Annoyingly, I cannot read the article, with the demands to sign up, undismissable modals, "ad blocker detected" pop up (I don't have an ad blocker on mobile).
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
When did we adopt the mentality that students first and foremost deserve "the college experience" and therefore can't be expected to follow safe guidelines?
We can empathize with students and the realistic boredom and disappointment that comes with social distancing while in college. But at the same time, these are adults, often enormously privileged. The thing about hard times is that they often require sacrifice and re-examining our expectation of what we deserve.
Obviously Covid-19 represents systemic failure, and there's an argument to be made that colleges shouldn't be bringing students back in the first place. But the infantilization of young adults is absurd.
Student deserve the college experience as that's what they pay for.
Some students pay a lot of money to go to a university that has brand recognition, others pay a lot of money to go to a school that's known to be a great party school. If you're 18, going to one of the latter schools, and you look at the statistics of death rates for each age group, you're definitely going to go and party.
I think asking an 18 year old who's thinking, "well I'm still paying this much and everyone else got to do it" to recognize the sacrifice is an extremely high bar to ask of them
I'm a college student on a gap year. I actually appreciate you saying this, but sadly, you have gravely overestimated the ability of college students, especially freshmen, to follow guidelines.
I feel like they have the ability but not the motivation and/or willpower. Obviously lots of factors probably affect it (I mentioned one in another one of my comments), but I'd be curious if e.g. a college student of the same age in (say) Germany would be just as unable to follow guidelines as one in the US.
Pretty boring, I must say. Staying inside may drive some people crazy, but it suits me just fine. I have plenty of hobbies to keep me busy. Most of my time and energy is spent on work and I have a reading list so I can actually acquire some education over the course of the coming year myself.
In the fall I plan on getting an IT job, so I'm glad this year has given me the chance to get some experience in technical work.
University education is basically an economic transaction. The student pays $X to get Y, where Y is certain learning and social experiences, plus a valuable credential, with a certain level of safety and protection.
Due to COVID-19, the university is no longer able to provide the same learning and social experiences with the same level of safety. This isn't the fault of anybody involved in the transaction, neither students nor university could have prevented COVID-19.
Here are the options:
- (a) Cancel or postpone the transaction. Students get their money back, the school is freed from providing their now-impossible obligation. Perhaps they are allowed to re-enroll when COVID-19 is under control again, without penalty to admission status or scholarship dollars.
- (b) Lessen the obligation. Students continue to pay and attend, but get less effective social and educational experiences, and more restrictive safety rules, due to COVID-19.
- (c) Ignore safety. Continue to operate as always, recognizing that a large number of students, faculty and administrators will sicken, and a smaller number will die.
People have mostly decided on option (b). Option (c) is a non-starter for parents and administrators, but a large subset of students is probably quite willing to take personal risks.
Nobody seems to want to discuss option (a), perhaps because it will destroy higher education's finances and force some institutions out of business entirely without massive external support.
Another note against C is that while very few students will die (~12 at a 40,000 student campus if they all get it and it has an IFR of 0.03% for people 18-25, ~2 if the IFR is closer to 0.01% and half the students get it - either way comparable to the normal number of student deaths. The chance that a 20 year old American dies in the next year is around 0.1%, after all), administrators/professors are older and thus at greatly increased risk.
I see a D option. Reduce the costs to the students to reflect the market price of the services rendered. While the pandemic isn't the fault of the colleges, the nature of operating a business is you can only charge for services you are able to deliver. Find a comparable online school, that's what you can charge.
The schools I'm familiar with are also allowing deferrals until the next year--which TBH, if it were financially viable, is probably what I'd be inclined to do at least if college me thought like current me. Not that most usual gap year options are available but surely some things that don't involve just taking online courses are.
> When did we adopt the mentality that students first and foremost deserve "the college experience" and therefore can't be expected to follow safe guidelines?
There are a lot of things that can be expected in the sense of thinking that they ought to happen; but thinking that they will happen is another matter.
Pretending that students, if sent lots of scolding e-mails and forced to sign pledges, will suddenly become models of social responsibility—in a way that, in many places, their 'adult' peers have not been able to do—is just a juvenile trick by college administrators to try to shift the burden of blame from themselves: parents forced them to open their campuses when it wasn't safe; students forced them to close their campuses by making it unsafe.
