The Student-Blaming Has Begun
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate this idea that only the individual is responsible when things go bad.
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.
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”
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
But the fundamental implicit assumption here seems to be "Students are not adults"
If there's truly no way to read an article, then the article would be off topic here.
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.