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Saturday, August 28, 2021

COVID Chronicles XXI: It’s baaaack… Joy and Horror and Maybe a Ray of Hope….

 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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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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