Both of these statements are, in their ways, true, but intentionally lost in the mix is the fact that the one body that is sucking out huge quantities of money from students and parents is somehow managing to pretend that it bears no responsibility, and is just the helpless pawn of its customers (and I do use 'customers' advisedly, our university's administration having stated that student safety was a priority and faculty safety was not, since we don't pay tuition).
As a recent highschool graduate, it is rather Unfortunate that many of my classmates seem to lack personal responsibility in the face of this pandemic. Worse, parents and older adults are freely enabling it.
No amount of “personal responsibility” is going to prevent an otherwise unchecked pandemic from further spreading where you have large numbers of young people clustered in housing and classes.
This isn’t a problem of individual virtue, it’s an institutional failure across many levels that’s being blamed on its victims.
It's no surprise that a bunch of 18 year olds and twenty-somethings aren't particularly responsible. The leaders that decided to open these schools, largely for financial reasons, were undoubtedly aware that this would be the outcome.
I disagree that it is evidence of some "lacking of personal responsibility". There are many concerns here from the health of the elderly to the potential unknown long-term effects of Covid-19, and so on. Another is the potentially long-term effects economically on the new entrants to the job market due to shutdowns.
We've seen the devastating effects and setbacks faced by millennials unfortunate enough to graduate during the Great Recession and found very few jobs in their fields. In other words, it's an important consideration: should the graduates and new entrants NOW, who are otherwise healthy adults capable of making their own risk assessments and caring for themselves, be by all means harshly economically impacted to ensure the safety of much older generations? Why can't we implement a scenario where the elderly are the ones locked inside with a check slid under their door while the rest of the world continues? What we currently have seems incredibly regressive: relatively well-off older generations holding the rest of the country hostage while the relatively poorer (and much less at risk) younger generations take the blow that may set them back for years or more.
I recognize that this is a very nuanced topic, and I didn't give nearly enough detail and information here to really lay out a fully equipped argument, but the point stands: there are more costs here than just the disease, and they may be more grave than the debate seems to mention.
The people running colleges know entirely that opening will lead to outbreaks, but have decided they can collect in-person tuition with safety theater, switch to virtual classes when the outbreaks emerge, and then blame the students. Virtual classes are a bad deal at that price? So sorry, you should’ve behaved better!
It’s a bad faith, bait and switch that puts lives at risk so the bloated administrations of these universities can continue collecting paychecks. Even professors recognize this and are protesting the reopenings across the country.
I hate analogies... but this is like the prison warden intentionally leaving the gates to the prison wide open, and then absolving themselves of all responsibility when the prisoners inevitably escape by saying, "well, the prisoners oughta have known not to escape".
No, you knew what you were doing and what the consequences would be.
> The thing about hard times is that they often require sacrifice and re-examining our expectation of what we deserve.
The funny thing about the calls for sacrifice is that all too often they are a call for someone else to sacrifice.
Are the senior employees of the universities, who run them as profit maximizing partnerships notwithstanding nominal non-profit status, taking pay and benefit cuts?
If I were a person who'd spent 6 years getting a PhD, and 25 years doing research, I'd be very reluctant to expose myself to a group of youngsters who 'needed' to party, despite the much-more-substantial risk I was taking to help their futures.
Just the other day I heard of the 'surprise' Covid death of a 30-year-old high-school coach. Covid is an equal-opportunity destroyer and age-discriminator. If the kids won't play it safe, then they're deliberately ignoring that they're playing with other people's lives. Suspension is too good for them ... send them home with an invitation to come back in a few years, if they're still alive and have the money.
Do you know it to be a fact that the admin's don't work overtime?
I live in the shadow of a major state university, so I know a lot of people who work there, and for most of them the idea of working a normal 40 hour week is a pipe dream.
It wouldn't shock me that they are working hours on top of their usual 50+ hour weeks to deal with covid issues.
This isn't unusual for so called "exempt" employees in the US. I once read that the average professional work week in the US is 50 hours.
Admin != staff. Staff are those that work with professors and students directly. They’re very hard workers and keep the system moving smoothly, and get paid poorly.
