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Monday, July 13, 2020

Get Back in that Classroom! A Professor’s Paranoid Covid Ruminations


 

My Grandfather’s motto was:  Health first, then school, then other things.  He was a diehard Republican (of the pre-hijacked party – one that believed that our country should be self-governed, not none -governed).  The president of the college where I teach is a Jesuit priest.  He used to be a stickler about not calling snow days – then one of our students died on her way into class in an auto accident on a day when many other schools were out.  Since then he has more closely followed the local norms for school closings.  The President of our country has lost all pretense of caring for the well-being of the citizens.  He is interested in re-election and believes that a thriving economy is the ticket to get there.  He might change his mind and decide that supporting masks will be the way to get there, but I don’t expect him to start really caring about people.

 

We are one month away from the planned start of school.  The plan at this point is for all of our students to come to campus.  In a typical year we have students from 40 or more states and at least 10 foreign countries.  They descend on campus, live in tight quarters, and pass around bugs – they create a veritable petri dish of infectious diseases. 

 

Our corner of the country is not getting a whole lot of press.  Our curve is rising, but not as fast as the South and Southwest.  Our county is at the next to highest level of concern based on the governor’s newest method of rating risk (our Republican governor is very old school and has done a magnificent job of working with a legislature that would deny the difficulties of this illness and with the citizens and praising them for the restraint they have shown until recently).  We are opening up – but the hospitals in my corner of the state are full.  We are close to a tipping point in terms of being able to handle new cases.

 

Why don’t we go to virtual classrooms?  There are two interwoven reasons.  The first and most important one is that boots on the ground, breath the same air experiences are better than virtual experiences for the cohort that comes to our university.  Distance learning works well for some – for highly motivated learners – which includes non-traditional students who are working to move into careers that will better tap into their talents – and for traditional students who are interested and able to be in virtual classrooms.

 

Ten years ago, I remember being shocked to discover that on many state university campuses, students were spending their entire college careers living in dorms and never setting foot in a classroom – they were only taking virtual classes.  And this weird configuration highlights the other reason to be boots on the ground – that petri dish creates lots of good stuff – presumably the kids living on campus but taking on-line courses were forming lifetime friendships, considering marriages, and learning the social skills that help us transition from adolescent functioning to being ready for what is now called adulting.

 

So the first issue is that in class learning has value – on many different levels.   But we have been consistently ignoring this value – we have actually been actively devaluing a college education.  I know, it is hard to say that given the cost of college.  It is crazy expensive.  But two things have led to that – the first is the ballooning of auxiliary services that are part and parcel of delivering a competitive education.  Things like computer access and screens in every classroom, along with white boards and chalkboards plus various offices on campus to manage a variety of student concerns but also to help students engage more fully in the college experience – salaries of faculty are certainly part of that mix (though I make less than some high school instructors and policemen in this city).  There is also the cost at State Universities of maintaining a large research facility.

 

In our little world, our President (and the one before him) have what I call an Edifice complex.  We have built lots of shiny new buildings – most recently a gym that looks very modern – unlike our old functional but dowdy building that wasn’t part of the tour given to students and their parents when they came to school.  Unlike the old buildings, which were named for Jesuit priests, the new buildings are named for donors – but the donors only provide about a quarter of the cost of the buildings and we have borrowed money for the rest.  So we have a huge amount of debt (I have told a cautionary tale before about building debt and the ability of a psychiatric hospital to survive bad economic times).

 

So, while the costs of providing a quality education have been going up in necessary and optional ways, we have been devaluing the education that should be central to what a University does by offering scholarships – which are internally referred to as discounts – on our tuition.  Our discount rate (I sometimes feel like I work at a Wal-Mart) is currently around 52%.  What we DON’T discount is room and board.  Parents get it that it costs money to house and feed kids.  So room and board has become our cash cow.  We have gone deeply into debt partly in order to have more dormitory rooms.  This means we need to fill those rooms in order to stay financially afloat.  If we go to all on-line learning, we won’t bring in enough money to service the debt we have taken on to subsidize the lower tuition rates that we have (I know – they are still quite high) and we will lose one million dollars for every week that we do not have butts in seats (and in dorms).

 

Earlier today I got a call from a high school classmate.  She is facing the same dilemma I am – only she will be going into a classroom with very young children – children who, when they need a hug, need a hug.  They simply can’t survive without one.  And suddenly that becomes a risky thing to do.  She wants to know if we should just retire.  I am five years away from my planned retirement (and so, more or less, is she - we went to school together).  Should we just stop now?  Financially that would pose the same problems that the school is facing.  I have debts that need to be paid out of my income.

 

Is President Trump Chairman Mao?  Is this the great purge of academics that Mao undertook?  I don’t think Trump has any love for us.  He knows that we are mostly liberals and likely will vote against him in the fall, but I don’t think that he is thinking (when I am rational) that killing us is the way to get back into office.  I also don’t think my own President wants to kill me (most of the time – sometimes he does get pretty angry with me – and with the rest of the faculty).  I would hate for him to realize, after we had become a superspreader site and many of our older faculty and staff are hospitalized that he had made a mistake – the way he did with the snow days.  But we are in a bind.

 

I wish that there were a way to put all debt on hold for a year – perhaps even to simply devalue all property.  And then to reduce the debt to be consistent with the new value of the property.  We need to put things on pause so that we can follow my grandfather’s admonition and take care of our health before we take care of other things.  This will require visionary thinking and remarkable leadership – both of which seem in short supply on both the national and the local level.


I remember a conversation with one of our staff who is in charge of our buildings and grounds.  I was arguing that we didn't need to have all of our buildings be in tip top shape.  In fact, when we were thinking about refurbishing the main liberal arts classroom building on campus, the architects met with faculty to get a sense of what a liberal arts building should look like.  They fondly said that it should be old - and that it should be comfortable.  There should be places to throw yourself onto an old couch so that you could curl up with a book.  But the buildings and grounds guy said that doesn't appeal to today's students - and if we don't keep our buildings up to date, their value plummets.  My counter?  The value of the buildings on our campus is directly related to what happens inside of them, not what they look like.  We need to make the experience of being in the classroom as valuable as we can.


Paradoxically, we live in a time when that value may not be accessible for some time.  That is a problem for the students, faculty and staff who want to be there.  And for the fiscal well-being of the school.  But if we don't keep health first as a motto, we may not have a community of teachers to return to.

 

In a month, I will be requiring all of my students to wear masks.  I will be masked.  I will spend as little time on campus as I can and I will wash my hands as frequently as I am able.  And I will pray that we all come through this OK… And I will try to keep my paranoid and vindictive thoughts at bay (including those about 30 pieces of silver...).

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For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.


 

 

 

 


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