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Retired East Stroudsburg University Distinguished Professor Dr. Allan Benn addresses legislative assembly Sept. 18. APSCUF members lauded his distinguished service, for which he was honored. Below: Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro speaks with delegates about higher-education issues. APSCUF Zoom photos

APSCUF’s September legislative assembly tackled its usual fare — committee reports and a guest speaker — and focused on the retrenchment threats and sustainability plans in Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. For health and safety during the continued pandemic, representatives from all 14 campuses met in a condensed, one-day session Sept. 18, held via Zoom.

Guest and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro spoke about higher-education related cases and took member questions.

Delegates also approve a bylaw change addressing videoconferencing and conference calls for legislative assemblies.

The assembly honored retired Dr. Allan Benn of East Stroudsburg University with its Distinguished Service Award, with physical commemoration to come at a future in-person assembly.

“(APSCUF) gave me a cause and gave me a voice, and for that I’ll always be grateful,” Benn told the assembly.

Lisa Demko, retired executive assistant to the president, also will be honored for distinguished service of more than 30 years.

Retrenchment (faculty layoffs) is a possibility at seven of our 14 State System universities. A smaller faculty means higher student/faculty ratios and possible program cuts. APSCUF is working diligently to find alternatives to these layoffs. Support and advocacy from students and alumni would be an immense help to the cause. Learn a bit more about retrenchment (possible faculty layoffs) on APSCUF’s Students page.

APSCUF leadership and staff will answer retrenchment-related questions from State System students and student journalists 3–4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 30. The event is open to students from all 14 State System universities. To register for the event, exclusively for students at State System universities, click here. APSCUF members may attend, but student questions will be given priority.

The 2020 election has enormous implications for public higher education in Pennsylvania. Join APSCUF for election-related informational events:

MEMBERS-ONLY PRE- AND POST-ELECTION DISCUSSIONS:
Sean Crampsie, State APSCUF director of government relations, will present an overview of the 2020 election, targeted state House and state Senate races, and discuss potential outcomes for the Nov. 3 election. The in-depth Zoom meeting is slated 6–8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29. Then join Crampsie noon–2 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, for a Zoom presentation recapping the 2020 election. He’ll review what the state House and state Senate chambers will look like for 2021–22 and what that means for the state of public higher education in Pennsylvania. Click here to register for one or both of the events. The free sessions are for APSCUF members only. To become an APSCUF member, start here.

STUDENT-ATHLETE VOTER-EDUCATION SESSION:
Student-athletes in Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education are invited to a voter-education seminar 6–9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 27. Slated speakers include Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania House Minority Whip Jordan Harris and APSCUF President Dr. Jamie Martin. Click here for registration information for this free, virtual event.

Only one APSCUF member who has been active since the group became a union in 1973 remains a part of the organization today. Randy Jesick began teaching journalism at Indiana University in 1969, at which point APSCUF was a professional association, and Pennsylvania professors had no union representation.

Jesick

“I think everybody was excited about finally having an organization, a union to represent them and give them a stronger voice, in the curriculum especially,” he said. “I was really pleased once the union was a fact of life.”

Before Jesick was an APSCUF member, he had been a professor for four years, and previous to that he hadn’t had aspirations for teaching at all. Jesick worked in public relations for IUP before professors David Truby and Craig Swauger asked him to join a new journalism major in the works for IUP’s English department. Jesick decided to give it a shot, and he began looking for ways to prepare for his new job.

“I contacted professors around the country to seek their advice,” he said. “The best thing I did though was interview 12 or so IUP students at the time and asked them, ‘Who is the best professor you’ve had? Why did you feel that way?’”

Jesick described overcoming the nerves he experienced during his first semester.

“Sometimes I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ but there were other classes where the conversations flowed back and forth, and I came out of the classroom floating,” he said. “For whatever reason, we got though that semester, and I knew then that this was what I wanted to do.”

Being a part of APSCUF provided Jesick with additional benefits, and he stressed the sense of security behind having them.

“I was just so pleased with all the benefits the union was able to achieve — not just the salary, which is very competitive with most state systems, but even things like, for example, all four of my kids had braces and that was covered,” he said.

