So, taking a break from futile raging on Twitter at the latest “Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee” bullshit (an Open Letter in Harper’s, signed by folks you’d expect–Pinker, Weiss, Brooks, etc.–and some you wouldn’t, like Margaret Atwood and Wynton Marsalis), I’d like to make good on a threat from over the weekend.
That would be to posts a thread in which the many Jackals who work in education, K-12 and higher-ed, to compare notes on whose doing what come the fall.
I’ll start. MIT gave more details about its plans today, adding to the outline they’ve been circulating for a few weeks.
The short form: seniors will be welcome (but not obligated to be) back on campus for the fall, along with “a relatively small fraction of other students whose circumstances require special consideration in terms of their safety, living conditions, visa status or other hardship.” So, more than 1/4, likely much less than 1/2 of the undergraduate student body. Seniors will likely not on campus in the spring, as the MIT leadership wants to ensure that all students have access to campus at some point in the year.
For all students not on campus, all instruction will be online. For those on-campus, some in-person instruction will happen, though there still no details as to what or how.
As far as the money goes. MIT’s cancelling a planned tuition increase, and give $5,000 as a tuition grant to every student. (If with aid a student’s bill is less than $5 grand, the bill will just be zeroed out.) Apparently the total aid budget will be increased, and the cost of off-campus living will be factored into aid decisions, and every student will be offered a research, teaching or service job to be paid up to $1,900. So, yeah, MIT is effectively reducing its tuition a bit–about 10% of its rack rate, more as a percentage of what almost all students actually pay. The most MIT aspect of this COVID support is the tech side:
Because the ability to collaborate on p-sets and projects is so essential to the MIT experience, we will loan a cellular-enabled Apple iPad and Apple Pencil to any undergraduate student (or graduate TA) who does not already have one, or who wishes to upgrade relative to what they own…As we did last Spring, MIT will loan wifi hotspots and computing equipment, including laptops, to those who need them.
P-set culture rules!
Other than that: tests for everyone on campus as often as twice a week. No cooking in the dorms, and MIT will subsidize meal plans. No access to campus at all for students not in residence. Greek houses have to shut (no way to keep them safe and be sure the rules stick).
All in all, I’m pretty comfortable with these decisions. First semester seniors are working on final research projects and the like, so it makes sense that they would be most able to get something out of an even greatly constrained stay. The campus is really being imagined as a bubble, to be separated as much as possible from the outside world. To the extent that can be made to stick, it just might work. And the administration seems to be taking the financial needs of the community seriously.
Of course: MIT, though not Harvard-rich, is still a very well-resourced university. We can take a tough budgetary year. And we have a lot of technical capacity to draw on. This isn’t available to everyone, and America’s education system is in a world of hurt.
Anyway–over to you all: what’s happening in your institutions, or in places you know about, and how much confidence (or terror) do you feel right now?
Image: Raphael, The School of Athens, 1511.
pat
whose
Should be who’s
At least I was first… woo hoo.
Phylllis
It appears my principals think August 17, 2020 is some amorphous date in the future that will never actually arrive.
jonas
Small, northeast liberal arts college — planning on having everyone back in late August with elaborate residential and instructional distancing practices, including hybrid instruction with some students online and others in classrooms w/ masks and regular disinfecting of all classrooms and high-traffic areas, required reservations in dining halls, etc. Students and parents were apparently adamant that they be back on campus this fall, although I think a lot of this came together before it became apparent over the past week or two that large swathes of the country — including a lot of college-age people — have apparently decided to willingly reenact the Black Death, just for shits and giggles. I wouldn’t be surprised if we reverse course in the next couple of weeks and adopt the Harvard model. Williams and Bowdoin are doing much the same thing, including canceling fall sports.
Starfish
That plan seems like a reasonable one.
I think that people were trying to cancel Margaret Atwood at some point. Here is a discussion of that time when people tried to cancel Margaret Atwood.
Atwood is warning that movements should not just exist to eat older waves of the same movements. This happens a lot in feminism where younger feminists are out to get the older ones. When feminism is structured to just attack other women, then none of the real problems are getting addressed.
People regularly like to go after Whoopi Goldberg because her definition of rape is probably violent rape by strangers. When rape is more inclusive than that, I don’t think Whoopi would know many women who have not been raped. Oprah was fairly open about being sexually assaulted by a family member when she was a child.
CaseyL
MIT must have one hell of an endowment, to be able to do that. And one hell of a leadership team, to be willing to do that, unlike some other famous colleges (*cough* Harvard*cough*).
University of Washington plans to comply with Governor Inslee’s Safe Start protocols. There will be in-person classes with social distancing and other precautions, plus a lot of hybrid and remote classes.
I work at the School of Medicine, and things might be a bit different here as our students who are residents and fellows simply have to do clinical work. We’ll be continuing the strict clinical workplace protocols currently in place. I’m not in the clinical part of the SOM, but in its Administrative offices. For us, continuing to telework is “strongly recommended,” though we may return to the office if we wish to ONLY if we can do so safely and the work we do when there is critical.
The parts of my job that are critical and that require my physical presence are postal mail and sending lab coats and scrubs to the laundry. The mail, because there are things like patient care documents that need to be forwarded to the appropriate clinic or caregiver (institutions and provider offices without HIPAA-compliant fax capability can’t simply fax or email correspondence to us). The laundry – well, that should be self-explanatory. I’ve actually been going to the office once a week to take care of that stuff.
In short, I expect to still be 90% WFH for at least the rest of the summer.
Evap
Emory in Atlanta is right now planning to have a mix of online and in person classes. In person classes will be in rooms large enough for social distancing and all students wear masks. Instructors will be behind barriers and wearing face shields. Some students will be on campus and in dorms, but must get tested before living in a dorm. I’m not sure what they are planning as far as meal service goes. Anyone who sets foot on campus must wear a mask.
The semester dates have been changed so that classes start mid-August and end at Thanksgiving, with no breaks or holidays. All final exams remote after Thanksgiving. I guess the idea is they don’t want students leaving campus and coming back.
Given the surge in Georgia, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this is scrapped and we go to all online classes. We got an email today that seems to be preparing faculty for this. In June, faculty were required to take a 3 week course online to prepare for online teaching. We got a bit of extra pay for this. When students are paying hefty tuition, the ad-hoc emergency online teaching won’t cut it.
Scott P.
All the MIT frats are on Boston University’s campus, so good news for them, too.
RSA
The university I used to work for is in panic mode, for good reason. From the US ICE press release, yesterday:
I’m not tracking this in detail, but the interpretation of the administration is that if the university goes full remote at any time (e.g., as a response to an outbreak), F-1 students would be forced to leave the U.S. The general reaction seems to a mixture of disbelief and shock at how dysfunctional this policy is.
different-church-lady
First of all, DCL +2 really strong ones.
Two of all: I knew that if I wandered over to LGM I would find out what with this Harper’s letter thing to which you is referral. And at cursuory glance it appears to be the intellectual equivalent of “An armed society is a polite society.”
And C’rd of every goddamed other thing in the universe of all: there’s far far too many people in the world who read Harrison Bergeron and took all the wrong effing conclusions from it eee emmm ooh.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
Rebuttal: Nobody has the right to an audience and “due process” only exists in the legal system. Employers and others have the right to fire people they don’t want to be associated with (in an at-will employment system)
different-church-lady
@Starfish:
Good fuckin’ luck with that project.
Jinchi
I keep trying to figure out how many awful things the Trump administration could possibly still do, but I guess the answer is at least one horrible thing per day. So … something like 200 more before we kick him to the curb.
There really needs to be a quicker way to rid the country of a president like Trump.
