That didn’t take long.
On Monday, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did a screeching, 180-degree U-turn on in-class instruction – a consequence of 135 COVID infections detected within a week of starting classes — and shifted to remote learning.
It’s going to be a rough, difficult fall semester, much as predicted for all colleges and universities.
The predicament, described by university administrators, as “untenable,” is doubly troubling because UNC’s leadership went to considerable lengths — bragging on itself in national news broadcasts — to do the testing and tracing and, thereby, avoiding a mess.
The mess arrived anyway, as it may to other campuses.
The student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, made the most of the opportunity and decorated an editorial with a colorful headline — available for discovery on-line with little effort. “Print news. Raise hell,” was the editor-in-chief’s directive. Oh, they did.
However, the student journalists overlooked something in this bright, descriptive categorization: “University leadership should have expected students, many of whom are now living on their own for the first time, to be reckless. Reports of parties throughout the weekend come as no surprise.”
Well, a reckless party-hardy attitude might “come as no surprise” if you just assume that the Chapel Hill student body is, in the mass, mentally thick as a board.
We want to think otherwise. Students need to be aware and alert to the dangers of a pandemic already a half-year in duration. We need them — and college students across the nation — to adjust their default behavior and act in a reasoned, rational, cautious manner.
That they choose to act differently, to fling themselves into standard, lubricated, clutching conduct, says simply that, yes, they are kids.
But that does not get them off the hook. The Tar Heel Daily, colorful headline included, fingers UNC’s administration as culpable for the abrupt retreat on in-class instruction. Assorted administrative failures were detailed, but suppressing the virus requires us all to do better — to be better.
Surely, current events — the hit or miss American response to the Great 2020 Global Pandemic — will spawn dissertations aplenty and social analysis for generations to come. But the short answer will endure: We were stupid — collectively, broadly, incomprehensibly.
But we still have to crawl out of bed tomorrow and confront the morning. Will we do better?
You sort of hope so. As for these collegiate campuses, it may very well work out that specific characteristics end up shaping individual outcomes.
In other words, some schools — say, the ones that are smaller, compact, broadly committed and communal — may handle pandemic challenges more readily that the hefty, sprawling academic factories, where consensus forms, if at all, by accident.
Admittedly, this constitutes optimistic thinking. We’ll discover how well this works out one way or the other, in due course.
But it seems obvious — axiomatic, you might say — that the broader the shared resolve (a direct function of commonly held values) the more likely a college or university will prevail and emerge from the COVID threat intact.
“Intact” is, in fact, is the immediate goal, the prime directive. Survival. Solvency. Existence. These are the real-time collegiate imperatives. No less.
That students arrived in Chapel Hill with a less-than-perfect understanding of the world-as-it-is says something and it’s disheartening to ponder what that “something” might be. Maybe they all took a six-month trip to another planet, is that possible?
Students, faculty and administrators fail to acquire “situational awareness” at great peril. The business model for all these colleges and universities is grounded in the word, “residential.” You can temporarily make it work otherwise, but you must account for an on-line half-life.
The faculty on these campuses may wish to rise to the challenge and prove that, however temporary, “on-line” is not a discount, down-market value proposition for students.
And the students better know — for a lead-pipe certainty — that irresponsible personal behavior could very well be rewarded with a shuttered Old Ivy.
