Here; an excerpt:
EA: In your resignation letter, you said you did not want to be complicit in a “moral atrocity.” Can you elaborate on what you consider to be the “moral atrocity” in this situation? Is it limited to UAH? What does it mean on a world scale?
JF: There is a good chance that classes and other in-person events on campus will accelerate COVID transmission in the wider community. This is a huge problem for a state like Alabama, in which only about 76% of senior citizens are fully vaccinated. (Compare that number with 99% in Vermont, 98% in Maine, 96% in Washington State and 95% in Maryland.) Already, as the school year begins, Alabama hospitals are packed with COVID patients and running out of ICU beds (and workers to staff them ).
In such circumstances, large institutions like schools and universities need to take all reasonable steps to minimize coronavirus transmission. (See, for example, the possible mitigation policies, numbered (1)-(8) above, as well as our petition demand to move at least some classes online and implement C.D.C.-recommended social distancing guidelines.) But, despite their modest efforts, the UA System failed to take even most of these steps. In my judgment, this failure is morally atrocious.
My particular role at the university complicated matters further. At UAH I taught various philosophy courses, including courses on the philosophy of mind and ancient Greek philosophy. Most often, though, I taught ethics courses. For the upcoming year I was scheduled to teach a course called, “Advanced Moral Philosophy.” The last time I taught this course, the texts included Jeff McMahan’s important book, The Ethics of Killing. Teaching this material again in the present context would have been a fascinating experience. But sitting around a seminar table during a moral emergency, cogitating—rather than spending more of my time agitating—seemed somewhat in bad taste. The fear that my students might transmit the coronavirus to each other during these “ethics” seminars, moreover, horrified me.
On reflection, I concluded that it might be best to publicly distance myself from the disaster that I fear is taking place in Alabama, and to use my resignation to focus attention on the moral seriousness of our situation, as well as on the low-hanging fruit still available to schools and universities that want to minimize coronavirus transmission in the region. I have some hope that persuasion and other kinds of coordinated campus actions might still hasten UAH’s move to online classes—or at least its implementation of additional, if ultimately inadequate, mitigation measures....
EA: What do you hope others take away from your story?
JF: I hope to encourage faculty to further organize around and voice their concerns about campus safety issues, in particular, and the lack of shared governance more generally. Regarding the former, it’s also important to consider the long history of higher ed institutions neglecting the well-being of their members. And I would hope that people who are now rightly concerned about COVID on campus might broaden their concerns to encompass these related issues as well—issues such as the harassment that students sometimes face from campus police and the barriers to accessibility that immunocompromised and disabled people sometimes face, not to mention the costly tuition bills that often force already burdened working-class students into wage work during the school year.
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