Boussinesque
I work as a tutor for physics, calculus, stats, and environmental science with students from the local high school district (San Jose/Silicon Valley area of CA). What I’ve been hearing from some of my clients is that some combination of online teaching and staggered days of in-person teaching are likely to be the plan—have no more than some fraction of students allowed on campus any given day, rotate through who’s on campus. So a hybrid approach. It sounds like a logistical headache to me, but thankfully my business hasn’t been too severely affected by the switch to full WFH, or at least not yet.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
This man is my hero. We should all aspire to such greatness.
Starfish
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): A lot of the people who have actually been canceled were self-employed big shots, and their cancellation is that they are not in a position of power over other people. Those whiners, I have no sympathy for. Everyone spending their energy trying to cancel their racist uncle instead of trying for policy change that would actually improve the lives of historically disadvantaged demographics bothers me.
joel hanes
If I were in charge of planning for a university, which thank God I’m not, I’d be deeply pondering the ??? step in this sequence:
different-church-lady
So: everyone’s gonna try to figure out what to do and no matter what everyone’s gonna be unhappy and it’s THE FUCKIN’ VIRUS’ FAULT, NOT THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK.
Viva BrisVegas
Do those people who signed that open letter not realise that every racist right wing dirtbag will now wave a copy of it in the face of any person who calls them on their shit. The words of these people will now be used as a means to stifle protest and dissent.
They just created a get out of jail free card for any and all racism, bigotry and misogyny that Republicans care to spew.
I thought these were supposed to be smart people. All they are showing is that they are people blinded by their own privilege.
Tom Levenson
@Scott P.: Not quite all. But enough, and proximity for many of the others.
I live very, very close to BU. I’ll be watching the fall with interest, and possibly terror.
Mary G
I fear the teen housemate may be lost to the streets. The school has tried hard online, but without the social interaction he doesn’t do anything. At one point I was hoping to get him into junior college even if only to take art and music, but now the goal has been lowered to a GED at some point.
Mary G
@Starfish: If cancellation was really a thing, Bret Stephens and David Brooks would be out of work.
ETA:
Also, I really like this guy and though I’m sorry how it happened, I’m glad to know about him now.
The ability of Blacks not to just sit in rage and hatred all the time amazes me. I’m trying to be more like that instead of the long term grudge holder I can be.
zhena gogolia
We had to all decide by yesterday whether we were going to teach online only, in-person with online students included, in-person with no online students, or “hybrid,” whatever that means. But our official announcement about what’s going to happen campus-wide is not until tomorrow. So I don’t know. I’m teaching online only. I watched a demo of “hybrid,” and it was a cluster.
WaterGirl
@RSA: University of Illinois – Chicago appears to have a plan for that. They are going with a hybrid plan so the don’t lose their international students.
JeffH
4-year public commuter school in suburban Atlanta here. We are supposedly going to be “mostly hybrid” courses which are roughly 25-30% face-to-face. Social distancing to apply, so we can only get roughly a third of our classes in a classroom at a given time. Faculty have to meet fairly rigid criteria to teach online only. The USG finally backed down on masks yesterday and everyone will be required to be masked, but seems to be holding firm on students being on campus.
As for how I’m feeling about it? Abso-freaking-lutely terrified. Given Georgia’s case numbers and everything I’m reading about the spread of the virus, this is a superspreader event waiting to happen. The actual classes are going to take two or three times more prep time and we’re not being compensated. The student experience is likely to be utterly miserable. This is going to be very, very bad all around.
geg6
I don’t have a fucking clue what we’re doing since nobody will discuss anything but possibilities until the fucking Board of Trustees meets. And no one has told us when that will be.
mrmoshpotato
OT – who wants a half-term former governor, failed VP candidate, RWNJ girlfriend?
zhena gogolia
@JeffH:
That sounds like the worst of all worlds.
We were lucky — we got freedom to decide, no need to explain. I am very grateful for that. I’m not expecting this semester to be much of a success, but your situation sounds awful.
different-church-lady
@mrmoshpotato: Who doesn’t nowadays?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
I’m not aware this is actually a thing. Even if it is, all “canceling” means is social punishment for having terrible values. Humans have been doing this since forever and somehow civilization never collapsed. The difference is that a lot of people who traditionally enjoyed privilege are now experiencing social punishment.
A strong case can be made that many nations, including the United States, have always been de-facto (and of course often de-jure) authoritarian states to varying degrees over the centuries to their respective minorities
Mary G
?????
trollhattan
This is fascinating to me because my kid was considering her Wellesley acceptance in part because of the opportunity to also take classes at MIT. Guessing that’s Right Out now.
I feel so bad for the class of 2020 but my cold comfort offering to the kid is the class of 2021 is going to get screwed vastly worse.
Her chosen college plans on beginning classes mid-August. We’ll see about that.
zhena gogolia
@Mary G:
Nice.
jonas
@jonas: I forgot to add: any faculty who wish to conduct their classes entirely online for either personal (i.e. health risk) or pedagogical reasons will be free to do so.
Of course now the fly in all this ointment is the announcement by the fascist fuckers at ICE that foreign students will lose their visas if they attend an all-online school. It just never ends with these bastards. It never ends.
trollhattan
We need something that’s not the 25A and not the current impeachment process. IDK what that looks like but it’s needed.
Patricia Kayden
Yep. Only Trump gets away with blatant racism.
Baud
@Mary G:
Damn. Go, Uncle Joe!
Sab
Several threads back a commenter described colleges as stationary cruise ships. My college prof sister agrees. ” You wouldn’t believe how stupid these kids are.”
I am going to waste my energy on nagging my local k-12 school board.
RSA
Yes. I should not be surprised, but often I am.
Cool. I hope universities can follow the letter of the law (so as not to expose their students) while making clear that the spirit of the law is contemptible.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
Just to add, people should absolutely be pushing for reforms for social problems. Given the recent resurgence of BLM, it seems possible that a new Civil Rights Movement is underway. So, I think a lot of people are demanding changes to the justice system for example
zhena gogolia
@jonas:
Fuck them.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@jonas:
Fuck ICE
Sab
@different-church-lady: Lol.
namekarB
As Atrios said:
Ken
@RSA: The rules lawyer in me says to create a class, enrollment limit 1, for each international student that meets in-person exactly once per semester. There’s even some precedent, in the form of seminars, special topics courses, and graduate research.
Sab
@Sab: Also too my missing in action GOP senator. The Dem senator is married to a state school college prof so he gets it.
Another Scott
Thanks for this thread.
A few days ago I posted an open letter from a school board member here – I don’t envy you folks trying to figure out how to safety educate the next generation – especially while ICE is throwing monkeywrenches in everyone’s plans.
:-(
My workplace is part of a very, very large organization. We’re being told we’ll be “fast followers” and things are ramping up very slowly, but management is still requiring masks and limiting the number of people in buildings. Teleworking is still encouraged. I assume that is going to be our working mode until everyone is vaccinated – even if that is years away.
Hang in there, everyone. Wear your masks!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
This seems very smart, well thought out. I find it especially Interesting that the Greek houses will be shut down. A very wise decision, considering community spread issues.
I’m not an academic, just an observer. But I have neighbors who work at Caltech, event planning and campus maintenance. And I have known some students and staff. It will be interesting to see what they will be doing.
A bit of a wild card. I knew people who would commute between JPL and Caltech. I wonder how the pandemic affects this and the projects people are working on.
mrmoshpotato
@RSA: The cruelty is the point.
(Fuck this bastard administration.)
Martin
We’re still struggling. The plans I’m working on were never going to be rolled out for Fall. They’re based on a more pessimistic view that the earliest we’ll see anything resembling normalcy is Fall 2021. Some of that is also due to the complete lack of data. Everyone packed up late March and we don’t really have a sense of what does and does not put students at risk. So everything is hypotheticals or abstracting from other data (e.g. how much does a classroom resemble a church congregation, etc.).
