Sacrificing Our Principles

For the past two semesters, the School of Public Health has implemented a teaching assistant employment policy by which applications are automatically rejected from people with health conditions that preclude them from going into the classroom because they are at increased risk for severe complications of COVID-19. If applicants are unable to work in-person in the classroom because of a health condition (or are just anxious about COVID-19 or about transmitting infection to vulnerable family members or other household members) and do not consent to working in-person, their employment applications are automatically rejected. The policy holds that they are simply ineligible for employment as a teaching assistant unless they agree to spend essentially 42 hours in the classroom (14 sessions at 3 hours each). Note that this policy was in place at the start of the current semester, at which time Massachusetts was experiencing the all-time peak of COVID-19 infection in the state. It is not dif