Austerity, Inequality, and the COVID Crisis: A Faculty Town Hall 

Monday, June 8th 4-5:30 pm 

Sponsored by the San Diego Faculty Association

The pandemic has impacted every aspect of our working lives: teaching, childcare, research, and more. It has brought existing structural inequality and precarity into sharp relief in our classrooms, departments, and communities.

As UCSD plans its response to the financial impacts of COVID-19, will faculty be meaningfully consulted about the distribution of the university’s resources and the impact these choices have on our workload, safety, well-being, capacities as educators and researchers, and relationships to students and staff in our departments? Is austerity simply inevitable, or can we work to shape a different response to this crisis? How might our university budget better reflect our concerns and values?

We’re calling a faculty town hall as the reconstituted San Diego Faculty Association (SDFA). We invite all members of the UCSD community who engage in research and teach students, including lecturers and librarians. We hope to convene a space for faculty to share their concerns with one another, connect across departments, divisions, and ranks, and articulate what concerns and values you think ought to be front and center in the university’s response to the current crisis. We believe that now more than ever, faculty need to build collective power to help construct the university we want, and as the new officers of the SDFA, we want to hear from you. What concerns you the most, looking ahead? What kind of university do you hope to see, and what values do you think should shape our collective vision?

Register here to participate and please invite your colleagues.