COVID, Selye Stress Response Syndrome, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Strain in the University
It is February of 2022, roughly the second anniversary of
our discovery of the COVID-19 virus (and two years since a go round that I had
with a very serious cold that knocked me out for the better part of a month –
could it have been COVID?). We are still
trudging forward – the omicron strain has been infectious enough that it doesn’t
seem to have anyone new to infect. We
continue to mask on campus, though we are all required to be vaccinated and the
students do not mask at the basketball games.
Many of them have also quit making use of the on campus health facility
because if they are found to have COVID, they are put in quarantine and not
allowed to go to class. To their credit,
many of them are self-quarantining until they believe themselves to be safe…
Last weekend I was talking to a colleague from Vienna, and
he reports that it is against the law in Austria not to be vaccinated. To this point, they have not been enforcing the
law, but in a month or two they will levy a fine of 600 Euros on anyone who is
not vaccinated, perhaps on a monthly basis.
He predicts that, if this occurs, there will be violent rioting in the
streets, and I don’t doubt it. Denmark,
meanwhile, has lifted all restrictions. These
two wildly different positions clarify that we simply don’t know whether the
pandemic has become an endemic or whether we are creating exactly the right
conditions for the virus to become really virulent. Time will tell.
In the meantime, I am quarantined at home by a blanket of
snow. The University is closed, but
classes are being held – sort of. The
mandate from the administration is that classes must be asynchronous. That means that we are not allowed to hold
classes by zoom at the appointed time.
Now you may have had to read that last sentence twice. It is senseless. We have been holding zoom classes as a means
of surviving the pandemic. We are not able
to get to school, so what are we to do? In the old days, class would be cancelled, we
would adjust the material to be covered and announce the changes at the next
class. But we no longer live in those
times. Nature cannot prevent us from
meeting now, we have technology.
So why can’t we use zoom?
The logic here is twisted, so I will try to explain it as best I am
able, but I’m not sure I’ve got it. In
an attempt to be responsive to students and faculty who may have other things
going on when a snow day occurs (such as caring for children – or going
sledding, perhaps, in the case of our undergrads), synchronous classes will not
be held. Instead, on a day when lots of
other things may be going on, we are to come up with a new assignment, tape a
lecture which can be viewed at anytime, and create a meaningful activity for
our students to do. We should not hold
zoom classes because for those students who can’t go to zoom classes because
their professors are unable to provide them, they may feel they are not getting
what their peers are getting.
There are all kinds of problems with this logic. The most problematic aspect is that the
administration should know what kind of pedagogical engagement should be used
for our students at a particular, unpredictable moment in the semester – to know
that it is anything but zoom (though implicitly, because others would be
jealous, it is likely to be zoom) – and we should be able to create that exact needed asynchronous learning opportunity with no notice while managing the other fallout from a
snow day.
It’s exhausting to complain about this. How much tone deafness can a faculty that is
already beleaguered tolerate? The irony
is that this is the first salvo from a new administration, one that we thought
would be friendlier and more supportive than the last (and, at least in their
imagination, they appear to be attempting to be just that). The problem with both administrations is the
assumption that college professors need to be told how to teach their classes –
that they can’t be trusted to create the best possible experience for their students
at a given moment based on the circumstances.
Or, from a more paranoid position, that we won’t object to working on a
day that nature has told us to take off because we are so angry about how we
are being told to work…
I must admit that I feel some sympathy for people who are
trying to exert control after having been out of control for two years. How did I exert control? I held two classes by zoom, recorded them,
and told the students who did not attend that their assignment was to watch the
recording. I provided both synchronous
and asynchronous learning opportunities.
Most importantly, I provided the best possible means of delivering what
was needed by those students at this point in the semester in each class. The
material in each class was dependent on interactions between the teacher and
the students. Those who couldn’t attend
can watch that interaction take place – not as good as being there, but better
to see their peers engaging than to be lectured at about something that
requires participation.
Perhaps they will
fire me for it. A peer provided me with the link to a video of a
professor’s “welcoming” his students to class where he clarified that he
experienced the students he was being forced into the classroom to teach as “virus
vectors” and encouraged them to stay home and watch him teach. After the video went viral, his school fired
him – and he had tenure! Perhaps they
will fire those of us who don’t join
the great resignation, and they can have all the control, and teaching
responsibilities, themselves.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, I referenced Hans Selye’s stress response curve, not as a means of understanding our response to infection by the virus, but as a means of understanding our response to the social consequences of the virus. I obviously think that is a potentially useful application of that curve, but I am also aware that it is a means of understanding acute stress – the kind of stress that a virus puts on an individual’s system. Especially as the pandemic has extended, the strain has become chronic, and the effects of that are both more subtle, but I think also, perhaps, more pernicious. I was talking with a friend about this and wondering if we know what the social consequences will be and he rightly stated that we don’t even know what the impact of this has been on each of us.
In a recent meeting of the faculty as a whole, it was clear
that there was great dissatisfaction with the position that we are in. The administration (as in this post) became a
lightning rod for that dissatisfaction.
Members of the benefits committee noted that they had requested that the
administration provide N95 masks for faculty to wear in addition to the two
fabric masks they provided at the beginning of the pandemic. The incommensurability of the level of
dissatisfaction and the laughably small, but likely unobtainable remediation
was a poignantly visible marker of how much work we have to do to recover from the chronic strain of, for instance, managing the fear that we will die by entering the classroom - something that we have then distanced ourselves from, as if that fear wasn't very real - because we did not, in fact, die.
If I were to think catastrophically about this (and one of
my nicknames within the family is captain catastrophe), I think that climate
change is nature’s desperate attempt to regain equilibrium. The intense storms that we are seeing are a
way of releasing the excess heat that has built up in reaction to the
greenhouse effect. The virus (as if it
were a sentient being, and not a barely alive and so small as to be invisible agent) might be trying to rid the planet of the perpetrators of this
overheating and habitat destroying monster.
Even if this is not the case, I do wonder whether it is wise
to ignore nature’s call to slow down – take a day off – and go sledding with
the kids. Our continuing to become more
and more isolated from the natural world – to stay in our rooms and study
harder – promotes further isolation from an awareness of the ways in which we
are products and citizens of the environment.
More than that, we have been entrusted to be stewards, and when we
emulate university administrators and attempt to exert too much control over
that environment rather than recognizing that it has its own rules and methods
of managing situations, it appears likely we will pay a very heavy price for
our hubris.
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