I Decided in May to Move My College Department’s Courses Online. Here’s Why
I’m the chair of a large English Department at a City University of New York school, the College of Staten Island. When I say, “large,” I mean around 130 faculty, including full-time professors and part-time adjuncts, as well as a dozen staff members. We have over 170 sections of courses because my department is required to teach at least two classes to nearly every single student at the college, in addition to our 400 majors, 100 minors, and 50 graduate students. While other majors have more students, we are the largest department on campus.
My thinking on how to handle the coronavirus outbreak in the New York City area began in my classroom in the second week of March. I wanted to be frank with my students, and I wanted them to be honest with me. Some wanted to know if the campus was going to shut down. More than a few told me about how they lived with grandparents or other elderly relatives, and they were concerned about bringing the virus home. That was on Monday, March 9.
I emailed my colleagues in the English Department, “I see no reason not to respect the judgment of faculty who believe that their health may be at risk. If you are considering moving your class to online or reducing contact with students and others, please consult with me about it so that we can work out the best way to accommodate you. If you are sick, please stay home and take care of yourself. I know that most of us want to hold classes in person, but we do ourselves no good if our students believe they will get sick from us.” Almost immediately, several said they wanted to move to distance learning.
On Tuesday, March 10, I wrote to my students, “While I will still be holding class on campus tomorrow, Wednesday, March 11, if you are sick, you should stay home. If you have a condition that could compromise your health, you should judge for yourself if you need to stay home.” In the classroom on March 11, I announced that we would be moving this class online, no matter what CUNY decided. On March 12, CUNY decided and everyone moved online.
I’m not going to detail all the internal discussions that, as a chair, I took part in, except to say that every chair and every dean was frustrated by the lack of clarity on what would happen in the Fall, especially since all the tea leaves were clear: the virus wasn’t going away quickly. It wasn’t going to disappear. It wasn’t going to be cured or treatable. It was now a fact of life for the foreseeable future, and, to my thinking, we needed to act that way.
Essentially, every CUNY campus was stuck awaiting an answer from the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees of the whole 25-college system, even if that answer was ludicrously obvious. I didn’t want to wait. What I wanted was clarity as soon as possible so that my colleagues could accommodate themselves to the idea of teaching their courses online for the full semester, so that they could prepare strong classroom experiences without the physical classroom, and so that our students would have some idea of how their college experience was going to proceed. Everyone had the right to know so they could make decisions for themselves about what they wanted to do. The sudden move from the classroom to the virtual world had been jarring and chaotic in mid-semester, understandably so, but still frustrating. It seemed to me that we should all be working to remove the chaos and move ahead purposefully. The only way to do that was to remove doubt from the whole situation.
On May 20, I told the faculty of the English Department that any of them who felt it was best for health reasons — for themselves or people they were close to — were encouraged to move their classes online in the Fall. At least half a dozen professors, all with conditions that would exacerbate any infection, did so.
Finally, on May 25, after discussions with the Dean and other faculty, I sent an email announcing that we would move the entire department’s offerings online for Fall 2020. The decision was met with the ever-present frustration, even more relief, and not a little sorrow. We wanted to believe the upbeat rhetoric on the coronavirus. We wanted to go back to normal. We wanted to be with our students in the classroom. We do this job because we genuinely love it, especially at a school like CSI, where we’re often teaching a diverse group of first-generation, working-class college students, many of whom have full-time jobs and/or families to take care of. We know that we can teach them well online, but we know and, from their responses, the students believe that the physical classroom provides the kind of interactions that are just not possible yet in the virtual classroom.
When I informed all the students in the 170 sections of courses we have scheduled in the Fall, it wasn’t that all hell broke loose. But a whole lot of students wanted to know if everything would be online, like orientation and other classes. More than one wrote to me upset that this had happened. While those students understood why, they decided they would take the semester off. Frankly, I don’t blame them. If a student has the ability to do that, it’s a perfectly reasonable response.
Other departments quickly followed going all or mostly online in my division of humanities and social sciences. I’m sure they were going to go in the same direction on their own. We’ve become a fairly close-knit group since the shutdown, occasionally having Zoom meetups and consistently emailing everyone. Our truly terrific dean, Sarolta Takacs, who had been at Rutgers University before tossing herself into the CUNY volcano, had already been using vaguely coded language, telling us to “Change as many classes to online as you can.” Neither she nor the upper administration was allowed to outright say what we all knew. Yet, still, into July, CUNY had not made a decision about whether or not campuses would be open. Instead, like Donald Trump telling the states they’re on their own with the coronavirus, individual deans and department chairs made the call.
