OAA This Week: Thursday Edition

OAA THIS WEEK | Aug 12, 2021

A news update and community connection for the Office of Academic Affairs of The City University of New York

OAA NEWS

Chancellor, HR, and EVC office get latest word out on return-to-office

Final preparations are underway for the August 16 return to in-person work at at CUNY offices and campuses. In addition to sharing details of health and safety measures instituted, administrators are disseminating details of return-to-work requirements including vaccination verification and COVID-19-testing protocols for individuals who are not fully vaccinated. Details of reopening plans and health and safety protocols can be found on the CUNY website.

_____In a message to staff on Tuesday, Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez reported that CUNY’s new system-wide COVID-19-testing program and strongly urged staff to get vaccinated. “Based on our surveys, thankfully most of CUNY’s staff and faculty are vaccinated and I continue to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated as the best defense we know against COVID-19 and its variants,” he wrote.

_____On Monday, in a message to CUNY staff the Human Resources office reminded staff of vaccination and vaccine-verification requirements in detail and included a link to FAQs titled “Getting Back to Working in Person and Learning on Campus – Frequently Asked Questions,” on the CUNY website. The FAQs are being continuously updated in response to new questions and evolving updates.

_____In addition to these efforts, the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost has been publishing the weekly Return Report, which details and streamlines the most pertinent return-to-office updates for the Office of Academic Affairs, such as uploading vaccine verification, facilities updates, testing procedures, and other related topics. The latest edition of the Return Report will be published this afternoon. Staff are strongly encouraged to look for it in their Outlook inbox and read the report thoroughly. An archive of the Return Report is available on the Office of the EVC webpage, under Messages from the EVC.

Chancellor lay outs COVID-19-testing protocols

As reported in last week’s edition of OAA This Week, CUNY has selected Applied DNA Clinical Labs LLC (ADCL) to provide extensive on-site COVID-19 testing throughout the University starting this week. On Tuesday, in a message to CUNY faculty and staff, Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez informed that ADCL testing sites will open at 18 CUNY colleges in all five boroughs, as well as at two CUNY Central Office locations. The Chancellor also announced that CUNY staff who are unvaccinated or have not yet uploaded their proof of vaccination to CUNYfirst will be required to be tested.

_____ADCL has retained the Cleared4 health-verification management system to provide the platform through which staff can register for testing, schedule a test appointment, receive test results, and display proof of testing.

_____As stated in a July 26 message from the Chancellor, unvaccinated faculty and staff returning to work the week of August 16 must get tested this week. Those returning the week of August 23 must get tested the week of August 16, and thereafter no more than seven days before entering a CUNY facility.

_____There will also be random testing of employees to help contain the spread of COVID-19 in the CUNY community. The testing program also includes periodic screening of a random sampling of vaccinated individuals across the University.

_____For more information about CUNY’s COVID-19 testing program, please see the Testing FAQs. For a list of testing locations, visit here.

CITY, STATE & NATIONAL NEWS

CUNY experts weigh in on mask and vaccine mandates

The rise of the delta variant has raised concern among parents of school-aged children as the date for public-school reopening approaches. Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that all 1,800 public schools will return for full-time in-person instruction five days a week starting in September. Precautions will include a mask mandate for all students, teachers, and staff, regardless of vaccination status, and all teachers will have to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing.

_____As parents and others monitor school-reopening plans, CUNY experts are weighing in on controversies including requiring masking for children and vaccine mandates. Lehman College and Graduate Center distinguished professor of physics Eugene Chudnovsky wrote an opinion piece for The Hill titled “Is It Fair To Ask Children To Wear Face Masks in Schools?”

_____Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy Professor Bruce Y. Lee spoke to the Observer for a piece titled “No, Vaccine Mandates Aren’t Anything New,” pointing out that while there is much controversy over mandating COVID-19 vaccination, mandatory vaccinations are nothing new. “Throughout history there have been many examples of required vaccinations or mass vaccination campaigns aiming to get as much of the population as possible,” he said.

Press spotlights CUNY COVID-19 memorial website

Diverse Education highlighted CUNY’s COVID-19 memorial website, which was initiated in May 2020. The article noted that CUNY is “one of the only higher education institutions to create a public, online memorial for those they lost to the pandemic.”

_____“It’s been touching, humbling, to see how much of an outlet it became,” said Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez of the recognition of the website.

COLLEAGUE CONNECTIONS

In each edition, OAA This Week asks our colleagues about the work their unit is doing in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, and how they’re personally faring in the era of remote work. If you would like to be featured as a Colleague Connection, please contact Duffie Cohen at Duffie.Cohen@cuny.edu.

