Originally Posted by Choro&Swing
I’m a just-retired college professor, so here is my prediction about college campuses. My state university, like many, plans to open this fall, but in crowded classrooms, classes will be divided in half, and one half will be in class every other class day. Thus, for a Tuesday/Thursday class, half the class will come to class on Tuesday and half on Thursday. The teachers will try to teach the same material in both class periods. For Monday/Wednesday/Friday, half the class will come on Monday and Friday one week and Wednesday the next week. (In, say, a Composition class with 20 students in a room that seats 40, students will come every class day, but will sit far from each other. The same goes for small upper division classes.) All students must wear masks walking too and from classes and in the classroom, and so will the teachers.
So far, so good. But every class day, I picked up about 100 new assignments, graded them, and wrote the grades in the gradebook, and I also passed back a hundred, touching each one and walking up and down the rows of desks. Teachers can wear masks, but air conditioning or heating is on, windows are closed, and there isn’t much fresh air. They can if the choose wear gloves all day, including while grading papers. I would. Will most teachers? I don’t know.
The classrooms seem pretty safe, but that’s not the entire story. Some 90% of my students held down part time or full time jobs while going to college. Will all of those jobs be safe? A third lived at home, and more went home on weekends. Many of those homes were small and had a lot of people living there. The rest of my students lived in dorms—two or three to a room, often a badly-ventilated room, with communal showers and toilets down the hall. Or they lived in apartments or houses they rented in town, usually four to six people per apartment with shared bedrooms. If one of those students in an apartment gets sick, there’s an excellent chance that most will. Also, a lot of my students loved partying above all things. What does it matter if the bars are closed if half my students attend large parties several times every week? We are talking parties with 100-200 students there, many kegs of beer, very loud with people shouting at each other from inches away to be heard, often in unventilated basements. Imagine bathrooms with ten people waiting in line to use the shared soap and wet towels.
In short, the colleges are planning relatively safe classrooms. However, when five or ten or twenty or a hundred students get sick (almost as crammed in as Bushnell Prison or a local nursing home), parents will push schools to return to online learning, and many will.
What will happen then? Colleges will have to refund most of the room and board fees. Landlords my be asked to do the same. Janitors and dorm personnel and cafeteria personnel will be laid off. Students on teams may lose their scholarships (and these are often minority students.) Many students will drop out because they find online classes harder. Possibly several hundred colleges will close for good because they can’t afford to stay open. Then several thousand teachers and administrators will unexpectedly enter the job market. But they will find that no school is hiring.
This sounds dire, but I think this is a fair, sober prediction. Expect it to come true.
In late April, the last week of class, one of my students emailed me to request a few extra days to complete her final assignment because her father had been taken to the hospital with Covid-19. I said yes, of course. She was a hard-working Mexican-American girl, an A student. She was working full-time as a custodian in the hospital, and her father had been doing that, too, in the same hospital. A few days later she wrote to say her father was improving and out of the ICU. A few days later I personally sent her her final grade and asked how her father was doing. She wrote back that he had died the day before, unexpectedly. She still had to work and was glad she had a job. Her father was dead! He was barely forty, providing essential services! He had a family he loved, and they loved him.
In early April I got an email from a colleague in another department. I’d never heard of her. Her daughter was in one of my classes. She had come down with the virus and was in the hospital. Imagine being a teacher, and your daughter makes it to college, then gets sick that way. The daughter improved, though, and came home. But she couldn’t focus her eyes enough to read, and she couldn’t think much. She was weak and had a headache all the time. She couldn’t breathe well. Her mother read her the final book of the semester out loud and helped her with the daily homework. Did the mother cheat? Who cares? No way would I even ask. (The mother said she herself loved the novel she read aloud.)
I’m very well aware of the economic costs we are facing. My retirement funds fell a long ways. I’m expecting a crash in the next few months. We need to reopen things. Had we known what we know now, we could have left most stores open and just required masks (not bars or restaurants or sporting events or theaters, though—too dangerous). I’m sympathetic to the Swedish approach, counting on people to take care of themselves and keep the economy going and accepting that thousands will die. I’m retired, so I won’t be teaching, and I don’t have an agenda or a political stance on this. I’m simply saying that in colleges, many students will not practice “safe partying” or “social distancing at home,” and there will be outbreaks on many campuses. Whether or not closing the colleges is the best solution, they WILL be closed because administrations will listen to the risk managers, and the risk managers will say you have to close or face lawsuits. Prudence and caution and job protection are built into the minds of college administrators. The word “lawsuit” strikes fear in their hearts.
There are 400 teachers in my university. Most spent over 23 years on their education. How many of them are you will to see die of the virus this year? What is an acceptable casualty rate for this year? 1%? 2%? 5%? That’s 20 teachers.
This is more difficult than some people believe. Just how precious is human life? How far should we go to Protect the economic well-being of our country? Tough questions!
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