The current plan is grad students will return in full in Fall. That both negates the impact of the F1 visa issue, but more importantly, we can’t run our programs without grad students, and they can’t provide the help we need from China or Saudi Arabia or wherever. Grad courses tend to be small anyway, and they’ll have the entire campus to spread out to so we can do proper social distancing. Plus, there’s relatively little cross-populating of grad courses. At the undergrad level you have students from all majors taking econ, but at the grad level, it’s only econ students. So the odds of an outbreak spreading outside of a single lab or degree program is pretty low.
We are offering some 2nd-4th year undergraduate courses in person, but very few – a couple dozen. These are experiential courses, lab courses, etc. – things that cannot be done at home. For most hands on courses we’ll be shipping kits to students. One upside to the timing of this is that so much physical stuff is now miniaturized and cheap. You can get a digital microscope that rivals the analog equipment we had in the labs 10 years ago for like $40. Digital oscilloscope for $150, etc. It’s not nothing, but since we’re having to toss out a lot of textbooks as they’re just not suited for such a radical change, it’s looking like the cost over a full academic year will be about the same. We’d already been doing some of this, so a fair bit is already in place. We found years ago that if you have the student buy the equipment and own it, they learn it better and apply it to a bunch of other stuff that they wouldn’t have bothered with if they had to run onto campus and hope they could get into a lab. And that digital oscilloscope will last the student 4 years (longer than a textbook) so it’s not a terrible investment.
But yeah, everything else online. We chose 2nd year and up since we really only have first year students living on campus, so everyone else was already renting an apartment, etc. In surveys we found that many upper-division students would probably stay in the area anyway. Many have local internships and things like that. It does open up on-campus housing for the students that want to stay on campus, since the freshmen won’t be there. Not sure what the uptake is on that offer. Only a few hundred undergrads have in-person courses.
Individual study for undergrads can be done on campus. We’ve had all of our safety protocols for research labs in place and running since April and they’ll have to follow those.
The only undergraduate program that has all students on campus is nursing. It’s both highly hands on, and well, this situation is what they’re being trained to handle.
The economics are a concern. We’re losing a few million a week through our hospital and clinics running at reduced volume. Our summer program revenue is zero. Housing and parking and food are assumed to be zero. Housing is a lot since that is mostly upfront capex by the campus, so most of our expenses are already spent and the housing payments goes to subsidize other parts of the university. We’re expecting 10% pay cuts and pretty mass layoffs/furloughs. The state will likely backfill us somewhat, but we don’t know how much yet.
Starfish
@Mary G: Everyone knows that the New York Times is a jobs program for some white dudes with bad ideas.
There is someone on my Twitter feed sharing Freddie de Boer articles as if they have a point. I am slowly losing my patience with some of these dudes.
namekarB
If Harvard cannot figure out how to have in-person classes then what chance does Podunk Middle School have of coming up with a plan?
RSA
What an excellent, in-your-face solution.
Ken
@trollhattan: I am trying to remember the name of a science-fiction story. It was an alternate history where Poland was one of the world’s superpowers. Someone from the United States (or close analog) was criticizing the Polish system of government which was, IIRC, some kind of absolute monarchy, with a term-limited elected monarch.
A citizen of Poland countered that their system had been stable for over eight centuries, and they hadn’t even had to call on the ultimate constitutional check, the Society of Assassins, for the last five.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@namekarB:
Ohio announced today that contact sports can begin under “strict” guidelines
As usual with DeWimp, this shit is a day late and a dollar short. It’s also completely toothless. He’s finally mandated masks, but only in level 3 counties. Does he not think people cross county lines to commute? Make it a statewide order and be done with it. No more half-measures.
Martin
@joel hanes: Most universities have already had the death of first staff member, btw.
namekarB
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Good luck with that Item #1. Major League Baseball can have tests taken before a game but can’t get the results back in less than a week. So what if you get the virus between when you take the test and when you play a week later? Maybe Ohio knows more than those Billionaires that own baseball teams, I dunno. Unless you have a short turnaround on lab test results, it doesn’t do any good to test
a lurker
My school’s plan: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, also known as “hybrid”.
My plan: Run it fully online, and if they try to force the face-to-face issue, come up with some sort of maliciously compliant workaround and get in touch with the union.
Redshift
The Maryland community college (er, non-four year degree granting institution, if I’m remembering the current current term) where Ms. Redshift teaches has announced that they will be all online for the fall. Since they have no students in residence, it’s a little easier than some schools. As regards the recent news, she’s not sure how many foreign students on student visas they have.
Jay
Here in British Columbia, other than SARS-Covid-19 Research, Simon Fraser University is continuing Remote Learning during the 2020 Fall Semester.
For any meetings greater than 1 on 1, the Meeting needs to be pre-approved by the Safety Commitee as “Essential”, and meet the Social Distancing Rules.
No layoffs or furloughs are planned.
SFU has decided at this time, to take the “Covid Times” as an opportunity to address issues of racism, injustice, and inequality in an Authotarian, Colonialist structure by restructuring and being more inclusive.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Will clinicals resume for your university’s nursing program? Mine were suspended my last semester because of the pandemic and we had to substitute with virtual clincials and case studies
NotMax
Well, IT is part of the name, innit?
:)
Be interesting to follow the variance in what the more isolated, outside or distant from an urban area colleges undertake.
Mandarama
My campus is…not gonna hire me this fall bc the situation isn’t allowing for adjunct $$. ?
My husband’s job is our main support, so it’s okay, but I’m sad and will miss teaching.
Brachiator
A question I keep asking about colleges, even K-12 schools.
Any ideas about identifying or making special accommodation for students, teachers and staff who may have underlying conditions?
Is there a cutoff? If x number of students or others test positive, will campuses be shut down?
zhena gogolia
@Mandarama:
I hope things will come back as soon as possible. This is all so heartbreaking.
schrodingers_cat
I am tired of the cruelty is the point trope. No. It is the by-product. The point is to diminish the United States so that it no longer is the first among equals. Putin didn’t put the Orange clown in the WH so that the sad fat man could live out his revenge fantasies. Putin’s goal is the destruction of the US power and prestige. One of the things that makes the United States unique is the immigrants it attracts from all over the world. Without immigrants and with the destruction of the post WWII system put in place by the United States, we are Russia, a has been with nuclear weapons. That is what Putin wants to reduce us to.
That is what Rs are helping him achieve. They are his wannabe oligarchs.
The man in WH is not the mastermind of this scheme.
Mary G
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
So much for “Republican governor who’s done a good job.” He’s not only allowing a completely unessential activity, he caved to the deplorables on even the smallest precaution.
Starfish
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It is very online behavior that I have seen repeatedly in various online groups.
It involves online shunning or doxxing done in a way that people would generally not do in the rest of life.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro tests positive for coronavirus
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer asshole
dmsilev
We haven’t finalized our plans for the fall. Helps that we’re on a quarter system with a start in late September, so we have an extra month or so to plan and also see what all of our peer institutions are doing. Grad students basically never left; we don’t have graduate dorms per se, just apartments. The labs were 99% remote from March to June (exceptions being a few directly working on COVID-related projects), but are now back up and running under stringent distancing/sanitization regimens, so that’s most of the grad students. Graduate coursework here is almost entirely small-group, so it’s easier to move online or even “people at four corners of a large room”.
Undergrads were all sent home in March, with the exception of a few percent who couldn’t/shouldn’t leave (primarily international students). We’re planning on bringing back a fraction of those, but I don’t think “which fraction” has been announced yet. They’ll be living in dorms (no frats here, thank God) with greatly reduced density. We have one dorm which will be set aside as essentially an isolation/quarantine ward should that become necessary.
