Official Updates from the USFFA

May 5, 2020
A message from President Sonja Poole

The past seven weeks have been, for all of us, a period of unprecedented disruption and uncertainty. As we close out this semester, on behalf of the full-time librarians and faculty, I wanted to take a few moments to give a brief update on the ways we have responded during this crisis and our hopes and intentions as we move forward. 

The librarians and faculty have stepped up and forward in remarkable ways to meet both urgent and emergent needs. And in my view, we -- along with the rest of you -- have been heroic in transforming the campus to meet the needs of this moment. 

First, we transformed our classrooms. With only two working days to implement, we, along with our part-time faculty colleagues and academic staff across the campus, took on the massive lift of instructional redesign and the shift to remote teaching. We have experimented with, adapted, and adjusted to distance learning and teaching, significantly increased our office hours, and have provided individualized instruction for students across the globe, from Accra to Shanghai.

Faculty with clinical or community-engaged learning curricula have pivoted to support community partners, who have of course also been struggling with the tremendous changes that shelter-in-place has necessitated. 

Outside of the classroom, we reimagined the way that USF provides essential supportive services to students. We have worked closely with staff at CASA and CAPS to provide students emotional support and tailored academic accommodations as they have lost jobs, relocated homes, cared for sick family members, and sadly even lost loved ones. We have offered dedicated support to admissions officers in Strategic Enrollment Management by evaluating applications, speaking with prospective students and parents, assuring them that USF will be here -- strong -- through this crisis. And to help our grads celebrate their accomplishments, we are taking the lead on creating department and program virtual graduation ceremonies and returning to campus to prepare for shipping to their homes the packages that contain their regalia.

At the same time, faculty have pivoted to finding ways to even more deeply support the broader communities that we work with off campus. Some of us have provided support in our areas of expertise to local K-12 schools and districts, to health care institutions, and to local and regional community organizations that do outreach, education and direct services. We are also speaking to the press and policy makers, writing papers and articles, and signing amicus briefs. 

Many of us are also embedded in extended communities of care, our churches, neighborhoods, and chosen kin, all of which have needed more of our attention and support. As have our academic staff and administrative colleagues, we have done this while taking care of elders, young children, teenagers, and returned college students in our families. We are doing this while sharing internet and home "work spaces" with members in our households who are trying to do the same.

 Internally at the USFFA, we’ve also been working hard to find new ways to support the university. We have spent many hours consulting with our colleagues across campus and at other institutions and professional associations to better understand what our university needs from us, and what we will need from USF to get through this together. 

Two key things we are trying to improve among faculty are communication and education. For weeks, we have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to set the stage for greater shared governance at the university and to get the information we need to participate in decision making.  We have proposed new systems of shared governance to the administration; we are resurrecting old ones such as the University Curriculum Committee that will start meeting this month; and we are developing new modalities for gathering and providing feedback over the summer and beyond. We recognize that everyone is scrambling and that there are many unknowns, but we need information and sustainable structures to meaningfully participate in supporting academic life at USF through the long haul. 

All of us carrying out the academic mission of the university, from faculty and librarians to program managers and program assistants, cannot do any of this the way we want to. Shelter-in-place is by no means ideal. But we are making a way and we’re getting it done. And we continue to see that the smartest and most effective way we can do this is together with improved transparency and improved communication.

Librarians and faculty are determined to keep learning and growing and sharing with one another to care for each other and support the mission of the university. We are trying things out, sharing with our peers, providing wonderful community spaces for thinking and dialogue for our students. 

While all of this is happening, we are mourning things that we can no longer do. We are sad that we're not in class with our students and among our colleagues -- and that we won’t see our graduates walk the stage next week. But we are holding up and supporting our communities, our students, our institutions, while we balance teaching and research, and caring for our loved ones.  We are worried for the world, we are worried about the university, but we are glad to be in this together.  

While we may be doing things differently for the foreseeable future, I want to provide assurances that we will continue to operate at a high level and deliver outstanding learning experiences. And we will continue to respond to this crisis in courageous and innovative ways. COVID-19 represents a challenge unlike any we’ve seen before. However, I am optimistic that if we are able to keep lines of communication open and decision-making transparent, inclusive, and mission-based, we will transform the challenge into an opportunity to become stronger and better collectively.