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@BrownUniversity prez wrote an irresponsible & ill-informed OpEd in @NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-colleges-universities.html & here’s my take: this OpEd shows she does not take the lives or futures of her students, her employees, or her community seriously. We know from (1/n)
@WeedonKim’s work ( https://osf.io/6kuet/ ) that college are small-world networks, among the most ripe environments for contagion to spread, & that limiting class size has only small impacts absent nearly-impossible levels of social distancing. And the measures the OpEd (2/n)
suggests—revising dorm plans, aggressive testing & tracing, & somehow magically getting her 18-22yo students to follow rules about parties—are unlikely to succeed even at an institution with the wealth & privilege of hers. Out here in the #RealCollege world, we have (3/n)
different concerns. We worry about our students who commute to class after shifts as first responders, health care workers, & grocery store clerks; those who are taking care of immunocompromised family members; those who are in their 60s themselves; & those who are (4/n)
housing-/food-insecure. & we worry about ourselves, as disinvestment & hiring freezes mean half of faculty at many of our campuses are in their 60s or older. We care—deeply—about the survival of our institutions, but we care EVEN MORE about the survival of our students & (5/n)
& ourselves.
But what she's describing won't work even for her Ivy, which is nestled in the middle of a bustling commercial & residential neighborhood in my state’s capital city, my home. If her plan doesn’t work quite the way she prays it will, her students will be disease (6/n)
But what she's describing won't work even for her Ivy, which is nestled in the middle of a bustling commercial & residential neighborhood in my state’s capital city, my home. If her plan doesn’t work quite the way she prays it will, her students will be disease (6/n)
vectors as they wander our streets patronize our businesses, & fill our hospitals, costs that we (not she) will bear. Our @GovRaimondo & Mayor @Jorge_Elorza have been doing a great job managing RI’s response to this crisis, but @BrownUniversity apparently intends to make (7/n)
their jobs much harder.
Let’s try something different, for a change. Let’s think about what it would mean to do higher education in a way that cares about the real people that are part of our colleges & universities. Let’s focus on funding regional comprehensives (8/n)
Let’s try something different, for a change. Let’s think about what it would mean to do higher education in a way that cares about the real people that are part of our colleges & universities. Let’s focus on funding regional comprehensives (8/n)
like @RICNews so that we can be here for our students, whether we do so online or in person, so that they can continue to learn and grow. Let’s focus on using our expertise to fight both this pandemic & the social inequalities that intensify its impact on (9/n)
minoritized populations. We can do better than this, and we must. (10/10)