For remote instruction, we loaned out a bunch of gear in the spring (to both students and instructors) and I expect that will resume in the fall.
billcinsd
My school, a small middle western engineering college. We’ve been meeting about how to come back for over a month, since our Governor decreed we would have to be open in the fall. We are limiting our dorm access to be 85%, which will be mostly freshman and sophomores, and we have reservations for that amount. Our few “large” courses will be all online. For medium sized classes we are hybrid, with 1/3 of the class attending each day for a MWF class. The course will also be synchronous and recorded. For labs we are increasing sections and trying to keep the numbers reasonable. We are trying to have cohorts so that each student mostly sees the same relatively small number of people. Faculty and students with possible COVID sensitivities can opt out of face to face classes
eta: we moved up our start date up 3 days, are not taking any holidays and will finish at the Thanksgiving break
eta2: It looks like we will be able to require mask/face shield wearing despite these not be mandated by the state
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@schrodingers_cat:
Completely agreed. I just hope the rest of the world and our allies understand this.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Very true.
Red Cedar
I teach at a smallish midwestern Catholic university with a lot of nursing + other health care majors, and the need for on-campus/clinical stuff has been a huge issue as our admin plans for fall. They’ve divided classes into tiers: Tier 1 requires on-campus for accreditation reasons, Tier 2 classes can be moved online but it seriously messes with things (labs/studios etc), and Tier 3 can be online without real problems. Basically the humanities are all Tier 3 (except Studio Art), and Tier 3 is all online in the fall. Since I’m in the humanities, that’s me and I’m grateful. Tier 1 and 2 will be on campus as needed, with all sorts of shifts and wiggles to make things safer, inc. new class times to extend the time between classes so there’s no crush at the doorways and on staircases, only large classrooms being used so there’s social distancing, required masks, testing availability etc. As far as students living on campus, there will be some but not nearly as many since everyone has to be in a single. We don’t have a huge residential population anyway; lots of our students are local.
Overall I’m impressed with our admin and how hard they’re working to balance things. We’re a tuition-dependent (ie desperately poor) school and depending how things go in the fall—if, say, the fact that most classes will be online means enrollment drops—this could be utterly disastrous. I’ve been thinking for several years that there’s a significant chance they have to close before I retire (12 more years). Up until now that was a reasonably small chance, though growing every year—the pandemic could well push us right over the edge.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
Doxxing isn’t cool, but online “shunning”? What does this mean? If this means blocking people, I don’t necessarily see a problem.
I know on Tumblr there have been campaigns the past few years by (mostly) teenagers and young twenty-somethings accusing other users of being “pedos”. I don’t see it as some existential threat in the same way I view the far-right.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Knocked out a quick mini-ditty about it yesterday.
:)
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
You might be right, but Trump is definitely very comfortable with the plan.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@namekarB:
Exactly. DeWine talked a good game about listening to experts, but it’s clear now he’s just trying to appease people instead of doing the right thing
dmsilev
@dmsilev: Should add that
HumboldtBlue
I only teach my cat dirty jokes but I did stumble across this lovely moment.
Music truly is our greatest achievement, it’s our universal language.
jl
My place is planning conservatively, but saying that might change depending on how well control efforts progress in area. So, right now we are planning for 100 percent remote until January 2021, except for a few classes that absolutely must be taught in person, and those are broken up into small group sessions.
So, from my experience, much better learning in the few smaller group in-person sessions. Not so much for remote. I think very difficult to teach some subjects 100 percent remote, even things that people think are ‘all in the head’ like math stuff. I tried to make statistical topics relevant by bringing in problems presented by covid-19 for specific professions, and from the students’ reactions, there was interest and motivation. But really hard to encourage focus and application needed to get some basic skills adequately mastered.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Of course he is and so are many of the Republican electeds. They want to be American oligarchs. They don’t care what happens to the rest of us.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
LOL, that’s good.
What pisses me off about it is he still doesn’t fucking get it:
He then started experiencing symptoms.
Oh, fuck off. Your father is a fucking piece of shit who has let a lot of people die unnecessarily because he’s not taking this pandemic seriously.
Please tell me there’s something the Biden administration can do to punish this asshole
jl
@schrodingers_cat: Mind boggling what is happening. We usually assume that oppressive oligarchs have enough brains and knowledge to at least keep the goose that lays the golden eggs that they steal healthy enough to keep pumping out golden eggs. Clearly, this bunch has long forgotten how to do anything but grab any cash they see that is not firmly nailed down. Right now, that narrow skill isn’t enough to keep their grift running.
marklar
Small, residential, Liberal Arts college (SLAC) in the Northeast.
Current plans are for students to return. Classroom occupancies cut by 50-60%, so hybrid will be necessary for most classes (labs, art, dancing, acting classes modified). Triples will be cut to doubles, Juniors are being given permission to rent houses off campus (usually only Seniors), and we’re making arrangements with two hotels to handle housing as well. Students will have assigned bathroom/shower times (and assigned sinks/showers), and most likely assigned meal times. Masks will be required at all times in buildings. I don’t think students have any idea what seminars are going to look like when we are all covered up and non-verbal communication is diminished.
Thankfully, the faculty are currently being permitted to teach whichever way they choose, without being questioned as to why by the administration. Twenty percent of us (myself included) intend to do completely online (mostly asynchronous), 10% want to do in-person classes, and 70% hybrid courses.
My choice isn’t only informed by health concerns, but because given the living and eating conditions on campus, and our being near both NYC and Philadelphia, I expect that we will have to shut down completely in weeks 4 or 5, and it will be less disruptive to my students if the course was already planned to be taught accordingly.
Oh, and since I live just 2 blocks from campus, I’ll be meeting outdoors, with individual or small groups of students as long as the weather permits. This will help with the ‘community building’ and personal connection our SLAC believes we promote.
If I’m required to do in-person classes in the Spring, I’ll be adding this language to my syllabi: According My participation policy is “Because the virus can be spread while speaking, your grade will be reduced by 1% for each comment you make in class.” Attendance policy is “Once you have attended 3 classes, your grade will be decreased 3% for each additional class attended, unless you can provide a doctor’s note explaining why you were present.”
Stay safe, everyone.
FlyingToaster
WarriorGirl’s Middle School (the basement of the PK-8 school, where one puts adolescents if one can) just sent out the survey, which you could complete 1, 3, 5, 10 or 12 pages. Because I’m an asshole, I completed all twelve pages but failed to put in my e-mail address for “further discussion”. They already know everything I’ve said — as a former volunteer my opinions are, shall we say, well known. They’ll know exactly who wrote it.
We’re watching this all with interest; one of WG’s music teachers is an international student, working on his PhD at the New England Conservatory. I have been convinced since May that he’ll be replaced, because as nice as the new buildings at NECM are, they aren’t fucking wind tunnels and they don’t have the budget to put everyone in a hazmat suit.
I’m waiting for the BU and NE clusterfucks to begin, along with the Storrowings.
RSA
@Ken:
“Polonaise,” by Alan Dean Foster. If you google the title, you’ll come upon the text for the collection I read the short story in, With Friends Like These…
Raven
I worked for the University System of Georgia for 20 years. The Board of Regents set policy for all system institutions and there are 387,000 students in system institutions. It is interesting to me that I spent 15 of my 20 years developing high quality on-line courses. We had 4 or 5 faculty in a content area and a year build each course. Here’s news from yesterday
More than 8,700 people signed a Change.org petition demanding the system require face coverings in classrooms as part of its guidelines to protect students and faculty from the spread of COVID-19, which has spiked among young people in recent weeks. More than 800 Georgia Tech faculty members signed a similar petition.
