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comment by ilex
ilex  ·  1620 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 24, 2020

My school is insisting on an on-campus fall semester with recommendations that people socially distance and wear face masks. No enforcement, though, and it isn't clear what faculty could do if they wanted to make stricter rules for their classrooms. Also no real discussion of what is going to happen in lab-type classes that typically come with lots of close human interaction.

Two years ago, they changed a policy to require graduate research assistant tuition waivers to be funded from their grant money. This affected a lot of students who were funded through small grants or whose grants forbade their money from being used for tuition funding. And it meant that a particular research consortium on campus restructured how they did grant funding for students which meant that I lost funding for the semester a couple weeks before it started. We got pissed off and talked a bunch and they decided to roll back the policy pending further research.

In May, the university silently reinstated a worse version of the policy, and now we have to do this all over again. Hopefully it doesn't immediately affect me as my funding is different now, but friends are very worried.