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1/ A call from on high has been issued: the presidents of two of this country’s wealthiest Universities have declared that we should all reopen campuses this fall.
We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/notre-dame-university-coronavirus.html?smid=tw-share">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/2...
We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/notre-dame-university-coronavirus.html?smid=tw-share">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/2...
2/Here at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and elsewhere, the charge to reopen has been received by faculty as a demand to put the value of human life to the side as we restructure classes to enable face-to-face courses in the age of COVID-19.
3/We read biologists’ reports about how talking in poorly ventilated rooms puts people at high risk of infection, and then we are asked to report which of us will be planning to do it.
4/Don’t worry, we are told, if you or a family member is at risk: you can apply to HR for an exemption. Notre Dame’s president John I. Jenkins claims that the pandemic is inspiring “vigorous” and healthy disagreement about moral values. But this is moral chaos.
5/At UNC we pay our graduate students a poverty wage (that’s literally the case: here graduate students make $1K per year above the Federal Poverty Level), and then propose to send them into undergraduate classrooms to teach during a global pandemic.
6/ Jenkins compares reopening to war, noting that soldiers risk their lives to protect Americans. The army pays better than poverty wages.
7/The CDC recommends against travel, yet Christina Paxson and Jenkins, who oversee Universities with endowments of 13.8- and 4.2- billion dollars respectively, advise moving large populations of potential carriers of COVID19, all of whom have health insurance, coast to coast.
8/ How can this be described as anything but insane? Higher education is important to the economy, Paxson reminds us; we must educate the next generation of leaders, warns Jenkins. Sure. But what are we teaching those potential leaders?
9/That some vague notion of “the economy” matters more than the human lives that make it up? That plunging forward to shore up revenue, knowing that doing so will cause death and illness, is how society should operate?
10/The establishment of quarantine dorms and new procedures for taking sick leave are major elements of the conversation here at UNC. We know that illness and death will result in this step, even though courses can be taught very effectively online.
Will those courses be as enriching as those in person? No. But we can wait it out for a bit longer without causing the end of the University. And if we can& #39;t, then it is the economic model that needs to be re-thought, not the value of human life.
