Inside Higher Ed reports:
... many professors say they'd prefer a remote term, or even a delayed academic year, to teaching face-to-face again too soon.
“So far, no one has really talked about protecting the faculty,” said Alan Czyzewski, a professor of accounting at Indiana State University who is over 60 and statistically at a greater risk of falling ill with COVID-19 than many of his students and some of his colleagues. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing everything we can for students, but the faculty are equally important. If we get sick, or three to four of us get sick all at the same time, who’s going to be teaching class?”
Czyzewski said working from home for the next eight months is hardly ideal. But an all-online semester remains his preference for fall, absent the mass deployment of a vaccine.
Like Prof. Czyzewski nobody at UCLA (or, as far as I know, the UC system generally) has specifically addressed the concerns of over 60 faculty (such as yours truly). But maybe they should:
Christopher J. Lee, associate professor of history and Africana studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, recently wrote a piece for Boston Review called “Higher Education in the Age of Coronavirus: The Right Not to Work.”
By that, Lee wrote, “I do not mean not working at all, but the right not to work under certain conditions.”
For example, he said, “given that a number of schools are seeking to re-open before a vaccine is available, one prospect is to give faculty members the choice of whether to continue teaching online or not. This proposal could benefit at-risk colleagues, while allowing the option of in-class teaching if a faculty member prefers it.”
...
The right not to work under certain conditions draws upon existing Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines that require reasonable workplace accommodation for reasons of disability or genetic information, Lee says. Given limited testing capabilities and the many epidemiological unknowns of COVID-19, “faculty members would generally fall within this latter category, even without preexisting conditions, until a vaccine is available."
Sounds like a good research project for employment law faculty. Because I for one would prefer not to go back to the classroom until there's a vaccine or a treatment.