Rusty
All of these college plans will be a smoking ruin the moment the first outbreak of 20+ students and one is in the ICU fighting for his or her life. The press will go wild, the week leadership of most universities will panic and cave. Parents will be frantically pulling their children home. The financial and reputational consequences will be harsh. With the number of colleges, it will only take a few occurrences and everyone will be online.
Mandarama
@zhena gogolia: Thank you! From your mouth to God’s ear, as my mom used to say.
My kid’s college is going back at the end of Sept (quarter system) at 60% residential capacity, with required masking and distancing. Classes will be hybrids. They’ll leave campus at T’giving and complete finals at home. I’m anxious for him, but IL has handled things a helluva lot better than my state has, so…
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think that’s one of those things they’re still trying to decide. Right now, rising cases in the county, no. Things will hopefully look different in a few months.
Pedler
@Viva BrisVegas: The idea that everyone must at all times calibrate their statements and opinions to avoid giving ammunition to political opponents (even if that entails merely stating inconvenient facts or making a claim that differs from conventional orthodoxy) equates to a demand for ideological conformity.
Raven
Whether in person, virtual or a mixture of the two, instruction at the University of Georgia will look a little different in the fall due to the continued impact of the global pandemic, but much work is underway to ensure that high-quality teaching and learning continues. Faculty members and administrators have spent the summer getting ready for students to return to classrooms—both in buildings and online.
Big G
Here in Tx, we have made a show of taking it seriously, but it feels like expectations for F2F keep going up. We have to ensure that every student has multiple F2F classes, and University has been particularly focused on freshmen having F2F, so the idea Of small cohorts with limited in cross-campus interaction is unworkable. Ability to opt out of F2F teaching depends solely on reasonableness of your Head. Only scrap we are hanging on to is that we are hoping a half semester of F2F labs will qualify whole course asF2F. Oh, and all F2F is hybrid synchronously filmed, though I’m don’t have high hopes we can pull off technology, even if the pedagogy didn’t suck. Frankly I’m ashamed of my job right now.
jl
@Rusty: “All of these college plans will be a smoking ruin the moment the first outbreak of 20+ students and one is in the ICU fighting for his or her life.”
No substitute for getting prevalence of disease as low as possible, and the US can’t seem to do that, like IMHO, a dozen countries all over the world are doing. Still lots of talk about social bubbles and pods and whatnot. In my mind, those things are just portable mini-travel bans, that blow up as soon as one case gets through.
Glad Fauci and some local public health officials are now emphasizing that covid-19 is at least 10 times more deadly than seasonal for everyone, including young adults. I know one supposedly invulnerable young adult that just flat out died shortly after diagnosis, too fast to get help. And I’ve heard of several other cases from friends. That just doesn’t happen with flu.
Need prevalence low enough so that outbreaks are truly rare, and when one happens you can focus on that one there and stomp out the trouble before another one happens. Anyone looking at trouble pro sports is having, with far more resources, should know most of the country is not ready.
I guess we need to try, since no school is a disaster too. But some places talking like we can just have 30 or 40 kids come back and do something clever, is just madness for most of the country.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Makes sense
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Enforcing the Trumbull County mask mandate: Some police departments aren’t sure that enforcing the mandate will be easy or realistic
Mary G
There’s always a tweet:
JustRuss
My large-ish state U is going hybrid, masks required inside all buildings. Dorms limited to two per room, and it looks like they’ll be pretty full. Most students are gone for the summer, but I still see plenty partying outside with no masks or distancing. They’re probably a minority, but it doesn’t take a lot to spread the virus. I’ve been called back to campus full-time, but once fall comes I’ll be pushing to work from home. I don’t see this going well.
mrmoshpotato
@FlyingToaster: Bookmarked. The 11’8″ train bridge (now 12’4″) in Durham, NC is also a crowd pleaser.
schrodingers_cat
@jl: Agreed. All these plans sound like castle building in the air. The infection rate is increasing in 48 states. Fall is going to be worse than the summer. I see a total shutdown in our future.
Raven
Will someone tell Rachel that reading text that is on the fucking screen is obnoxious at best.
phein60
Our youngest is enrolled for his sophomore year at Illinois Wesleyan (1900 undergrads, underclasses normally required to reside on-campus). Their plan is to start a little early, finish by mid-November; single occupancy in dorms (at double occupancy rates; shared bath/showers); classes meeting only when necessary (class size is already <10 for most of my son’s classes). If he tests positive, we’re supposed to drive over and bring him home. We both check 5 or 6 boxes on the at-risk population list, but what else should we do? Not sure how to approach this year; haven’t accepted aid yet, waiting to find out how they would respond to a gap year, and figure out how gap year would affect son.
Oldest son teaches in local high school with ED/BD students, hoping he chooses to return to grad school and pick up a master’s at U of I this year. School district has no announced plans, but Illinois isn’t going to force schools to open.
Raven
Jay
Kelly
A friend that teaches at a local school district reports a lucky break. The district will complete a long planned, new building in the fall that will consolidate and replace several very old, small, scattered grade school buildings. They meant to abandon the old buildings this fall. Instead they will take advantage of having twice as much space.
Martin
@Rusty: Maybe, but I think that’ll be contextualized.
Remember, universities were among the first institutions in the US to close. Yes, there will be some institutions that open in a blatantly irresponsible manner, but I think this will be fairly well contextualized. If there is such an outbreak, I think you’ll see a pretty swift response by the university.
If there was such an outbreak, the way the public would find out about it is from our response to it. People weren’t outraged by the illnesses in the meatpacking plants, they were outraged by the employer not giving a shit. Same when Liberty pulled that shit. I don’t think you’ll see any reputable university trying to forge ahead in a case like you describe.
NotMax
@Raven
Yeah, she should sing it.
:)
Mostly it’s because some of the audience listens to the program on radio or audio streaming, methinks.
SiubhanDuinne
@Raven:
I was fixing dinner at the time, and was beyond grateful for the audio.
Marcopolo
This says open thread so although away from the topic:
This is ridiculous level money. Also, Harrison (SC) raised ~$14M, Gideon (ME) raised $9M, Bullock (MT) & Kelly (AZ) raised ~$7M. Lots of well-funded D Senate challengers.
MomSense
Wondering if Immanetize has been around lately. Hope he and Imm are ok.
Central Planning
I’m not an academic, but I work with the schools in the SUNY system. Word on the street (for the ones I talk to) are expecting about a 30% budget cut from the state, spread over the next 5 fiscal quarters.
I also heard one college’s acceptance rate was 50% lower than normal. That will really fuck up any financial planning.
MagdaInBlack
@mrmoshpotato:
Great ! Im going to waste a lot of time on that one, and I have plenty of that, still.
Avalune
My community college will have their usual fully asynchronous online courses, also synchronous classes with Zoom/Blackboard Collaboration style specific “class time.” A small number of courses will be a hybrid – which in this case means they’ll be in lab at campus, with a very small class, partitions, a lots of space a time or two a week, while the rest of the work will occur online. All academic support staff will continue to work from home.
We’ve loaned out laptops and lab equipment for students who need it. A couple of our local restaurants continue to provide breakfast to our students to make up for not having access to our food pantry. We’ve frozen tuition but won’t budge on fees for classes that were moved to online. We also get a lot of complaints about why we have seat caps for online classes – as if the teachers don’t then have to grade 5000 things if they just have infinite students.
We’re trying to do a lot of outreach, online meetings, phone calls, whatever, to help and connect as much as we can but I can already see some frustration building with the students who feel they are being ignored or responded to too slowly.
They’ve also noted that everything is subject to change, so we’ll see!
