The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Sahalie Donaldson and Chelsea Long
January 13, 2022
As most residential colleges start their January terms with in-person instruction, some faculty members and students are pushing back, asking that administrators allow courses to be offered online for a few weeks, until the wave of Covid-19 cases brought on by the Omicron variant dies down.
But rather than demanding fully remote learning — a common refrain earlier in the pandemic, when more people were at risk of serious disease for lack of vaccines — some faculty members have a more modest ask: greater flexibility in how they teach while cases are high, particularly for instructors with health complications or family members ineligible to be vaccinated.
At the University of Louisville, more than 1,600 people have signed a petition — titled “Keep All Cardinals Safe!” — that pushes for instructors to have the ability, on a case-by-case basis, to move instruction online until Covid-19 cases subside.