The admin I’m talking about are the “provost of XYZ”, who don’t do anything worthwhile, but take in massive salaries, and keep pivoting universities away from education to “student satisfaction”
Universities have high fixed and structural costs, and to date, little has been done to address these. Several have openly stated that residence revenues (dorm fees and foodservice) are a major concern.
2. Sustain functional capacity (building and systems maintenance, skills capacity, reputation).
3. Provide minimum sufficient income for idled staff., faculty, and contractors.
4. Provide for continuity of contractors, vendors, and suppliers.
Writ large this is the problem facing economies as a whole. Universities and colleges are merely one visible and vocal sector.
The problem is not one of economic stimulus or simple financial reform. It's of preventive and sustaining care for the entire economy until the global health emergency is resolved.
In this case the terms are effectively synonymous.
This world won't support 7.8 billions of souls, even in the short term without the collective activity we call "the economy", here a stand-in for all productive capacity worldwide.
In the long term, even that is likely not viable, which raises some interesting questions.
My point wasn't that we need to sustain some monetary/financial engine. It's that the institutions and organisations which make our world possible will cease to exist absent some means of addressing operational requirements. The situation is analogous to a person who is sick and requires assistance to survice; nfood, water, medical treatment, but also support for bills, rent, and essentials, while they cannot work.
Small-business failures in the US are approaching 50% for 2020. A third of tenants, residential and commercial, have stopped paying rent. Colleges are part of this same system, and face similar hurdles. Many were already in precarious shape, and it's likely that many will close.
Regardless of your sympathies, this will have profound effects.
Exactly. If they are too immature to be expected to follow the safety rules, why are they still allowed to vote? Adulthood comes with responsibilities as well as privileges.
Universities are complex combinations of several value propositions.
The most significant is real estate. Universities increase the value of real estate around them as they grow. Consequently, the last decade is the largest growth in higher ed real estate expansion - precisely as the surge into digital education could not be more obvious. Most of the billions in donations that higher ed receives goes to real estate.
Second, a degree is the only price protection universities enjoy. The evidence for this is massive - there has been an explosion of alternative learning institutions and systems. They can’t charge anything near what a university can. Universities are very, very aware of this.
The idea that universities are a service organization is mostly a myth. They are at best a feudal cartel. More than 50% of faculty are part-time and paid very poorly. Faculty who are worth tenure are directly responsible for sourcing government grants for research.
University administrators (and admission, i.e. marketing/PR departments) are painfully aware that they must project a mythic image of the “college experience” and employability in order to maintain public perception that they are a necessary right of passage. A recent study found only 2 in 100 students actually have that experience.
There is one ready market for this narrative: foreign, wealthy families - for whom a college degree is access to the American economy.
Universities are a highly adaptive entity that has formed over 100 years in relentless pursuit of their own survival. They have close to zero insight in terms of the education needs of students and even worse: when they are present with it they choose their fiction over a re-invention.
Nothing about this is surprising - it’s how all big corporations die.
To;dr; universities recognize any negotiation around reducing their price due to reduced services to be an existential threat and will fight it at all costs.
College students regularly break safety guidelines. They climb on roofs where they're not allowed, try random sketchy drugs, drink to extreme excess, and have crowded unsanctioned parties. A few schools correctly anticipated this, and have simply banned students from leaving their dorms for the first 2 weeks of the term.
So it's very difficult for me not to infer bad faith from administrators who said "pinky swear not to party?" and now act shocked there were parties.
The administrators want to have their cake and eat it, several ways over.
They want college students to return, at least for a bit, to justify charging for room and board. They also want the root cause of any “okay, everyone go home” orders to be the students themselves, to better justify keeping all that room and board money. But they also desperately want to avoid any awkward questions about why they didn’t see this coming. It’s really hard for the casual observer to not wonder if the administrators are just plain stupid.
I wonder how many of these problems are severely exacerbated by the high price tags for college education. Especially amidst the pandemic. It seems obvious that when people pay more, they become less flexible on the results they find acceptable.
The blame for this lies solely with those with the political and institutional power to have mitigated the impacts of this global pandemic. If not for their reckless inaction we would not be in this position in the first place. Any talk of blaming teens and twenty-somethings for this is nothing more than a deflection.
College age kids have exhibited poor behavior since ... forever? You can rage against this, or you can design systems designed to function despite the poor risk/reward calculations of some people.
