So this blog as a whole is not really about COVID, but lately I keep
falling into that rabbit hole, so I have decided to more fully inhabit it. COVID has taken up more and more of my
conscious (and unconscious) life, especially as the opening of school has approached. Mindful of the observation of an historian about the 1918 flu pandemic that very little writing about that period was done
– the surmise was that people were ashamed of their actions so didn’t record
them – with some trepidation I will go on marking what I say while recognizing
that even now I feel that I may, someday, want to delete these thoughts from
the ether.
In
my last posting on this subject, I was trying to make an argument – it was
a weak argument – that fiscally the University should close because we might
take on long term expenses if COVID turns out to be a chronic illness and we
have to not just manage the short term illnesses of faculty and staff, but
their long term difficulties.
Despite the fact that I knew it was a weak and even a bit of
a whiny and last minute argument, I made it in a faculty meeting with our
representatives to the administration. A
number of other faculty resonated with my article, which was nice, it meant I
wasn’t alone, but the leader of our faculty group was unclear what to do with
my argument. Who should I take it
to? Whose province is this? I asked that he be in contact with
administrators and ask questions such as: What
are the conditions under which we would not start school? What are the conditions under which we will
pivot to on-line learning? He agreed to
do this.
Yesterday he sent out a communique from the COVID task force
that stated they were addressing such things as what the criteria would be for
students to return home (the Reluctant Son’s position is that this will happen
when the first kid dies at Arizona State, then all the schools will hear from
parents and send their kids home. I
think this is a reasonable scenario).
Included in the email was a link to a panel discussion
of Catholic Social Teaching and COVID.
I was curious, so I watched it.
I learned a lot.
Among other things, these folks were taking the position that keeping
schools open was good for our brown and black employees – those who are least
empowered – because they are the ones most likely to be furloughed if the
school is to close. It is also good for
our brown and black students who are more likely to come from disadvantaged
backgrounds and therefore to have more difficulty accessing technology and
quiet study space at home than on campus – and that campus jobs are an
important source of income while they are in school. So staying open is a good thing, especially
as we think about structural inequalities and systemic racism.
Similarly, in terms of Social Justice, this is a time for us
to be refurbishing our curricula to address in the classroom the racial
inequalities that have been exposed by COVID.
The greater proportion of black and brown people who have been infected
with COVID, and the higher percentage of those who have been infected who have
died. So we should be exposing the ways
in which the social and economic structures privilege those of us who are white
and chronically – not just at times of COVID – disadvantage those who are brown
and black. I especially agree with this
point. This is, indeed, a moral
imperative.
But I was struck that all four panelists were speaking from
the position that it was an economic reality that schools must start in the
fall, and therefore that they will. They
were asking us to empathize with the decision makers who will likely face what
they called moral injury – a psychological term they acknowledged they borrowed
from the VA which emerged as the part of PTSD that is based on having hurt
others in ways that are inconsistent with one’s conscience – we should
empathize with the moral injury that will result for administrators when staff
and faculty members die as a result of their decisions. They went on to suggest that we prepare for a
period of lamentation – of remembering and atoning for our sins after this
crisis has passed – when we acknowledge what we have done.
They did this while blaming the administration of the
country for their poor handling of the outbreak. We have become an international pariah, they
noted, because we have not taken the steps that are needed to contain the outbreak. But then they implied that we were
disempowered from doing anything but moving ahead in the direction we are
going. We can’t not open, was
essentially the position they were taking.
Our leaders, when they mirror national leadership, should receive our
pity for what they are being forced to do.
There is an
article in the Atlantic that accuses schools of preparing to blame the
students for negative consequences. The
Catholic Social Teaching group also seemed to be casting blame outside – “We
have to do this.” But they were not
saying, “Should we do this?” “How much
(more) of a pay reduction would we have to take to teach online and to weather
this storm – to keep our employees on board – including those we would
otherwise furlough like the cafeteria workers and the dormitory staff?” “Is that something we are able to do?” These questions were not asked.
I feel like we are sailing blindly forward into a
predictable future (and God, I hope I am wrong), creating moral havens for
ourselves as we engage in behavior that is likely harmful to our students,
their parents, our staff and faculty, and to society at large. It seems that we have lost all moral
relationship to our role as potential superspreader sites. As if, in addition to American
exceptionalism, we have the exceptionalism of the Ivory tower on our side.
As a psychoanalyst – to return to the point of these posts
for a moment – I get it that this appears to be a very large exercise in
managing the unconscious guilt that is part and parcel of much of our human
functioning. I also get it that there is
group think going on (a psychological, not a psychoanalytic term). But I guess I felt that our exceptionalism –
as institutions of higher learning that value scientific knowledge and
especially as homes of the Humanities that value self-knowledge – that our
exceptionalism would lie in being willing to be what one of my colleagues calls
the moral rebel: The person (or, in this
case, people) who are able to say – NO, THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.
Sadly, my hopes are not being realized.
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