I’m pretty darn old, got allergies, have asthma. I also just rode my bike to pick up my CSA veg, like I do every week. Know what I was wearing that whole time? A mask.
If the kid has that much trouble breathing with a mask on, she needs to try on different masks.
Well, he probably understood that the risk is much higher when you’re inside a classroom for an hour or more than it is when you’re passing through an area or outside.
My guess is also that he was the bottom-of-the-barrel pick. People paying the tuition don’t often appreciate how little adjuncts are paid and how difficult it can be to scare up someone to come teach a class even without a pandemic. There are places where you’re wading through unemployed PhDs, like Boston, but in most parts of the country it’s not so easy to find cheap academic labor if you burn through your immediate supply.
To give a sense of how low the pay is: in my college, which is the largest college at an R1 university, adjuncts get $2K per semester hour, and that’s reduced if the class isn’t fully enrolled. For a 16-week, 3 s.h. course with 25-40 students, with 1-2 hours a week of office hours, prep, grading, and answering emails, the wage can drop below minimum very easily. No benefits, no job security, no way of knowing whether or not the course will actually run until a couple of days before the semester starts. There are places that pay worse.
Yes. IIRC, every week they were tested.
Bottom of the barrel pick? What an awful thing to say. Here’s his Bio: Irwin Bernstein | The Department of Psychology
He is a distinguished research professor emeritus, accomplished, highly published. He came back surely for the sake of teaching the next generation during a pandemic, surely not out of any financial need at the age of 88 as a retired full professor. He came back to help! At the time that the decision was made, probably the incidence of Covid cases was low, and it was felt that the vaccine had stopped transmission. The risk of transmission while walking outdoors from his car to the lecture room is negligible. The risk of transmission in the lecture hall IF EVERYONE WORE MASKS was also negligible. That one selfish young woman refused to do so, putting everyone in the room at risk, and the governor prohibited the U from enforcing a mask mandate, so he did the only sensible thing. He walked out.
Bottom of the barrel? The man’s a hero.
Bottom of the barrel in the sense that they probably didn’t want to go to him. You don’t normally try to pull an octogenarian out of retirement to teach, much less during a pandemic that’s dangerous for old people.
Not every comment is about prestige. I swear, this site’s going to make me feel awesome about standing behind a register again someday.
The reality is no one should feel unsafe. he did. He did what he needed to do.
People have to care for others. If the laws don’t allow it, he decided to leave.
Since he came back, the school was likely short staffed and asked.
Maybe he came back as a sense of purpose or because he had no other hobbies or just loved to teach.
We should all be so useful when we are 88 - I think it’s awesome and I don’t blame him at all.
I hope other students run this one off campus - it was a very selfish act.
Do we know if he ever left teaching? One thing said he retired in 2012, but said retire/rehire. Maybe he retired for get the retirement benefits at 80 years old but never stopped teaching. Or went part time. Maybe he no longer wanted to publish.
I say let him retire and wish him well.
Dude sounds scary (from the bio):
“ I will give you as much guidance as you ask for. I will not give you specific directions or projects. Your work will be your own. I will serve as your mentor, but if I have not hired you as a technician, you do not work for me. If we collaborate, I will make my expectations clear from the start. I am very demanding with regards to design, analysis, logic and writing. I believe that getting it right is more important than getting it done quickly. I expect your dedication to your chosen science to come first in your life.”
I find that last sentence intriguing in this particular context, as in how does it apply to both the student and himself?
Twitter is typically the forum where lives are destroyed in minutes by people who they’ve never met. To date, I have not seen much come up other than the original article posted by the OP and re-posts across the usual news outlets, with comments mostly bashing UGA for not having the mask mandate to begin with (and some pretty gross ones questioning why parents would pay tuition to have an 88 y.o. teach a class 
) I know a handful of recent UGA alumni as well current UGA students and haven’t heard them talk about it. I haven’t seen the student named - usually that happens pretty quickly when the intent is to cancel someone.
Absolutely selfish but not in violation of UGA’s policy. A quick search found a couple of small (50 person) protests by students and UGA workers but they may have been prior to this incident. The other college in GA where the professor walked out (Georgia State?) seems to have more robust protesting by students.
$2K per credit hour! That’s a king’s ransom! Mine is around $1100.