Only one actually gets results, the other just lets you shift blame.
These students don't have a history of bad behavior, they have no history at all because it's their first time living alone, and making such decisions for themselves.
We know that people often make mistakes when they lack experience, it's our responsibility to ensure those mistakes don't lead to catastrophic loss merely because you graduated high school in the wrong year.
There's a bit of generalising here. This is not "how students behave". This is "how people who really want social gatherings and in person parties behave" regardless if they're students or not. The idea that you can't tell an adult they have to wear masks in a certain environment is silly.
Or to put it in a different way, if the students stayed at home, specific rules would apply to them. There's no reason they shouldn't apply on the campus as well. They're paying for college, not for a right to party.
Are you seriously arguing that if X fails to take action that would prevent some bad thing from happening, then any Y that comes along and takes actions that make that bad thing worth is completely without responsibility?
If someone burgles a place that left their door unlocked, do you think that the people who did not lock the door bear sole blame for the burglary?
If I build a campfire in an area full of dry weeds (ignoring a ban on campfires due to the fire danger) and that starts a big wildfire, I'm blameless--the blame lies solely with whoever maintains the campground for not having cleared out the dry weeds?
98 percent of the blame for this situation is in the hands of those with institutional power. The politicians, congress, educational leaders, etc... I’m not going to waste my energy accosting a bunch of students over the situation. They are not the reason we are in this mess. Those in power could make the pandemic more or less disappear at their convenience if they acted responsibly. The students are not the reason we’re in this mess.
As said in the article:
> Julia L. Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, believes they should. “What’s happening on college campuses is a microcosm of what’s happening in this country, which is a deflection of responsibility from the top down to the individual,” she said in an interview.
Don’t fall for the game they are playing (and by they I mean political and institutional leaders). This discussion serves only as a deflection from the root of the issue.
It’s not a zero sum situation, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. If I ran a National Park in a high risk wildfire situation, and someone asked me if i would allow hundreds of Boy Scouts to camp at the park for months, then knowing what I know about the behaviours of Boy Scouts I would be totally negligent in my position if I let them camp. Some percentage of boys will not be supervised appropriately, the risk is too great that irresponsible use of fire will happen. The Boy Scout who started the fire would absolutely have made a mistake too, but as the person tasked with management of the park I as well would be responsible for my decision to let a high risk activity occur.
I don’t think it takes a huge amount of experience to know that congregating hundreds of teenagers and young adults is going to lead to close physical contact among young adults. If your goal is to avoid the spread of COVID, it’s a bad idea.
It really bothers me that the college administrators are so misaligned with their students. Their core focus should be on safely providing value to the students.
IMO rather than reacting with condemnation and threats, Syracuse should have reacted by facilitating the development of safe social norms, placing tables in X patterns outside and telling students that they are free to gather but have to remain on opposite sides of the tables. People often do this naturally anyway and it would be sufficient to enforce safe distancing.
Good strategy. It's easy to sit in a high chair and look down on college students while working from home. In reality the students that stringently follow their University's health and safety strategy this year will be in a mentally distressing situation. Curfew - dorm room isolation - omniscient professors (attendance and participation). The whole country watching you with shameful eyes. Imagine being a young adult who has no real place in the world yet - learning from everyone in your life that you should work hard so you can go to college and have a shot at carving one out for yourself - and the moment you arrive our culture flips the script and calls you a murderer for going.
It’s very annoying that this site drops a big banner forcing you to create an account to read it. Who do they think they are that their written content is supposed to be so can’t-miss that I’m going to slap together yet another data breach liability-waiting-to-happen user account, let alone letting them track my personal data, just to read this.
The arrogance and user hostility is severe.
Of course they are allowed to try this, they don’t owe me anything at all, and they (rightly) are wanting to monetize the publication of content they spent time and money to produce.
All that is irrelevant. They (and many other sites doing this) need a serious wake up call to be more self-aware that random long tail content on the internet is worth approximately zilch, and the cost of registering and giving you my data is way too high for something like this.
I hate this concept that blaming these young adults for being irresponsible is wrong because we should have know the students would be irresponsible.