It wasn’t until July 10 that Chancellor Matos Rodriguez sent out a memo that still didn’t completely clarify the situation. What got to me, and what prompted me to write this, is one section: “Thanks to the diligent work of so many in our system, 48 percent of the Fall 2020 courses that are open for student registration are already scheduled for hybrid or online delivery. We hope to increase this percentage in the weeks ahead in preparation for the start of the semester.” That’s not a decision. And it’s just unnecessary. It shouldn’t have been up to us each individually. Not to stretch the comparison, but it feels of a piece with Trump’s failure to have a national plan of action on the coronavirus.
Even as late as July 24, one of our campus leaders wrote to the campus community, “It isn’t official, but don’t expect any students on campus at the beginning of the term.” That lack of anything “official” is confusing and more than a little aggravating for everyone, especially as we are now just a month away from the Fall semester’s supposed start.
I’m not going to pretend to have the expertise to talk about all the considerations for whether or not pre-K-12 schools should open in August or September for face-to-face instruction. But after a few decades in the college classroom, including ten as the chair or deputy chair of my department, I think I’ve built up the street cred to talk about what should happen with most colleges and universities come Fall: Without a massive influx of funding to take care of safety issues, it’s a ludicrous proposition to open up campuses. And by that, I mean funding for the constant cleaning that would be necessary, for the hand sanitizer and for functioning bathrooms, for classrooms that can allow for physical distance, for masks, and so very much more. CSI just got the hot water working in my building after roughly five years of it being out. We were told to be happy about that.
Still, I’m also not proselytizing against distance education. Far from it. It has provided opportunities to people with disabilities, people whose schedules simply don’t allow them to attend classes, and so very many others. None of them should be denied the advantages of getting their degrees.I also see a great deal of potential for teaching and learning online. It’s evolving as technology evolves, and that’s encouraging. I even enjoyed my online graduate seminar this summer and thought it was a successful course no matter what the mode of instruction was. We can make it work, but it enrages me that our federal government has put us in a position where we have to make it work. It enrages me that I can’t choose whether or not to have face-to-face classes. And while CUNY has provided students in need with laptops or iPads, there is no guarantee that a student will have easy access to the internet without sitting outside a reliable wifi source.
At CSI, our classrooms weren’t built for the number of students we currently have in each section. Students routinely sit practically shoulder-to-shoulder in desks that are crammed in. I have had to change rooms several times because the one I was assigned couldn’t accommodate the size of my class. The physical plant of the college can’t handle coronavirus, even if we put plexiglass between each desk. The chronic underfunding of education across the board is a chicken that has come home to roost.
But the bottom line is this: We cannot make it so that the campus is safe. One of our emeritus professors, Richard Currie, a beloved Victorian literature scholar who was simply one of the kindest people I’ve known, passed away from coronavirus. I know of several faculty who have had it, including one who is still suffering the effects months later, and that was in lockdown. I want to be in the classroom. I miss my office. I miss my students and colleagues and staff. I know my amazing faculty feel the same. But sending us back to school now, even here, in New York City, where cases have plunged, is madness. To do so in all the places where COVID is spiking is akin to a cruel medical experiment.
By the way, at the end of April, my doctor suggested I get a COVID antibody test. Around March 20th, I had a mild fever and a slight cough. It wouldn’t have been enough to keep me home from work, but I was home anyways. She had wanted me to get tested for the virus, but that was during the time that only the most visibly sick could qualify for the mostly unavailable testing. I did quarantine for 10 days, even though I felt fine after three. Now that things were calming down, she thought I should test for the antibody. And it came back positive. Understanding that even the best antibody tests right now are flawed, having the antibody meant that I had had COVID-19, probably back when I felt a bit off.
Working backward from there, it’s entirely possible that had classes continued meeting on campus in March, I could have passed the coronavirus on to my students and to the faculty of all ages I met with. I might have ended up causing someone to become sick or die. I would have to wonder if I had hurt my students or colleagues or staff. That’s something none of us should be forced to live with.
