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American University, in Washington, D.C., scrapped plans for a ‘hybrid’ academic year and announced on July 30 that all classes would go online this fall.
When university campuses shut down in March, sending their students home, everyone hoped it would be a one-time event. We looked to the fall for something better.
Much as we might have wished, with President Trump, that the virus would “sort of disappear,” it was clear by the time the semester ended in May that nothing of the sort would happen. Rather than confront that fact head-on, however, many colleges and universities embarked on a summer of magical thinking.
With gravitas, sage university presidents put together blue-ribbon commissions. They brought in their best men and women for advice. They launched extraordinarily elaborate planning rituals. We would return to something like normal, they promised. Even if all classes might not be in person, many would be “hybrid,” some mix of in-person and online, no matter the lack of pedagogical research on hybrid learning.
They outlined schemes to test all the students, trace their myriad contacts on college campuses, and isolate them in the event of illness. They developed apps and honor codes. Go ahead, they assured parents: Put your tuition deposit in.
All those committees, all that effort, all that baroque planning—all those illusions—they all, inevitably, came crashing down in the late summer. The late reversals left students disappointed, parents frustrated, administrators back at square one, and faculty rewriting their syllabi for the eighth or ninth time in a single summer. Once again, we were all lurching to online classes.
Left to look after their own interests, university officials focused on their small corner of the world, pretending they would find a way to open campuses.
None of this should have been a surprise. Before the spring semester had even ended, alarm bells were ringing. The pandemic was surging in much of the country. Large nonresidential campuses, like the California State University system, faced that reality and announced online classes for the fall. But the leadership of residential universities continued to bury their heads in the sand.
In late May, two law professors posted a well-researched essay under the vivid title “Unsafe at Any Campus: Don’t Let Colleges Become the Next Cruise Ships, Nursing Homes, and Food Processing Plants.” “Rushing to reopen campuses offers only the illusion of safety,” they cautioned. “In contrast, offering an effective online alternative provides the reality.”
“We’re in a global pandemic,” a former president of Yale University averred. “The idea that college life is going to be normal … is just a fantasy.” In mid-June, a professor of psychology at Temple blasted college reopening plans as “so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional.”
Casting such warnings aside, university leadership forged ahead. As late as July 19, more than 85 percent of colleges tracked by The Chronicle of Higher Education were still planning to open. By then, the situation in the United States had worsened dramatically. Warnings of a second wave in the late fall turned out to be wildly optimistic: The country’s first wave hadn’t yet peaked.
The three most populous states in the country—accounting for some 90 million people—were experiencing runaway outbreaks. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of students from those states were signing leases for apartments in college towns around the country, and planning their trips to move in.
And still the universities forged on.
Bizarrely, some universities planned to bring students to campus—the highest-risk event—while putting classes online. Most committed to the maximum amount of in-person teaching they imagined they could safely undertake. Faculty in high-risk categories would be allowed to opt in to online teaching. But what about the frontline staff, the kitchen workers and janitors and all the others on whose labor the reopening plans rested? Many of them come from communities that have been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic. Few universities bothered to include them in their plans.
Urgent questions went unanswered. What benchmarks would the universities use in deciding whether to close campuses? How many students would have to be hospitalized before universities decided to shut down? How many dead were worth the cost of reopening? Was it two or six or ten or fifty? Or was university leadership just planning to decide on the fly?
And what about all that testing these universities planned in their futile quest to make campuses safe? At a time when the country was hobbled by a lack of fast and reliable testing, did it make any sense to commit so much laboratory capacity to open residential campuses? Could colleges even get all the tests they needed in the event of a campus outbreak?
By mid-July, public-school systems around the country faced the new reality, announcing that they would go fully online. And still the residential colleges forged ahead.
All those committees, all that effort, all that baroque planning—all those illusions—they all, inevitably, came crashing down in the late summer.
Only now, in the dog days of late July and August, are some of them finally coming to their senses. On July 29, Georgetown University announced it was reversing course and going fully online. Johns Hopkins and Princeton followed the following week. Others will fall in line.
Better late than never, perhaps. One can be relieved that universities made the right decision in the end. But what was the delay about? Was it just an elaborate charade to persuade students and parents to commit to enrolling before they changed their plans? Was it all a gigantic bait and switch? Or just hubris and wishful thinking driven by business strategies?
“My suspicion,” wrote a University of Michigan economics professor back on June 15, is that “colleges are holding out hope of in-person classes in order to keep up enrollments.” “If they tell the difficult truth now, many students will decide to take a year off.” The financial consequences for most residential universities would be catastrophic.
To be sure, universities have been thrust into this situation by the lack of federal guidelines. A sane government would have warned early on that campuses would have to stay online for another semester in service of the collective effort to contain the pandemic.
Left to look after their own interests, however, university officials focused on their small corner of the world, pretending they would find a way to open campuses and persuading parents to put those tuition deposits down.
Like the bars and restaurants and gyms scrambling to reopen, consequences be damned, universities committed their faculty and staff’s time and resources to developing fanciful plans in denial of reality.
Trump’s fantasies about the pandemic have drawn widespread scorn and ridicule. His policies of denial have led to a national catastrophe. Yet many of America’s most eminent higher-education leaders, who disdain Trump’s delusions, dwell in the same fantastic universe.
