College Reopening: Imagine the Possible!
Teachers and students miss their campus and would like nothing more than a return in the fall. The higher education institutions are doing everything to bring them back together. Not the least because they fear a considerable budget shortfall if a sizable number of students choose an alternative to returning to campus, including not going to college, taking a gap year, attending a local community college, or taking online classes. They promise to return safely to regular, on campus operations. Unfortunately, that promise is almost entirely outside of what the institutions can control about the pandemic and is likely impossible to keep.
Why is safe return to campus an impossible promise? To answer this question, just observe the extensive and expensive procedures professional sports organizations are putting in place to avoid the spread of the virus and bring together under a thousand athletes and staff. Now imagine what it would take to do that on a college campus of several thousand young adults! Instead of imagining that impossible, the sooner the colleges start imagining what is possible the better it will be all around. This is not to say that college campuses should remain closed.
In the midst of much uncertainty and the uneven progress of the virus in different states, giving the best available information and flexibility to all employees and students to make their own choices puts the institutions in the most defensible position.
Students should have the option of returning to campus or studying exclusively online. Students and their parents wish for an on-campus experience for many reasons. The ability to attend classes, and especially labs, in person is one of the key reasons, but not the only one. The ability to focus on studies without distractions is another key reason. At least as important is the campus life of bonding and shared learning experiences with peers in residences and dining halls, in the facilities on campus and outside, and through sports and recreation activities. A typical student is in class only for about 15 hours per week. Many of the remaining hours are spent elsewhere with their peers. Institutions should take all possible precautions to reduce the spread of the virus, including offering online classes to those on campus! The role of collective responsibility, such as through the wearing of masks in congested common spaces, must be made apparent.
Some students will prize the on-campus experience, even with some online classes, and will return. Other students may wish to forego on-campus experience and rely on online connections with their peers and instructors for a variety of reasons with the most obvious being an unwillingness to take on the risk of contracting the virus or a reduction in expenses from room and board. Giving students the flexibility and consequently the choices students make, will naturally lead to the spaces on campus becoming less congested, helping mitigate the spread of the virus. Such flexibility perhaps might mean that fewer of the traditionally under privileged will be on campus, depriving every one of the benefits of diversity at least in the short term.
Employees including faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate student researchers and teaching assistants, should have their options as well. For those with one of the known Corona virus risk factors in the CDC guidelines, institutions must be proactive and preclude on-campus access. For others, including those who have family with risk factors in their household, online commuting options should be available on request. If a significant number of faculty and student teachers express a reluctance to be on campus, it is probably indicative of the expectations they have of the campus climate they will face.
There is an apparent disconnect about the cost and benefits of online and in-person offerings of classes, between students and colleges. Whereas students and their parents are assuming large, impersonal online offerings with little cost to the colleges, colleges are exploring smaller online classes that can be both more conducive to learning and safer than larger in-person classes, independent of whether students are on campus. Whether instruction is in person or online, whether the students are online or on campus, or whether the classes are small or large, creating engaging classroom experiences that are responsive to a diverse student audience is a challenge. That is a topic for discussion another day.
Here is one intriguing possibility a colleague of mine suggested. Can you imagine twenty students gathered under a tree on a campus, properly socially distanced and engaged in a shared learning experience along with some of their friends online, spellbound listening to an instructor teach logic online? It may not be the blended learning model that is natural to envision but one that should be entirely within the realm of possibility. Imagining that possibility openly may pose financial and other logistical challenges to colleges in the short term. But that transparency puts everyone in the best possible place should the virus strike the campus.
A bit more about me.
I am a college professor. I teach logic.