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Uh huh. When I’m at the computer my back is to the TV, so also appreciated here.
jonas
Refuse to have anything to do with him politically and appoint an ambassador and embassy staff that will drag his ass every day on social media and in the Brazilian press.
jl
@schrodingers_cat: Sad that other countries could do shut downs with adequate social support for those sick, and protections for workforce that could push the prevalence down low enough, and then start gradual reopenings, with adequate outbreak control. Seems beyond the ability of the US, because its capacity to provide basic public services has been so starved and constantly attacked.
And, nothing special about covid-19 here. In 1920s there were big outbreaks of bacterial meningitis in the SW, taking down hundreds at a time. Probably more dangerous, certainly more gruesome, than covid-19, if you got sick. No way you could have modern college dormitories in that environment, until you got the prevalence way down. Other countries can do it, we can’t, and its a disgrace, a scandal and a tragedy. We used to be able to do it, with typhoid, TB, bacterial meningitis, but we can’t now. The US has regressed in its public services so badly, its sustainability as a society and an economy is threatened.
The country has been unable and uninterested in doing anything about horrible life-expectancy for a high income economy for decades, hasn’t cared about suffering from horribly inadequate health care. Isn’t so easy to sweep a new infectious disease under the rug, and we are flailing and failing. Only thing this country has done about health and other social problems for decades is tell the ‘lesser’ people, anyone not rich, to suck up and deal with it. Trump/GOP trying same approach now, but it isn’t working. As Gates said, people aren’t going out to shop and party with bodies piling up around the corner.
Kay
It’s all like that. They seated a table full of people to yell at them to get to work and fix everything, while not doing jack shit themselves.
They have done NOTHING to assist public schools, DeVos has been completely AWOL, but they found time to hold this ridiculous photo op where they order people around.
In a way it doesn’t matter. They’re all lazy as shit. People talk about the incompetence but incompetence assumes they actually do work, just badly. They don’t. They won’t even follow thru with this campaign stunt. They’ll be on to some other useless fake job tomorrow.
namekarB
@Martin: It is looking more and more that there is a bottleneck at the labs. We can ramp up testing 3-fold (which we need to do) but if it takes longer and longer to get the results (now averaging 5 days for non-symptomatic tests) then by the time a school finds out about an outbreak, it is a week (or two) afterward and by then it is rapidly escalating. And then keep in mind that 45% of infected people are asymptomatic so how do we test them?
NotMax
@Central Planning
More fish sticks, fewer fish fillets at the dining hall.
:)
Keith P.
What happens when Trump recommends butt-chugging to possibly kill COVID? All that equipment is stored in secure fraternity facilities.
NotMax
@jonas
Problematic, as China will rush to fill the vacuum.
Kay
Gibberish. Trump is addled and damaged so he can’t form a coherent sentence but it’s true for all of them. They can’t talk. They can’t speak coherently on a phone call because none of them of them know what they’re talking about and they’re too lazy to prepare.
jl
@jl: Well, OK, not enough people are willing to go out and shop and party. We’ve seen that there are some on the news recently. But, too many people with enough common sense and decency to protect themselves and others. Probably our leaders don’t understand common sense and decency well enough to understand that latter group.
jl
@Kay: “She also criticized specific districts “playing both paradigms” in planning a hybrid of in-person and online classes for the fall, singling out Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington.”
The dimwittery is astounding. Bright side is if she is spending her time wandering around the country delivering idiotic harangues, it will keep her from doing more serious trouble.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Everyone knows that Tax Cuts will keep the eggs coming and cure the ‘rona too!
mrmoshpotato
@MagdaInBlack: Glad to be of assistance. ?
jl
@namekarB: It’s looking bad for states that have let things go to heck. The hope that we can get prevalence down low enough with a well planned shut down, so that early surveillance, contact tracing and isolate will work has probably evaporated for many states. I’m worried that may be gone for big parts of California.
What next? If we can’t do a shut down correctly then another one will just delay the mess from restarting for a few weeks and ruin the economy even more. And some state governments still don’t thing its needed. What’s left? Well, mass saturation testing and isolation of cases has worked well in several countries. But, the US is so messed up, we still don’t have testing capacity for that. I don’t know what AZ, TX, FL and other states are going to do. I hope CA can pull back from the brink so it won’t have to find out.
Bobby Thomson
College administrators have a lot of pressure to open because of physical plant costs, effects on the town economy, and the ability to churn room and board fees to avoid cutting their bloated salaries. But August is going to be hard and September is going to be brutal. Everyone will be back to remote learning by Thanksgiving at the latest. You’d have to be crazy to pay for a room and board contract right now. It’s just not possible to make dorms safe without drastically reducing occupancy, if then.
James E Powell
Here in Los Angeles, our public schools are scheduled to open on August 18, six weeks. The district has not informed us of what the plans are. I’m sure that only the best people are working on the best plans and that everything is going to go well. A few years back, the school board was dominated by the corporate charter faction. They hired a billionaire hedge fund manager to break the union and turn schools over to the corporations. Our strike took that off the table. I’m sure his experience as a hedge fund manager is just what we need to figure a way through this mess.
Kay
@jl:
She dropped in after the yacht race to harangue the assistant principals.
mrmoshpotato
@Keith P.:
Sounds more like an opinion or dissent that would be written by the blackout drunk college rapist in a 5-4 decision.
On a serious note, to hell with Kavanaugh and all of the Rethuglicans who voted for him.
Another Scott
ICYMI, the IHME site is still doing projections on the course of the pandemic. They’re projecting 208,255 dead in the US by November 1.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
As usual, there are huge differences in the various paths (universal masks, easing, etc.)…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@jl:
She “singled out” Fairfax County because she’s been a Right wing political hack for 50 years and she’s hoping she can drum up some discord in the suburbs that she can use to her advantage, since her idiot boss is tanking there.
How long did they stick with the statues gimmick? 48 hours? This is the next one.
jl
@James E Powell: I may be a grouchy malcontent on this, but I think that one reason distance learning has been so difficult and ineffective is the substandard off-the-shelf junk the corporate takeover crowd has pushed in the past in too many places.
Around here, the one group that has been consistently left out of planning distance learning in the past is teachers. Which some may find odd.
Martin
I should add something when people think of these plans. We are still all constrained by city/county/state ordinances. Here in CA, we have a face mask ordinance, and that automatically applies to classrooms. We can’t overrule it. And that does shape what we can and cannot do. As part of the state, we can request exemptions and all that, and are relatively likely to get those, but you kind of have to bake in all of the superseding ordinances to what we’re doing.
That said, none of the detailed plans I’ve seen appear that they would work from the modeling we’ve done. That’s not a deal breaker necessarily, since a lot of what we’re trying to build is the ability to rapidly adapt, but it will require that. My worry is around plans that don’t scale up and down, that commit the institution to a course that they cannot easily reverse or adapt. I see a lot of plans to do some fraction of x thinking that will dilute enough to keep students safe (and maybe it will) but if it doesn’t, can then go to a smaller fraction of x, or do they have to just pull the plug. That faculty are not a component of these plans, and relatively little infrastructure appears to be built (such as Raven’s online course work) to allow for that kind of scaling.
I have a very unpopular opinion on this. American universities are largely a failed model. They’re just too entrenched to actually fail. We respond to change at a glacial pace, if not completely deny it, assume we operate from an unassailable position in society and the economy, and as a result have a business model better suited for the 1950s than for 2020. We are terrified to measure our own performance by the standards we advocate for others. Rather than genuinely measure what we have fostered in our own students, and arm students with that, we fall back like most other calcified organizations into appeals to our reputation.
Trump came out of Wharton. Did he learn anything (doesn’t appear to)? Did their curriculum work? Could it be improved? Well, they’re the top business school in the nation, so we don’t need to be bothered with those things. Obviously they and everyone to come out of there is amazing.
