School in the 2020-2021 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 1)

Parents Forum
3342

The President of Davidson College re-tweeted a New Yorker article written by a surgeon at Mass General Brigham that lays out concrete advice on how to best protect against the spread of covid-19 when reopening the country. Well worth a read. The surgeon lays out a 4 step regimen used in a healthcare setting that could be implemented reasonably elsewhere including a college setting.

“Its elements are all familiar: hygiene measures, screening, distancing, and masks. Each has flaws. Skip one, and the treatment won’t work. But, when taken together, and taken seriously, they shut down the virus. We need to understand these elements properly—what their strengths and limitations are—if we’re going to make them work outside health care.”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/amid-the-coronavirus-crisis-a-regimen-for-reentry

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@ChemAM i just don’t think keeping friend groups together is on the list of priorities when these decisions are being made.

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@Leigh22 I don’t know, because I would think that while finances would be their number one consideration, student mental health should be one of their top considerations. I also think opting into groups that would be assigned to semesters together would not be a very big deal for the college if they are going to offer every required course for a major every semester next year, which is probably what they would have to do for the three-semester model to work.

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The problem is a usual comms problem.

The surgeon and everyone else in healthcare has a decade or more of training in the culture of living with dangerous pathogens. Values are transmitted in this education. Lore. Practice. Teaching, mentoring. It builds on a foundation of care and belief that health and saving lives are of primary importance, it screens out people who can’t follow instructions, and it builds conviction.

Now, without all that, you want people who refuse to maintain a safe following distance on highways, even though they know what car crashes look like, to follow complex and uncomfortable procedures daily for months or years to fight something they can’t see.

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I’m describing a well established public health measure called “contact tracing.” I am using the term as it is normally used by public health authorities. There is a Coursera course Johns Hopkins Department of Epidemiology on how to do it.

I dipped into the course. You can too. It’s free. You can watch the lectures, but they also provide transcripts.

The contact tracer first talks to the person who tested positive. The course provides a sample call. The contact tracer talks about the symptoms, then talks to the person about isolating and makes sure that the person is able to do that. (In some jurisdictions, for some people, there are places they can go to isolate, if they can’t do it at home. In most jurisdictions, social workers can help out if the person needs help to get food and medicine.)

Then the contact tracer carefully goes through the person’s contacts in the relevant time period. This is where skill and charm comes into play, to help the person recall as much as possible.

Then the contact tracer wraps up the call, sympathizing with the person’s plight, reminding them to stay home, reminding them to get medical help if they get worse, and assuring them that the contact tracer will check in again soon.

After that, it’s time to talk to contacts. The course says that if the person was in a big anonymous group, like a movie theater, then the contact tracer reports that to their supervisor for handling, so I don’t know what is done in that case. But for identified individuals, the contact tracer gets to work. They call each contact up. The course gives a sample call for that too.

The contact tracer gives the bad news that the person was exposed, without saying who was the infected person they were exposed to. They go through the quarantine process. This is a long call, and again, charm and skill go into it, because the tracer needs to establish rapport with the exposed person. The tracer talks about the help that is available to the exposed person as they stay home.

Contact tracers will keep checking back with both the infected people and the exposed people. It’s a social process. A poster in one of these threads said they thought they’d be a good contact tracer because they are a journalist. I think that’s right; the process of working with a source over a period of time would be similar to the process of working with an infected person or a contact over time.

You may think that contact tracing won’t work for this epidemic. But that doesn’t mean you can redefine a term of art.

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On a more micro level, colleges and universities (especially smaller residential ones like Davidson and Amherst) may be better equipped than the nation at large to convince their community of students, faculty and staff to buy in to those uncomfortable procedures in order to reopen.

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Probably true, but UCSD has gotten their 5,000 students/staff/faculty currently on campus to buy in to new procedures, as have many other schools that have relatively large numbers of students on campus.

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One of the things we’re likely to hear about this fall and more so next January is the repercussions this will have on the nation’s adjunct staff. Will Colleges which have balanced their budgets on the backs of adjuncts for years try to salvage their remaining tenured faculty by throwing the adjuncts under the bus? It is unlikely to me that adjuncts will qualify for unemployment.

Programs will be slashed, departments downsized. Professors who haven’t taught an intro course in years will find themselves facing whatever class of incoming freshmen the college can muster up. OTOH, colleges may face a slate of retirements from tenured faculty well past 65, who linger because, well it’s academia - that’s what we do.

Suffice it to say that the effects of this are going to be profound and long-lasting and beyond what we can even predict right now.

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Why would adjuncts not qualify for unemployment?

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Or will universities try and get rid of tenured faculty, with buyouts/retirement incentives, and then eliminate the positions?

Academia is still impacted by hiring freezes and cuts of 2008-09. This is the next stomach churning free fall.

I know faculty now seriously considering early retirement, depending on what happens the next few months. Their positions won’t be filled in the foreseeable future.

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Getting rid of experienced tenured faculty is a catch-22. Why do families pay $60k/year for residential college? According to posters on this board, part of the reason is the opportunity to study with the well known, experienced tenured faculty. But if colleges encourage those faculty members to retire so they can reduce the COA they won’t have the experienced faculty that drew the people who were willing to pay $60k/year for the privilege of being taught by them. Will they then be expected to drop the COA lower because now they’re offering an “inferior” product?

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Academia is very unusual in not having a mandatory retirement age. It would be good to implement one. Most people are not at their best in their 70s and 80s, and hanging on that long does not serve the interests of the students or the college.

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Aren’t adjuncts at some (many?) schools not employees, but contractors who receive 1099s?

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^Super elites will keep tenure.

There has been a lot of support on the parent boards here, and nationwide, for eliminating tenure.

Opps… Crossposted with roycroftmom

fwiw… I am talking retirement of those late 50s, early 60s, with international reputations and very productive

They’ll keep researching and writing because that’s what they do

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Tenure is fine. Lifetime employment until death is not. Big difference.

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Some of those folks have been hanging on because their positions will be eliminated, a hardship to their students and colleagues.

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Maybe some programs should be cut. Our state flagship publishes the number of grads by major every year. 40k undergrad enrollment. In some departments, there are fewer than 3 kids majoring in it per year. So 1 or 2 kids out of a possible 10k. Taxpayers can reasonably ask if those departments should continue to be publicly funded

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The pursue of tenure is what makes some of nation’s, and world’s, most qualified to go into academia. Eliminating it will likely make US professorship no longer attractive for talents all over the world. Higher education in the US could suffer the same fate as US secondary education.

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I’m sorry, I’m not an expert in employment law. What does that mean with respect to unemployment claims?

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1099s are independent contractors and thus do not qualify for unemployment payments.
Please, a mandatory retirement age of 70 wouldn’t end tenure as we know it or mark the decline of higher ed in the US