Jesick comes from a family that knows the value of a union — and collective action. His father, Maynard Jesick, was a steel worker who took part in the United Steelworkers of America’s steel strike of 1959. When Jesick, knowing what his father went through, took part in the 2016 APSCUF strike, he was pleased with how quickly it was resolved.

“When it lasted only three days, it really hit home because I remembered my father had to take side jobs painting,” he said.

Jesick described teaching as “a calling,” and said that it is “ultimately for the benefit of the student.” Now, thanks to his decision to teach, he has influenced the lives of thousands of students, including Michele Papake, associate professor and chairperson of IUP’s journalism and public-relations department, who has known Jesick since she was a student more than 30 years ago.

“Randy was one of my professors when I attended IUP as an undergraduate in the late ’80s,” she said. “He is as rigorous and as passionate a professor today as he was back then. He is an amazing mentor, colleague and friend. He has helped to shape me into the professor I am today, and I’m proud to know him.”

—Kyle Bower,
former APSCUF intern

18 August 2020

Dear Members of the Board of Trustees for the PASSHE System and Temple:

Together, we represent over 9000 faculty, librarians, academic advisors, staff, graduate students, medical students, and coaches at 15 different universities. Along with the students we serve, we are the lifeblood of our institutions: We teach the classes, win the grants, do the research, make the art, advise the students, coach the teams, serve on the committees, and serve our communities. When called on to pivot to online work in response to the current pandemic, we did so without hesitation and with unstinting effort. Now, we are being called on again to invest extraordinary time and resources to adapt to the grave challenges posed by the pandemic. And, again, we are ready to answer the call.

However, we are also being asked to needlessly risk our lives and the lives of those we love. We cannot accept this, and neither should you. 

We call on you to acknowledge that the ferocity of this virus and the failures in our national response have upended the plans our institutions have constructed. We urge you to join institutions large and small, rich and poor, public and private who have recently realized they must alter course. As of this writing, the U.S. has surpassed 5 million COVID-19 infections, an average of more than 53,000 new infections a day; the situation is much more dire than many of us imagined it would be. We are devastated by the loss of more than 170,000 Americans to COVID-19. Doctors and scientists every day warn us about the potential long-term health impacts of COVID-19 and encourage us to continue to be vigilant in our efforts to flatten the curve and reduce transmission. We have seen students, staff, and faculty get sick and die around the country, including at university campuses and their neighboring communities. We also need to acknowledge the enormous burden of increased family responsibilities that faculty, staff, and students are juggling due to the pandemic, making in-person teaching extremely difficult and in some cases logistically impossible.

We understand that people are supposed to wear masks and practice social distancing; however, we know that asymptomatic transmission can happen quickly in indoor spaces even when these precautions are taken. We also know that research on the propensity of our students to take risks makes it unwise to rely on their compliance with mitigation measures. Given the current state of COVID-19 in the U.S. and our institutions’ inadequate safety protocols and lack of consistent and widespread testing, we are being asked to choose between our health and our jobs when we know that we can teach effectively online.

We know that the choices before you could not be more difficult. We also know that a great deal of well-intentioned work, expertise, and considerable financial resources have gone into these plans. We understand that you want to satisfy our students’ desire for in-person instruction (though we are not convinced that you have properly surveyed them to see what they actually want given the current conditions). Of course, we would rather feel free to teach, advise, and coach them in person. We understand that you are concerned about revenue; so are we, since our jobs may hang in the balance.

But these considerations must be outweighed by the imperative to protect the health and safety of our members, our students, other employees of the university, and our neighbors.

Here’s how you can resist the temptation of questionable financial gains for one semester at the expense of the longer-term financial, reputational, and ethical health of the institutions you oversee:

If these two conditions were met, the threat to the health and safety of the university community would be significantly reduced. But you should also:

Our members and elected leaders stand ready to enter into a dialogue with you about how to address these grave problems. But we must first sound the alarm about the terrible risks you run if you do not change course. The potential damage to the universities we love could not be more profound–the loss of money, faith in leadership, health, and life. If you do not value the health and safety of the university community as you should, you will poison the relationship among all of its stakeholders for the foreseeable future.

Classes have already started on some of our campuses and will start soon at the rest. The window for acting before tragedy strikes is closing. We urge you to change course before it is too late.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Executive Committees of APSCUF, TAUP, and TUGSA and members of the student body of the Lewis Katz School of Medicine