By Daniel W. Drezner / The Washington Post
Tuesday was the last day of spring semester classes at my school, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, which means it is time to start grading and think hard about what the fall semester will look like in an Age of Coronavirus.
Fletcher has set up a working group to game out how the next academic year will play out. I am sure every other institution for higher education has a similar committee. Will residential schools encourage students to return to campus? Will classes stay online or return to in-person lessons?
Some schools had toyed with the idea of shutting down for the fall semester and restarting in spring 2021. On Monday, however, Harvard University’s provost announced that the university would be open for business in the fall. Harvard tends to be a trendsetter in these areas, so my hunch is that most other schools will follow its lead.
Harvard did not specify whether the fall semester would be on campus or virtual, which raises some thorny questions. My Fletcher colleagues and students were able to adapt quickly to an online learning environment, but there are reasons to think that this semester was anomalous. Because these classes started out in person, it was relatively easy for students to get to know one another and for professors to get to know them. Starting a class online prevents that kind of tacit knowledge from easily emerging.
Some students at other schools have already started agitating for tuition reductions and reimbursements, on the premise that online courses are not as good as in-person classes. This puts additional pressure on universities to accommodate the people providing the tuition revenue. Even shutting down universities for summer activities will cause them to hemorrhage money.
This debate intersects with a push from conservatives to reopen U.S. society sooner rather than later. The Washington Examiner’s editorial fairly sums up this line of thinking: “It is simply not feasible to keep schools closed for years and expect parents to hold down jobs while taking on the new responsibility of educating their children. … We must learn to live with the coronavirus and treat COVID-19. That does not mean, it must not mean, crippling our nation in the hope of reaching an unachievable goal of absolute safety.”
Some academics agree. Brown University President Christina Paxson, in an op-ed for the New York Times, argues that for the good of students, the good of higher education and the good of America, universities need to reopen:
“As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely. This is especially true for lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study. …
“Higher education is also important to the U.S. economy. The sector employs about three million people and as recently as the 2017-18 school year pumped more than $600 billion of spending into the national gross domestic product. Colleges and universities are some of the most stable employers in municipalities and states. Our missions of education and research drive innovation, advance technology and support economic development. The spread of education, including college and graduate education, enables upward mobility and is an essential contributor to the upward march of living standards in the United States and around the world.
“The reopening of college and university campuses in the fall should be a national priority. Institutions should develop public health plans now that build on three basic elements of controlling the spread of infection: test, trace and separate.”
Reason’s Nick Gillespie wholeheartedly endorses this idea: “It should be a national priority to open up as much of American society to younger people as soon as possible. Not only are they far more likely to survive COVID-19, they are the ones ultimately bearing much of the cost of the lockdown in terms of missed opportunities to learn and work.”
Both Paxson and Gillespie acknowledge that getting students back on campus is not the same as returning to business as usual. Paxson notes, “A typical dormitory has shared living and study spaces. A traditional lecture hall is not conducive to social distancing. Neither are college parties, to say the least.”
Gillespie allows that any reopening would “require concessions to public health, including social distancing, wearing masks, reconfiguring dorms and dining halls, and prohibiting large gatherings in accordance with the evolving understanding of how the coronavirus spreads.”
Even with these caveats, however, there are reasons to wonder whether this notion will work without any therapeutic breakthroughs.
College dorms are not quite as bad as cruise ships, aircraft carriers or retirement homes in terms of housing density, but they are close. (Cutting the number of students per dorm by half might ameliorate this problem but raises the awkward question of where the other half of the student body would live.) Even if young people are less likely to suffer severe cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, any dorm — particularly those with common bathrooms and eating spaces — would function like a perfect incubator for it. Which means a large fraction of students, even if asymptomatic, would serve as carriers of the virus. Other people who work at universities, from the food service employees to the professors, would also be put at risk.
In theory, these risks could be mitigated through proper testing, contact tracing and separation. In practice, the United States seems a long way off from meeting those criteria. U.S. testing levels are not close to being adequate. Even if testing increases, the quality of the tests are open to debate. Widespread contact tracing remains a novel thing in the United States.
Finally, none of this addresses the most important question: How do you get everyone into a classroom while still maintaining social distancing? It would require a seminar class of, say, 20 to occupy a lecture hall that would normally host 60 students. Those rooms would be at a premium, probably requiring an elongation of the class day to ensure their full utilization. Other class sizes would have to shrink to fit smaller seminar rooms. Truly large lectures would probably have to have flipped classrooms, with asynchronous video lectures followed by discussion sections.
Assuming testing and tracing mechanisms were onboard in September, maybe this could work. Maybe. But the fact remains that the nature of this disease is that it spreads easily and there is a long latency period. The likelihood of a mass epidemic on campus would not be low.
Furthermore, contrary to claims that a rising tide of Americans want stay-at-home measures to end, polling suggests otherwise. The Pew Research Center found that even those who have been knocked out of work by this are still extremely wary of any reopening. According to NPR/Marist, 85 percent of Americans do not think it’s wise for schools to reopen.
I hope Paxson and Gillespie are right. I don’t want to teach via Zoom anymore; it’s more exhausting and less productive compared with in-person teaching. Maybe everyone’s experience with this pandemic this spring will help prevent a recurrence, but it seems hard to envisage a scenario where these plans will not lead us right back to where we are now.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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