Sure, it’s predictable, but that does zero to absolve the students. It just means that the admins are to blame also. They’re clearly hoping that holding rule breakers accountable will lead to other students rising to the challenge. It’s obvious that, before you punish/suspend/expel a bunch of them, they’ll act as normal. It remains to be seen what they’ll do afterwards.
I can't speak for the general case, but in the case of the small university I work at, a huge reason the student body is so irresponsible is that the administration is well-known to turn a blind eye to whole rafts of terrible behaviours (some of which are blatantly illegal, others merely really bad ideas).
If you've been demonstrating for the past 80 years that students who put on unsanctioned parties, put racist graffiti on their neighbours' whiteboards, and have suitcases full of heroin in their dorm rooms won't be punished in any way, why should they believe that now you're going to punish them for...putting on unsanctioned parties?
Large universities often run their own campus police departments. They don’t act as substitute parents but substitute governments. In this capacity, the university has to police student behavior - it is the only entity which can do so.
Universities have a wide degree of latitude in how aggressively they pursue crimes on campus (often this causes friction with the hosting town’s police force). Campus police can be less harsh on drug offenses, as the GP describes.
At the university I work at, the frat houses are owned by the university. The vast majority of all students live in university-owned housing, and while there are unsanctioned parties in off-campus housing where the university has no jurisdiction,
a) Most parties are not. They occur on university property. Therefore, the university has a responsibility and liability for what goes on there.
b) The university is known to lean on the local police force (which is already very small) to not do anything about student parties either on or off campus.
c) The university has, except for this past year due to the pandemic, funded and run every year a huge weekend-long party every spring. Until a very few years ago, this was poorly-enough policed that students from the local high school regularly got in and got themselves smashed. One underage girl (the last year before they instituted stricter access controls) got so drunk she passed out and nearly died.
This isn't about being "substitute parents". The university has a responsibility both to its students and to the community in which it exists, and it is blatantly shirking that responsibility just so it can give the students a "fun experience" so they will remember it fondly and give it lots of money as alumni. (This isn't even speculation; it is well-known that this is the reason for the lack of policies with teeth.)
Here in Poland it seems nobody is truly enforcing this. Technically, you cannot enter anything without masks but neither employees nor patrons will react. Most people also wears their masks without covering their nose which shows how much attention they are paying to the whole thing -- the masks are only there to avoid a hefty fine.
In this situation it is difficult to blame students. Young people have innate tendency to ignore orders and if "full" adults (I don't really like the term...) cannot show united front on somethnig then youngsters certainly won't.
A few weeks ago, I showed up a family member's house for a gathering. I thought it was going to be about 15 people, outside, with masks and plenty of distance.
Instead, it was a party, with all ages. Tables from a catering company were close together. My elderly aunts and uncles from both sides of my family were there.
I left immediately. Fortunately, no one's come down with Covid-19. Given that many people at the party were elderly, if Covid-19 was there, it wouldn't have ended well.
Part of the hard reality of this is that colleges often depend on room and board revenue to stay solvent, particularly smaller schools[0][1].
This would seem to heavily incentivize bringing students back so as to collect this money. When things (predictably) go to shit, it's easier for the administrations to blame the students than it is to blame the perilous finances that made it all but required to try to bring the students back so they could collect that money.
It's not about whether or not they're adults; it's about whether they're willing to follow public health guidance about large gatherings. Many older adults throughout the country are similarly unwilling.
I'd argue we do. In most areas of the country formal citations for violating social distancing measures are extremely rare; we occasionally crack down on the most blatant excesses, but generally just accept that some people are gonna have large parties or large protests.
Reminder: the vast, vast majority of the students are not in danger of dying. Median age of those dying is ~80, and CFR drops off exponentially for younger people to almost nothing. They're also going to do stupid shit anyway. So maybe it's better if they stayed in dormitories rather than visited their grandma from time to time.
Students are only one group of people who use a campus...people are less concerned about kids doing dumb shit that hurts them, and more worried about kids doing dumb shit that jeopardizes the safety of faculty, administrators, facilities staff, poor students who get a decent meal when they’re on campus bc of financial aid...part of the entire problem here is the narrow perspective that ‘students’ are the only ones worth considering when making public health decisions around universities.
Most of the "administrators" can work from home, or in fact be laid off outright. The quality of education will only improve, and cost would decrease. Older professors could social distance and wear PPE if they are so inclined. I think charging $40-50K/yr for a glorified MOOC is ridiculous.
