get tested,” she said.
Summer semester changes at FIU
FIU is planning to offer more in-person courses this summer and fall, which would bring in more faculty, but specifics have not been worked out, Santana said.
In a Feb. 19 memo to the other 12 board members, Colton noted that “no modifications of any agreements the University has with the faculty union are entered into without first being discussed with the Board.”
Trustee Leonard Boord said the immediate goal is not to reinstate the pre-COVID environment, where there were no masks or social distancing in place.
He advised FIU to adopt a phased plan.
“Let’s bring in 10 percent more of the population; let’s roll them in little by little,” he said. “It’ll be a transition by stages, but let’s be realistic about what we can achieve.”
An earlier version of this story misidentified Trustee Leonard Boord as Trustee Rogelio Tovar.
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