Kristin Hart, University Dean of Libraries and Information Resources

What resources programs does the Office of Library Services currently oversee? The Office of Library Services (OLS) manages centralized services and shared resources across CUNY libraries. We curate an incredible array of information resources that are available to all CUNY users including scholarly databases, streaming films, newspapers, digital archives and, increasingly, open-access research. Our units include Systems, Central Cataloging, Collection Strategy, Scholarly Communication, and Open Educational Resources (OER). We also manage the official committees that set the priorities and policies that guide the entire library system. CUNY libraries are a model of collaborative partnership, an ethos that has only grown and expanded during the pandemic.

You started in your role as University dean of Library Services (UDL) during the pandemic. What was it like to come onboard while working remotely? Before starting at OAA, I was the associate dean of libraries for Queens College, so the CUNY-based command center in my bedroom was already well established before I started as UDL in July. I’ve known the team at OLS as colleagues for years, and they are the best at what they do — which has made the transition easy! I spent May and June slowly easing into my new role, so when I woke up in July to an empty Outlook calendar, I joked that I was like a newborn baby with nothing but time on my hands. That didn’t last!

How has your office adapted during the COVID-19 crisis? What are the challenges your team has had to address and the accomplishments you're most proud of? The OLS team, by the nature of our work, was already adept at collaborating and managing things remotely. But when COVID-19 hit New York City in March 2020, and the libraries needed to pivot overnight to new and expanded remote services, the need for support and the opportunities for collaboration were greater than ever. CUNY libraries, led by OLS, launched our new library-services platform, called Alma, right in the middle of the pandemic, which was a Herculean feat of communication and teamwork across CUNY libraries.

_____We also grew CUNY’s digital offerings through participation in the Internet Archive’s Open Library initiative, as well as through our ongoing scholarly communication and OER initiatives, which respectively make the research and educational works created by the CUNY community freely available online. Publishers won’t license many e-books, including textbooks, to libraries so the library-led, State-funded Open Educational Resources initiative reduced or removed textbook costs and improved access at a time when this was needed more than ever.

What are some innovative practices, strategies or initiatives that your team has developed over the past 18 months? The pandemic was an opportunity to grow collaborations and rethink priorities across CUNY libraries, as well as within OAA. We participate in initiatives such as the Innovative Teaching Academy and organize ongoing workshops on open pedagogy that highlight the fantastic projects that are happening on the campuses, which are shared across the University and the world.

_____We also co-led the Faculty Funding Friday webinar series with the Office of Research and the CUNY Research Foundation.

_____While the physical spaces of the libraries were closed, we partnered with the Internet Archive’s Open Library, which uses a legal framework called controlled digital lending (CDL) to provide electronic access to physical books a library has acquired through donation or purchase. CDL supports libraries to do what we’ve always done (which is lend books), but in the digital realm, and as a result of this collaboration we were able to provide online access to over 25 percent of our physical book collections. It’s a growing area of library services, and I look forward to seeing how it develops at CUNY Libraries and how it intersects with other strategic initiatives we are developing across the libraries.

What’s your home workspace like? What kind of challenges or disruptions are you dealing with while working from home? Most days, I work in my room, which has a sweeping view of The Bronx. I work at a wooden table that belonged to my grandmother. It’s a beautiful old table that was apparently in a middle-school cafeteria in Wisconsin (where she was the lunch lady), which boggles my mind. My aging Rottweiler lounges on the couch behind me.

_____I share the house with two teenage boys, of whom just finished seventh grade (I hope!) and one who is returning for his second year of college in a few weeks (not that I'm counting days). We’re lucky to have so much space, including a tiny yard. They like to cook. Elaborate snacks and ambitious light meals are delivered to me several times a day. Around six o’clock I finally stumble downstairs and survey the mess in the kitchen. The school year was hard, especially for my younger teen. I really hope they can make up ground this coming year. I am not a good homeschooler.

What’s your daily routine? Do you have a self-care practice that has helped you deal with the past tumultuous year? I am not a morning person, so the non-commute has been a luxury I’ve tried to savor. Most days, I’m able to walk my dog on the Aqueduct Trail in Van Cortlandt Park (our pets are the real winners here) and selectively read the New York Times while drinking espresso in my backyard (CUNY Libraries provides free accounts to everyone at CUNY — but the Spelling Bee section is extra) before my first Zoom. Then it’s nine or ten hours of nonstop listening and talking interspersed with brief periods of intense email writing.

_____I can’t wait to get into the office just so I can use whiteboards again. I have tremendous faith in the power of whiteboards. At the end of the day, I try to spend a few minutes reflecting on whether we moved the needle at all that day. The answer is usually yes. But there’s always more to do tomorrow.