73 comments
[ 10.1 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If there's truly no way to read an article, then the article would be off topic here.
We can empathize with students and the realistic boredom and disappointment that comes with social distancing while in college. But at the same time, these are adults, often enormously privileged. The thing about hard times is that they often require sacrifice and re-examining our expectation of what we deserve.
Obviously Covid-19 represents systemic failure, and there's an argument to be made that colleges shouldn't be bringing students back in the first place. But the infantilization of young adults is absurd.
Some students pay a lot of money to go to a university that has brand recognition, others pay a lot of money to go to a school that's known to be a great party school. If you're 18, going to one of the latter schools, and you look at the statistics of death rates for each age group, you're definitely going to go and party.
I think asking an 18 year old who's thinking, "well I'm still paying this much and everyone else got to do it" to recognize the sacrifice is an extremely high bar to ask of them
In the fall I plan on getting an IT job, so I'm glad this year has given me the chance to get some experience in technical work.
Due to COVID-19, the university is no longer able to provide the same learning and social experiences with the same level of safety. This isn't the fault of anybody involved in the transaction, neither students nor university could have prevented COVID-19.
Here are the options:
- (a) Cancel or postpone the transaction. Students get their money back, the school is freed from providing their now-impossible obligation. Perhaps they are allowed to re-enroll when COVID-19 is under control again, without penalty to admission status or scholarship dollars.
- (b) Lessen the obligation. Students continue to pay and attend, but get less effective social and educational experiences, and more restrictive safety rules, due to COVID-19.
- (c) Ignore safety. Continue to operate as always, recognizing that a large number of students, faculty and administrators will sicken, and a smaller number will die.
People have mostly decided on option (b). Option (c) is a non-starter for parents and administrators, but a large subset of students is probably quite willing to take personal risks.
Nobody seems to want to discuss option (a), perhaps because it will destroy higher education's finances and force some institutions out of business entirely without massive external support.
There are a lot of things that can be expected in the sense of thinking that they ought to happen; but thinking that they will happen is another matter.
Pretending that students, if sent lots of scolding e-mails and forced to sign pledges, will suddenly become models of social responsibility—in a way that, in many places, their 'adult' peers have not been able to do—is just a juvenile trick by college administrators to try to shift the burden of blame from themselves: parents forced them to open their campuses when it wasn't safe; students forced them to close their campuses by making it unsafe.
Both of these statements are, in their ways, true, but intentionally lost in the mix is the fact that the one body that is sucking out huge quantities of money from students and parents is somehow managing to pretend that it bears no responsibility, and is just the helpless pawn of its customers (and I do use 'customers' advisedly, our university's administration having stated that student safety was a priority and faculty safety was not, since we don't pay tuition).
This isn’t a problem of individual virtue, it’s an institutional failure across many levels that’s being blamed on its victims.
We've seen the devastating effects and setbacks faced by millennials unfortunate enough to graduate during the Great Recession and found very few jobs in their fields. In other words, it's an important consideration: should the graduates and new entrants NOW, who are otherwise healthy adults capable of making their own risk assessments and caring for themselves, be by all means harshly economically impacted to ensure the safety of much older generations? Why can't we implement a scenario where the elderly are the ones locked inside with a check slid under their door while the rest of the world continues? What we currently have seems incredibly regressive: relatively well-off older generations holding the rest of the country hostage while the relatively poorer (and much less at risk) younger generations take the blow that may set them back for years or more.
I recognize that this is a very nuanced topic, and I didn't give nearly enough detail and information here to really lay out a fully equipped argument, but the point stands: there are more costs here than just the disease, and they may be more grave than the debate seems to mention.
It’s a bad faith, bait and switch that puts lives at risk so the bloated administrations of these universities can continue collecting paychecks. Even professors recognize this and are protesting the reopenings across the country.
No, you knew what you were doing and what the consequences would be.
The funny thing about the calls for sacrifice is that all too often they are a call for someone else to sacrifice.
Are the senior employees of the universities, who run them as profit maximizing partnerships notwithstanding nominal non-profit status, taking pay and benefit cuts?
When you sacrifice, do you first write a news article calling on yourself to sacrifice?
