“This is going to be a long road ahead,” APSCUF President Dr. Jamie Martin said about university consolidations during an August episode of “Behind the Headlines.” “The vote by the board in July was the first step of many. We still have a lot of unanswered questions about accreditation, questions about the NCAA decision to allow sports or athletic teams at all six campuses, questions about curriculum, and a lot of questions about exactly how this will look at the end of the day. And so this should be an iterative process. And as we get answers to some of these questions, there could be modifications to the original plan — or changes to it. So we’re carefully watching … We also have a collective bargaining agreement, and so we’ve got to work through that process and determine how that will look whenever we have a new university that’s three campuses but one president, one accreditation, those kinds of issues.”
Martin also discussed COVID-19 and the return to the fall semester.
“We had advocated for this strongly through our meet-and-discuss processes that there should be, at the very least, a mask mandate,” she said. “And so we’re happy to see that all 14 universities have done that … We would certainly support and advocate for a vaccine mandate.”
Click here to watch the complete interview with The Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy program.
Click here to read Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education’s statement encouraging COVID vaccination. Martin is among the union leaders who signed the message.
Click here to read about the State System and COVID-19 vaccines in The Philadelphia Inquirer.