That’s a mode of operating which is really problematic when a real crisis arrives. Yeah, Penn has the money to ride that crisis out better than other schools, but I’m seeing very little actual problem solving and structural change for a problem like this emerging. Again, I think there are far more parallels to the role of policing in society than most academics can bear to admit. They are both institutions that coast on their own perceived invulnerability. Eventually that invulnerability is pierced. I don’t think this is the moment, but I think it’ll shake even more small colleges out of business, and possibly create even more tension for the publics with their elected officials, and the public.
NotMax
Gremlins ate AL’s newest post?
Martin
@namekarB: Yeah, that’s a concern as well. That’s part of the infrastructure that needs to be in place. Nobody is working on it anywhere in the US as far as we can tell.
mrmoshpotato
@James E Powell:
Our sack-of-shit Republican former governor Bruce Rauner moved from Illinois to LA? That’s definitely not fucking off to Italy if he lost re-election.
jl
@Kay: shows how much she knows about anything. The research I’ve seen says that blended in-person and distance learning can be very effective. All distance doesn’t work very well.
Bill Arnold
@RSA:
I hadn’t read it, but a google search for
“society of assassins” poland
found it.
jl
@Martin: I don’t know about you buddy, but at my place, the evaluation surveys ask me if everything worked great, wonderful or unbelievably fantastic. So, we always get good scores!
mrmoshpotato
@Kay:
The annual DeVos family yacht race? A DeVos is always the winner!
Kay
@jl:
Well, it’s also amusing, because she spent 20 years lobbying for online schools to replace public schools in Michigan, so she seems to have undergone some kind of conversion.
Or, she’s a political hack who wants to take an unfair shot at a suburban district because she thinks it will help her retain power. She knows he’s in trouble. She has never had a job other than political operative, and she only got that one because she bought it.
Jay
Original Lee
My son’s university is only housing freshmen and select others (there’s a lottery). My son has an off-campus apartment in a building managed by the university. Everyone in his building will be allowed to cancel their leases without penalty if they don’t need to be on campus. Allegedly, the university will not fill vacated apartments, so it’s possible his building will be partially empty. The university has frozen tuition and fees at last year’s levels (yay). Also, allegedly, meal plans will be daily delivery of the number of allowed meals (we are wondering if they’re MREs because students are not allowed microwaves in the dorms), although we haven’t really been following that because my son is off-campus and in an apartment. He will have to make sure to pack a lunch on the days he is on campus. So far, the university has not said which classes will have FTF components, except that upper class labs and small classes will be in person at least part of the time. Face coverings will be required everywhere that’s not your room. Everyone will be tested before coming on campus. There will be some kind of daily temperature check and contact app they will be required to use. The university may add weekly testing. There will be sanitizer squads that clean high-contact surfaces at least twice a day. They are requiring a signed social distancing contract, too.
The local school system is debating between two different models for re-opening. Both models split the student body into A Squad and B Squad. The currently favorite model is for Squad A to attend M-W one week, while Squad B does distance learning, everyone does distance learning on Th, while the school is sanitized, and F is teacher prep-and-in-service day (unclear whether this is in-school or not). The following week, M is distance learning for everyone, T-Th is in-person for Squad B, and F is teacher prep. The other model is just to alternate Squad A and Squad B being in school.
Kay
@mrmoshpotato:
They actually race. Well, “race”. They hire a bunch of people to sail their fleet. They’re not on there hauling lines. I wonder if Trump is mad at her because Michigan is slipping away. He can’t fire her. She bought the job, it’s paid for, and she’s much, much richer than he is.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
I’m not currently a college professor, administrator or student (I was in the past all of these things). I am, however, a single mom in AZ. I have a 9 year old starting 4th grade all online on Aug. 5th. No word on the tools, no word on the amount of structure, and no word on content. The only concrete thing I know is that my son has to spend 75 minutes per day on math, 60 minutes on reading, etc, etc. If it’s anything like the end of third grade online I will be tearing my hair out within a week.
I work anywhere from 40-60 hours a week from home now. I don’t know how I’m going to do that if I have to be my son’s teacher as well. I’m worried and angry and scared. My 16 year old is self-sufficient for the most part. He is starting his senior year of HS online. But what the hell do I do for my young’un?
mrmoshpotato
@jl: And the comment sections oddly only accept “Wow! It was so off-the-charts awesome that I’m at a loss for words to describe the awesomeness!”
Kay
@Original Lee:
I’m grateful to public schools for trying – they won’t get any help. When the covid came and the courthouse stayed open and it was chaos our best judge sent an email to the bar. She wrote that it was hard for all of us and to try to remember to be patient and kind to staff. I don’t know what it meant to others but I needed the reminder and it helped. Since then of course people have had attacks of incredible crankiness because we like routine and rules and everything takes three times as long but it was a good starting sentiment.
Martin
@jl:
That’s not been the problem at my institution. The precursor problem is the wage gap between tenure-track faculty and adjuncts. The latter carry the same or larger teaching load, and earn ⅓ as much. My faculty are concerned that online courses are a gateway to undermining their own earning.
They recognize that even though they would almost all much rather do research than teach, teaching is the keystone that holds the whole system together, and if we can remove some of their authority there, that they lose their leverage.
So, I’ve spent a decade advocating for, building programs, finding champions, etc. to expand online and self-paced learning at my institution, and the faculty have been adamantly and almost universally opposed. So we enter this moment very poorly equipped as a result. I suspect this varies considerably by institution. MIT for instance, is quite good at their online instruction, but they have much different dynamics than we do.
There are a few underlying problems with these efforts. The most stubborn one is that we pay faculty $x to stand in a classroom for y hours per week to teach, and after z weeks, they’re done and transition to something else. Raven could inform us just how frontloaded the costs are for good online courses, and they do require continuous attention, and attention to students. It breaks our basic employment contract, and we don’t have the institutional strength to change that. So we’re not going to. Add to that the ability for faculty, particularly at research institutions, to justify the energy needed to learn how to do this, when that is relatively unrelated to their promotion.
I suspect it’s different at teaching universities and K-12 where the faculty simply don’t have that kind of autonomy. It didn’t indicate who made the decision which of our courses would be in-person, because it didn’t dawn on me. It was 100% the faculty. The administration could okay or reject the limited opening concept, but not the specifics. Even for the full resumption of graduate courses, faculty can choose to teach in person or not.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay: Oh c’mon! During her liefest that was called a confirmation hearing, I was totally thinking about potential grizzlies, bluegills and tommycods!
Alex
I’m a townie near a large public university in the Midwest. Plan is vague and “hybrid” with plans for quarantine housing but no details on testing (if tests are available), mask enforcement, or Greek or off campus housing. Small clases in person, large remote, athletes are already back. The endowment is truly huge for a public university, but no talk of tuition breaks. Once the students sign leases in town, how do we send them home if the university goes full remote again? They can’t just go expose their families, and they will want to stay and party like they did for St Patrick’s Day. Bars are closed for now, but how are we going to prevent house parties?
No one can make the university do anything except the regents— they are constitutionally independent of the state and local government, and it doesn’t look like they are consulting or even informing the city or the county health department of plans. If they become an amplifier they will disproportionately kill older people in the surrounding community.
Martin
@jl: I convinced our academic personnel folks to adopt A-F grades for evaluations since students all had different concepts of what a 3 was on a 1-5 scale, but they all know exactly what a B- means. That was 20 years ago and there are still faculty that are pissed about that.
It has served as an interesting data source for dealing with issues related to grade inflation.