Just the other day I heard of the 'surprise' Covid death of a 30-year-old high-school coach. Covid is an equal-opportunity destroyer and age-discriminator. If the kids won't play it safe, then they're deliberately ignoring that they're playing with other people's lives. Suspension is too good for them ... send them home with an invitation to come back in a few years, if they're still alive and have the money.
I hate this idea that only the individual is responsible when things go bad.
I live in the shadow of a major state university, so I know a lot of people who work there, and for most of them the idea of working a normal 40 hour week is a pipe dream.
It wouldn't shock me that they are working hours on top of their usual 50+ hour weeks to deal with covid issues.
This isn't unusual for so called "exempt" employees in the US. I once read that the average professional work week in the US is 50 hours.
The admin I’m talking about are the “provost of XYZ”, who don’t do anything worthwhile, but take in massive salaries, and keep pivoting universities away from education to “student satisfaction”
These conflicts will continue absent means to:
1. Discharge present obligations (debt, payroll, contracts).
2. Sustain functional capacity (building and systems maintenance, skills capacity, reputation).
3. Provide minimum sufficient income for idled staff., faculty, and contractors.
4. Provide for continuity of contractors, vendors, and suppliers.
Writ large this is the problem facing economies as a whole. Universities and colleges are merely one visible and vocal sector.
The problem is not one of economic stimulus or simple financial reform. It's of preventive and sustaining care for the entire economy until the global health emergency is resolved.
How about we stop caring about the global economy, and start caring about the people instead?
This world won't support 7.8 billions of souls, even in the short term without the collective activity we call "the economy", here a stand-in for all productive capacity worldwide.
In the long term, even that is likely not viable, which raises some interesting questions.
My point wasn't that we need to sustain some monetary/financial engine. It's that the institutions and organisations which make our world possible will cease to exist absent some means of addressing operational requirements. The situation is analogous to a person who is sick and requires assistance to survice; nfood, water, medical treatment, but also support for bills, rent, and essentials, while they cannot work.
Small-business failures in the US are approaching 50% for 2020. A third of tenants, residential and commercial, have stopped paying rent. Colleges are part of this same system, and face similar hurdles. Many were already in precarious shape, and it's likely that many will close.
Regardless of your sympathies, this will have profound effects.
The most significant is real estate. Universities increase the value of real estate around them as they grow. Consequently, the last decade is the largest growth in higher ed real estate expansion - precisely as the surge into digital education could not be more obvious. Most of the billions in donations that higher ed receives goes to real estate.
Second, a degree is the only price protection universities enjoy. The evidence for this is massive - there has been an explosion of alternative learning institutions and systems. They can’t charge anything near what a university can. Universities are very, very aware of this.
The idea that universities are a service organization is mostly a myth. They are at best a feudal cartel. More than 50% of faculty are part-time and paid very poorly. Faculty who are worth tenure are directly responsible for sourcing government grants for research.
University administrators (and admission, i.e. marketing/PR departments) are painfully aware that they must project a mythic image of the “college experience” and employability in order to maintain public perception that they are a necessary right of passage. A recent study found only 2 in 100 students actually have that experience.
There is one ready market for this narrative: foreign, wealthy families - for whom a college degree is access to the American economy.
Universities are a highly adaptive entity that has formed over 100 years in relentless pursuit of their own survival. They have close to zero insight in terms of the education needs of students and even worse: when they are present with it they choose their fiction over a re-invention.
Nothing about this is surprising - it’s how all big corporations die.
To;dr; universities recognize any negotiation around reducing their price due to reduced services to be an existential threat and will fight it at all costs.
So it's very difficult for me not to infer bad faith from administrators who said "pinky swear not to party?" and now act shocked there were parties.
They want college students to return, at least for a bit, to justify charging for room and board. They also want the root cause of any “okay, everyone go home” orders to be the students themselves, to better justify keeping all that room and board money. But they also desperately want to avoid any awkward questions about why they didn’t see this coming. It’s really hard for the casual observer to not wonder if the administrators are just plain stupid.
Only one actually gets results, the other just lets you shift blame.
We know that people often make mistakes when they lack experience, it's our responsibility to ensure those mistakes don't lead to catastrophic loss merely because you graduated high school in the wrong year.
