On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 9:53 PM James J. Valentini wrote: Dear Ira, The message sent to Arts & Sciences instructors on Monday doesn't to me read as initiating an open and thoughtful conversation with faculty about their teaching choices. Amy's letter to instructors on Monday posits that giving faculty choice was predicated on the expectation that there would be more courses taught in the in-person and hybrid modalities than is now the case. But the choice of modality was clearly put in the hands of faculty without qualifiers or expectations of outcomes. The letter claims “that policy also assumed consideration of the needs of our undergraduate and graduate students." To bring students into this in this way is to suggest that the faculty have failed to give proper consideration to the needs of students. It offers an implied administrative criticism of faculty decision making, and levels an accusation at faculty, without any evidence to support it. The letter goes on to claim that having mostly online classes "will be a great disappointment to" students, implying the faculty should feel guilty for teaching a course online. And again, this disappointment was claimed without any evidence. All this was done in a public letter, a letter sent not just to faculty, but also to staff in Columbia College and General Studies, many of whom work with and know faculty. So, the faculty suffered a very public indictment before there was any opportunity for faculty to defend themselves. The letter Amy sent to Chairs last Friday accuses faculty of being deficient in balancing "the obvious tensions between personal wishes and the demands of our pedagogical and professional responsibilities to our students." Concerns about one's health and the health of one's family during a pandemic of a disease whose transmission and physiological impact are not well understood, are not personal wishes. Survival is not reducible to a personal wish. And those concerns cannot be dismissed with a fundamentally meaningless claim that faculty will be "safer in class than at the grocery store," a claim that amplifies the indictment of faculty. This all invites students, parents, alumni, and the world at large, to view those of our faculty who have chosen to teach online as faculty who have put their personal preferences above their professional responsibilities. Not only is there no evidence to support that, it is most certainly not true, as anyone who has actually worked with faculty over the past four months knows. The fact that faculty have made choices that administrators do not like does not render those choices invalid, nor does it imply that the motives for those choices are self-serving. To attack one's own faculty in public in this way, in order to justify changing a policy clearly announced just three weeks ago, because the outcome isn't what one wanted, making accusations and implying motives without evidence, seems to me to fit the definition of unethical. Regards, Jim James J. Valentini Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education 208 Hamilton Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 Voice: 212-854-2441 Email: jjv1@columbia.edu