Tufts professor: ‘I have yet to see a viable plan for reopening colleges’
A teacher at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is concerned that colleges are in "complete contradiction with the reality of the coronavirus."
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There needs to be a word for when organizations announce plans that seem to be in complete contradiction with the reality of the coronavirus. Oh, wait, there are already several words for that. Academics might use terms like “cognitive dissonance.” Other, more direct people might just say “denial.”
I bring this up because over the weekend, the New York Times’s Anemona Hartocollis reported on how many universities — close to three-quarters of them — plan to reopen college campuses this fall: “University officials say they are taking all the right precautions, and that the bottom line is that face-to-face classes are what students and their families — and even most faculty members — want.”
They are running into some resistance, however. There is the small matter of the virus itself, which appears to be raging out of control everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line and a lot of places north of it. It has already forced the University of Southern California to switch back to online-only courses this fall.
There is the other matter of professors not keen on doing any face-to-face teaching in the middle of a pandemic without therapeutics or vaccines. As Hartocollis explains, the demographics of college faculty do not mesh well with in-person classes right now:
“Driving some of the concern is the fact that tenure-track professors skew significantly older than the wider U.S. labor force — 37 percent are 55 or older, compared with 23 percent of workers in general — and they are more than twice as likely as other workers to stay on the job past 65, when they would be at increased risk of adverse health effects from the virus.
“Many younger professors have concerns as well, including about underlying health conditions, taking care of children who might not be in school full-time this fall, and not wanting to become a danger to their older relatives. Some are angry that their schools are making a return to classrooms the default option. And those who are not tenured said they felt especially vulnerable if they asked for accommodations.”
This is normally where I pivot to my own highly original, counterintuitive and Pulitzer-worthy take on what to do. This is not a normal moment, however. Readers should understand that my primary job is not writing this column; it is teaching at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I have way too much skin in this particular game to demonstrate any kind of objectivity about this situation.
Rather than offer any single argument, here is what I think after observing my industry attempting to cope with an unprecedented pandemic for the past four months:
• It is nothing short of a miracle that universities this spring were able to transition from in-person classes to online classes in just a few weeks. Higher education is the last sector of the modern economy that operates according to feudal principles. It ordinarily takes two years to get anything of substance done in a university. Even if the online courses were suboptimal, it’s extraordinary that this transition was possible midsemester.
• Having taught online and in-person, the latter is much better, and it’s not close. Lecturing online never works. The only proper way to do it is to record asynchronous content, which eliminates the possibility of interactive give-and-take with students. Making students watch a prerecorded lecture and then talk about it afterward is not as good as doing it in real time.
• Having in-person indoor classes is a recipe for spreading the coronavirus. Even with masks and social distancing, a bunch of people sitting in rooms with recycled air and contaminated surfaces seems like a surefire recipe for spread. If you read how experts are going about their day-to-day lives, I do not see “sitting indoors with a whole bunch of other people” among their favorite activities.
• Conversations about reopening colleges need to be kept distinct from reopening K-12 schools. It is impossible to talk about working parents, a.k.a. moms, actually working full time without talking about children going back to school. The demographics of the students and teachers in primary and secondary education skew younger than in higher ed. What works for one might not work for the other. Or, rather, what is necessary for the U.S. economy might affect one and not the other.
• The situation is far worse now than when I wrote about this topic two months ago. The number of infections is spiking, and schools are supposed to open in less than two months. It seems highly unlikely that the infection rate will be under control by September, so schools will be starting with lots of infected students.
• Most people opining on higher ed and the coronavirus have no idea about the economics of higher education — including a lot of faculty. Focusing on Ivy League institutions badly distorts perceptions about college endowments and sources of income beyond tuition.
• The pandemic, combined with the Trump administration’s inept response, has the potential to permanently alter the entire higher-education sector. Most U.S. universities count on foreign students to swell enrollments, particularly as the number of American college-age kids declines. But foreign students ain’t gonna come to a country with a festering pandemic, and the Trump administration does not seem to want them anyway. The result could be the collapse of another structural pillar that Americans have taken for granted for nearly a century.
• Without a viable vaccine in the next six months, higher education in the United States will face a severe reckoning.
• As bad as the situation is for students, faculty, staff, and administrators, spare a thought for the admissions teams at competitive colleges. Not only will they have to work extra hard to solicit applications, but those poor people will have to read an endless stream of “What I Learned About Myself From Living Through COVID-19” essays.
Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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