Or to put it in a different way, if the students stayed at home, specific rules would apply to them. There's no reason they shouldn't apply on the campus as well. They're paying for college, not for a right to party.
If someone burgles a place that left their door unlocked, do you think that the people who did not lock the door bear sole blame for the burglary?
If I build a campfire in an area full of dry weeds (ignoring a ban on campfires due to the fire danger) and that starts a big wildfire, I'm blameless--the blame lies solely with whoever maintains the campground for not having cleared out the dry weeds?
As said in the article:
> Julia L. Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, believes they should. “What’s happening on college campuses is a microcosm of what’s happening in this country, which is a deflection of responsibility from the top down to the individual,” she said in an interview.
Don’t fall for the game they are playing (and by they I mean political and institutional leaders). This discussion serves only as a deflection from the root of the issue.
I don’t think it takes a huge amount of experience to know that congregating hundreds of teenagers and young adults is going to lead to close physical contact among young adults. If your goal is to avoid the spread of COVID, it’s a bad idea.
Source: was a Boy Scout and went to college
IMO rather than reacting with condemnation and threats, Syracuse should have reacted by facilitating the development of safe social norms, placing tables in X patterns outside and telling students that they are free to gather but have to remain on opposite sides of the tables. People often do this naturally anyway and it would be sufficient to enforce safe distancing.
The arrogance and user hostility is severe.
Of course they are allowed to try this, they don’t owe me anything at all, and they (rightly) are wanting to monetize the publication of content they spent time and money to produce.
All that is irrelevant. They (and many other sites doing this) need a serious wake up call to be more self-aware that random long tail content on the internet is worth approximately zilch, and the cost of registering and giving you my data is way too high for something like this.
Sure, it’s predictable, but that does zero to absolve the students. It just means that the admins are to blame also. They’re clearly hoping that holding rule breakers accountable will lead to other students rising to the challenge. It’s obvious that, before you punish/suspend/expel a bunch of them, they’ll act as normal. It remains to be seen what they’ll do afterwards.
If you've been demonstrating for the past 80 years that students who put on unsanctioned parties, put racist graffiti on their neighbours' whiteboards, and have suitcases full of heroin in their dorm rooms won't be punished in any way, why should they believe that now you're going to punish them for...putting on unsanctioned parties?
If gatherings need to be banned, police should enforce the ban on gatherings.
Universities exist to instruct and learn, not be substitute parents.
Universities have a wide degree of latitude in how aggressively they pursue crimes on campus (often this causes friction with the hosting town’s police force). Campus police can be less harsh on drug offenses, as the GP describes.
a) Most parties are not. They occur on university property. Therefore, the university has a responsibility and liability for what goes on there. b) The university is known to lean on the local police force (which is already very small) to not do anything about student parties either on or off campus. c) The university has, except for this past year due to the pandemic, funded and run every year a huge weekend-long party every spring. Until a very few years ago, this was poorly-enough policed that students from the local high school regularly got in and got themselves smashed. One underage girl (the last year before they instituted stricter access controls) got so drunk she passed out and nearly died.
This isn't about being "substitute parents". The university has a responsibility both to its students and to the community in which it exists, and it is blatantly shirking that responsibility just so it can give the students a "fun experience" so they will remember it fondly and give it lots of money as alumni. (This isn't even speculation; it is well-known that this is the reason for the lack of policies with teeth.)
In this situation it is difficult to blame students. Young people have innate tendency to ignore orders and if "full" adults (I don't really like the term...) cannot show united front on somethnig then youngsters certainly won't.
A few weeks ago, I showed up a family member's house for a gathering. I thought it was going to be about 15 people, outside, with masks and plenty of distance.
Instead, it was a party, with all ages. Tables from a catering company were close together. My elderly aunts and uncles from both sides of my family were there.
I left immediately. Fortunately, no one's come down with Covid-19. Given that many people at the party were elderly, if Covid-19 was there, it wouldn't have ended well.
This would seem to heavily incentivize bringing students back so as to collect this money. When things (predictably) go to shit, it's easier for the administrations to blame the students than it is to blame the perilous finances that made it all but required to try to bring the students back so they could collect that money.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900782472/as-pandemic-hits-co...
[1] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/13/coronavirus-small...
But the fundamental implicit assumption here seems to be "Students are not adults"