Some years back I was tasked by a somewhat overbearing administrator to do an analysis of student performance and ethnicity. I refused. I told him there was nothing good that could come from looking at that. He hounded me on that, and moved to get me fired over it. I held my ground. In passing one day he asked ‘aren’t you even curious about what that might show?’. I told him I’m curious about all manner of things, but I’m responsible enough to not act on every ‘I wonder if that will fit in my ass’ thought that wanders through my head. It gave me an idea though. At the next meeting of ‘will do you do this analysis I’ve demanded or shall we fire you’ I mentioned that I was curious about something, whether there was any correlation between faculty salaries and quality of teaching on their evaluations.
He stopped bothering me about the report. He knew what it would show.
Original Lee
@jl: The additional issue is access to broadband internet with enough umph to stream video and use the software the teachers are having the students use. In the county my sister lives in, the schools loaned everyone the exact same equipment, including hotspots. In my county, where a nonzero number of residents do not have indoor flush toilets, a largish nonzero number of students last spring had to show up at the school once a week for a paper packet of equivalent material to what the students with broadband were getting online. (Yeah, real equivalent there.) A teacher I know, who has spotty internet because of where her home is located, was told to find free WiFi somewhere and work out of her car. We can’t do online learning unless everyone has the same minimum tools and internet access.
C Stars
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: Good luck! I can’t even fathom how it’s going to work for our family either (a first grader and a fifth grader) and I’m not single parenting. It’s going to be ugly.
Kay
I don’t follow the evolving science as much as many of you do, but it would it maybe be helpful to stop trying to give timelines? I think they lose credibility when they say “2 weeks” because it’s often longer than two weeks and the lag is just enough time for idiots to believe it isn’t going to happen. There’s this idiot window that keeps cropping up. If they don’t know they can say that. We all get that it’s “novel”.
mvr
Midwest State University in a state that is doing better than most (largely because the university pulled the plug and some of the larger city mayors followed after which the governor sort of also followed without mandating much state-wide – except meat packing anyway). We will start early and end before Thanksgiving. There is supposed to be significant on-campus teaching for most classes, with students allowed to opt out if they feel unsafe in which case we have to make it work for them. For us we had to apply for accommodations based on health history/condition or those of one’s co-habitants or work out a non-official plan with one’s chair. They seem to be generous with them. I actually plan to meet some of my students in class if they keep the rooms as safe as they promised (at like 1/5 usual capacity, masks required, clean desks, etc.) but they gave me permission not to , when I filed for an accommodation to be able to use my own judgement (based on a pre-existing respiratory thing) in case they did not keep things as safe as promised. Around campus some classes will be pre-recorded with in-person discussion sections, others remote but simultaneous, and others mixed. I think this will protect our international students provided they can get here.
All of this has involved significant extra summer work and expense (buying cameras and mics and laptops and stuff so as to be able to get used to using them and not have to share equipment when you are trying to distance) but it probably keeps more of us in jobs, so I can’t complain too much.
OTOH, it looks like the nation is going down the tubes virus-wise and I doubt that my university’s plan, which might have worked if we actually had national leadership and reliable testing, is going to last through the end of term. With thirty states in real trouble as of yesterday, traveling students are going to bring Covid to campus. And I worry a lot about student behavior putting us older folks in danger. Most faculty are over 55 which is what happens after years of budget cutting. The frats are especially worrisome and I haven’t heard of a credible plan to control what happens at them. There may be a plan, but none I’ve heard. So I’m planning both to start partly in person/hybrid and likely to finish remotely.
My wife is staff and she is retiring before they bring her back to on-campus work. I think the staff will be in the most danger.
Martin
@Original Lee: People would be fairly shocked to learn how many students are homeless. We tend to think of homeless as old men in an alley. Part of what I advocated for was to explore ways to get our very low income students back into the dorms, even if all instruction was online.
Feathers
One thing to note on Harvard, they already have a huge infrastructure for online teaching. The Harvard Extension School has a huge online student body, with many of the courses being based on in person Harvard courses. So they know what it takes to do quality online learning, have the equipment, have the staff, etc. Weirdly enough, they also have a rule that professors must have a written version of their class lectures available so that if they are unable to make it to class, someone else can fill in. (I worked there.)
Just checked the website and they have a announcement about an “Academic Gap Year,” letting potential students know that they can take Harvard classes online, presumably while on leave from their home institutions.
Lyrebird
@zhena gogolia: we don’t have the option of all-online unless we have medical documentation of being in a high risk category.
Struggling 4-yr college kinda in the northeast, seems that the administration cares more about finances than public health, don’t know if they will require any testing of out of state students or whatever.
Legally, I have read online that my family members being high risk would give me ADA protection and the right to teach all online, but those family members are also afraid that I will lose my contract if I balk at showing up on campus.
Going to wear extra gear, change clothes as well as PPE when I get home, and keep trying to make my hybrid courses less awful than what you saw.
Sure Lurkalot
@schrodingers_cat: Both hands enthusiastically clapping.
namekarB
I’m right there with you. South Placer County northeast of the Capital. Local hot spots but now that folks are wearing masks it may have reached a plateau in my city (fingers crossed)
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
No, of course not. He’s as big a stooge as the rest of the Republican party, only also, and primarily, owned and operated by Putin. Fortunately we have the opportunity to get his dumb ass out of the White House this fall~!!~
Jinchi
Arrrrrrggggghhhhh. We were talking about this since before spring break.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@schrodingers_cat: A-effing-men!!!!
kfairchild
Our district is postponing a decision until July 23, only a few weeks before we’re supposed to start classes on August 17. I think that’s smart, since the situation is so fluid. Orange County (CA) is a hotbed of anti-mask sentiment, so I’m afraid that our school board, in an election year, will be influenced by those in the community who want schools to open come hell or high water. As those of us in district leadership have been planning, though, we’ve been preparing teachers for 100% distance learning, on the theory that if there is any in-person time, they can adjust more easily than the other way around.
HeartlandLiberal
Indiana University in Bloomington planning to open, mix of physical in person classes and online meetings, to be determined case by case, apparently; requirement of faculty, staff, students to wear mask and maintain social distancing, even outside especially if social distancing not possible. No in person class meetings after mid-November through early part of spring term, with continued mix of in person and online meetings resuming then. Brief scan of docs online at the university gave me impression that leadership of the uni is taking this seriously, acknowledging the science and reality of the virus. Not sure how it will play out. Some of my former colleagues in IT are still working from home. One good friend who helps maintain the LINUX server infrastructure supporting the business of the university could do his job from Timbuktu, if necessary. Others who are higher in the food chain have to do the in person meetings often, I worry about one, who is at least 15 years younger than me. I hope they will all be safe.
Mandarama
@Martin: I’ve clocked 20+ years as a humanities adjunct, watching tenured faculty and administrators from a distance, and this whole comment gave me a sudden rush of love for you.
Ian R
I realize this is probably a dead thread, but why do so many of the plans involve forbidding student cooking? To prevent grocery store exposure?
schrodingers_cat
@Jinchi: Scarf Lady needs to STFU that was her fucking job as one of the leads in the Corona virus task force.
hofeizai
I’m a teacher at a small international high school in Shenzhen, China. All teachers have been tested at least once for the virus. Every day temperatures are checked for everyone who arrives at the school and several times throughout the day for students. There are clear procedures for students with symptoms. Masks are optional, but people here wear them whenever they feel ill. There are some plans for what will happen if there are any positive cases within the city. There are some limits on group activities and outside trips, but otherwise we are kind of back to normal
Sloegin
Our big state U is trying to figure out a hybrid model for Autumn Quarter, but our state is seeing infection rates we haven’t seen since the March bug-out, and our greek system just had (at last count) 151 people test positive, which is impressive in that it was at summertime occupancy of about 1000, instead of the regular school population of about 2500. I don’t see how Greek housing or dorms or dining will happen without it being a disaster. Add the ICE fuckery on top of the mess with them promising to deport any foreign students who do a full online schedule and there isn’t enough alcohol to salvage it.