Not since Day 1 have I felt this nervous about my job
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a hand sanitizing station in Reese Phifer HALL
On Wednesday I’ll put on my armor, trek to Tuscaloosa and battle for four months against the coronavirus and other uncontrollable circumstances.
OK, enough with the melodramatic depiction. Save war analogies for doctors, nurses and real soldiers.
Still, I know from conversations and social media that faculty returning to the new semester at the University of Alabama and elsewhere share varying degrees of trepidation about whether they will be sufficiently protected from getting COVID-19 on campus. We need to worry about an invisible virus in the classroom, potential active shooters in the hallway, and Zoombombing online. Guess I can relax in the parking lot.
Many UA faculty members nonetheless plan to enter the classroom this fall, because that’s a better education for the students. And yeah, it gives the university some cover for continuing to charge full tuition. Slightly less than half of all UA courses will be taught face to face in classrooms. The ratio of enrollment to room size will allow social distancing. About one-third of all courses will be taught in “hybrid” fashion, meaning a few students in a socially distanced classroom each week with the remainder joining simultaneously by videoconferencing from a remote location. All other courses will be completely online.
I can’t speak to every situation, but generally the university granted teachers’ preferences for class format (though some subjects don’t allow flexibility). Teachers I know who fall in a COVID-vulnerable category will teach completely online.
My large lecture class, normally in a jam-packed room, will go completely online, with students in a live Zoom meeting. Two others of mine will be hybrid, and one, with nine students in a huge room, will operate face to face.
All in all, I consider the university’s protective steps sufficient enough that I’m willing to teach in classrooms. The university’s caps on number of people in a room – at least the caps I’m familiar with – are tighter than I thought they’d be. The university also mandates masks for everyone.
Occasional testing is part of the plan, too, but even though I understand the value of testing in fighting a pandemic on a macro scale, it’s not much comfort on a micro level because of false or slow results. A student or professor is only as non-threatening as what they did last night.
I’d trust 98% of my students with my life (which, come to think of it, isn’t merely an expression in this case). But the 2% can ruin it for everyone. And recent evidence of crowded locations in Tuscaloosa, Auburn and elsewhere is reason for alarm, if not total panic. (Report from youngest son as he drove past bars in downtown Tuscaloosa on Saturday night: “Packed.”) How bad could it get? In Chapel Hill, it got bad enough that the University of North Carolina on Monday halted in-person learning and will flip to remote teaching. Its semester was one week old.
One administrator at UA offered some smart advice: Assume everyone has the virus. That won’t be true, of course, but a lot of faculty and staff do want to know the number and rate of positive tests among people on campus, broken down by students and employees, on a daily basis. Locations of outbreak clusters are of vital public interest, too. None of this violates FERPA, the educational records privacy act.
The UA System hasn’t made such information public yet. Employees are taking on a health risk to help fulfill the university’s mission, thereby also benefitting the university financially. That creates an ethical obligation to provide key information that lets everyone know whether this experiment is going to blow up or not.