COVID-19; University Administrative Responses; Junior faculty and women at risk; psychology of pandemic response; psychoanalysis of pandemic response..
What a joy it has been to be back in the classroom the past
two weeks. Frankly, I was unprepared for
how much fun it would be. For a year and
a half I have missed the hum and buzz in the background of the classroom as I
set up to teach and field individual questions and comments from students while others –
many of them – talk in the background.
I had also missed the back and forth of a live classroom
interaction – being able to see and read students' body language – to be able to
call on them when they are incubating a response but don’t yet have it in final
form, but are itching to be engaged. The
classroom feels alive again, even if we are all a bit muffled by our masks.
It has felt like what being at Opening Day must feel like
for true baseball fans. Throwing off the
winter of our long COVID doldrums, we could once again hear the crack of the
bats (OK, maybe it was the crack of someone’s bubble gum) and feel the promise
of summer following spring (OK, we started early in August to get out of school
by Thanksgiving in order to beat what we assumed in spring would an early winter
spike in cases – if one were to occur – so it is the cool fall nights that we
are looking forward to).
Our stats looked good going into the first inning (to beat
this analogy to death). Eighty five per
cent of our faculty and staff are vaccinated as is 77% of the student body. Our new president announced that we would be
the first local school to require immunization before students could register
for spring semester. Oh, there was much
joy in Mudville.
But in the top of the second inning, with our best pitcher
on the mound, we ran straight into trouble.
Actually it was the second week of school and we had 11, then 23, then
51, then 87, then 123, then 140 cases reported among our students on successive
days. Though our faculty and staff
numbers have stayed relatively low, we are suddenly reeling.
On Wednesday, the latest day for which we have stats at this
point, I sat with 7 of 8 students in a small seminar class that met for two and
one half hours. The eighth student, the roommate
of one of the others in the class, did not come to class because they had “the
sniffles” and decided to get tested rather than come to class. Bravo, I thought, that is the responsible thing
to do, though I also naively assumed the chances of their testing positive were
nil because the data always lags a few days as we collect it and “the sniffles”
hardly seemed to qualify as something to worry about.
Well, you guessed it, the roommate tested positive. Ugh.
Am I a carrier? I am masked when I
am teaching, but my glasses fog up when I breathe – clearly stuff is getting
around my mask. Am I now passing things
along to the students in my (for our campus) relatively large lecture class the
next day? What should I do?
Oh, btw, two students stayed home from that class because
they were in quarantine.
The guidance from the lame duck and tone deaf university
Provost arrived on Friday in the form of an email to all faculty. In it we were encouraged to be flexible in
responding to student needs. We were
encouraged to support our students who need accommodations because they are in
quarantine and a variety of options were offered but we were explicitly instructed that moving to an all remote zoom class
was not available to us as an option without the dean’s approval and our having
completed a course in teaching pure remote classes – something most of us have
not done (though most of us having been teaching in split classrooms and/or
remote only for the past year).
In other words, we were to be flexible, but the
administration would not be flexible in allowing us to make decisions about how
to assess what is in the best pedagogical and health interests of our students.
In a brief conversation with our Dean, where I made it clear
that I would NOT be asking permission for any actions I would take in regard to
making decisions about what is best for my students, she noted that none of us
anticipated that this surge would occur.
Indeed, this seems to be a much more virulent uptick in cases than
anything we experienced last year, and none of us were vaccinated then.
I get it. We are
unprepared. We are making decisions on
the run.
I also get it. I am
in a position of privilege. I am
tenured. I know the Dean
personally. I can tell the Dean what I
will be doing without real fear of reprisal.
Everyone in my home is vaccinated.
And I am not caring for an infant at home.
Junior faculty who are not tenured are likely to have
children at home. Some of them have had
daycare cancelled without notice because their children’s teachers have tested
positive. If I had an 18 month old that
I had to care for alone – without family in the city because I had moved here
for a job and I was told that I could not teach from home – and the university
could terminate my contract because I am not tenured and we were living through
times when there are concerns about the budget – what would I do?
I know that I would lose sleep over whatever it was that I was
considering.
The University is mirroring the Culture as a whole in
putting its youngest, female members most at risk of additional strain (and
illness – we are in much closer contact with young children who are not yet
eligible for vaccination) as the pandemic drags on and spikes again.
Meanwhile our state legislature is trying to pass laws that
would prevent requiring inoculations and mandatory masking and our governor,
who was an early leader – and an admirable one – in responding to the pandemic,
fears he cannot lead because his own party, of which he is nominally the head,
is at odds with him because they are striking a populist note rather than
convincing their constituents that we need to pull together to beat this thing.
A
writer in the Atlantic has taken the position that the end game of this
pandemic is that COVID is so threatening now because it is novel COVID-19. Once it
passes into the annals of being the same old COVID-19 – once our bodies have
learned to how to react to it either through inoculations or through repeated
exposure to it – it will likely be like the flu (which was once much more
lethal than it currently is) and the common cold – something that knocks us out
for a few days, but is generally not life threatening.
We are trying to get from here to there and if we take precautions, we can get from here to there minimizing
additional loss of life, economic peril, and creation of new and more
problematic strains of the disease.
Oddly, our
system of self-government, on a local, state, regional and national
level seems, at first glance, to continue to be allied against our doing what
is in our best interests.
Fortunately, my department is not going along with the herd. In the last two days, junior members of the
department have begun work on a communication system so that we can share
resources, support each other both tangibly (teach each other’s classes if need
be, deliver groceries and food if needed) and socially (have each other’s backs
if individual choose not to follow stupid directives from the administration).
One of the concerns that I expressed to the Dean was that
the administration’s failure to support especially our junior faculty is
against our long term interests of the University. We function best when we support each other
in the difficult work that we do.
Fortunately our junior faculty are stepping up and doing that, despite
the apparent vacuum in leadership in some parts of the administration. There is hope yet – we might build a new
culture out of the ashes of the old one that mirrors or even outshines what we once had and thought was pretty good - until it was tested. We might actually emerge stronger
from this maelstrom as we cast off old top down ways of doing things and take
matters into our own hands.
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