Where Life is Precious, Life is Precious: The University as “Community of Care”

In a statement to the Board of Trustees on June 19, 2020, Miami’s Safe Return to Campus Committee says that Miami “needs a community of care” to help us keep one another safe.

We agree. Miami AAUP is all for forming communities of care. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” Mutual care is our society’s most important responsibility and challenge.

But when a workplace presents serious risks to workers, students, loved ones, and our community, and when workers do not have free choice to decide whether they are putting themselves or loved ones in danger during a pandemic by teaching in person — life is not being held as precious. “Caring” can’t reach its fullest bloom under coercive circumstances.

Let’s say we all care very much about one other. Let’s say that the safest thing we could do for one another is to not be in the same room. Let’s say that — because our workplace might shut down without sufficient tuition revenue, because spending choices have stripped funds from our educational mission, and because our government refuses to sustain us through this crisis — we are forced nevertheless to be in the same room.

What do we do?

Because we care about one another, we do the best we can. We do the labor of care required under the circumstances. Of course we do.

But this kind of caring is a coerced form of caring. We’re actually being asked to constrain our caring.

Miami AAUP wants all of us to join the Miami community of care, as the R2C committee asks. That’s essential right now. But we also want Miami workers to notice that you are being forced to care in specific and narrow ways, ways you might not choose if you were free to care as much as you would like to.