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Rutgers canceled its May commencement, as did UConn.
The state of Kansas is closing its K-12 schools through the end of the school year, resorting entirely to online teaching.
The governor of New Jersey just closed all indoor shopping malls indefinitely.
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are talking about universal basic income to offset the destruction of the retail and service sectors.
All of those things happened this week, and I’m writing this on Tuesday.
Sabrina Sanders tweeted out that the surreal feeling of this time reminds her of the period right after Sept. 11. I agree. I was in New Jersey then, close enough to NYC that we actually put up a colleague for the night who couldn’t make it home to Manhattan. For weeks afterwards, I remember people driving differently. The usual aggressiveness was replaced, briefly, by an awkward courtesy, as if we were all suddenly much more aware of how fragile everyone was.
For weeks after Sept. 11, I rationed my news consumption in the name of preserving my mental health. I’ve found myself doing the same this week. Both kids are home, readying to take classes online for indefinite amounts of time, and they take emotional cues from us. Panic wouldn’t help. But this is definitely strange.
Part of the strangeness, as an academic administrator, comes from having to decide which elements of "normal" to try to maintain and which to let go. For example, we’re starting to look at allowing a much broader use of a pass/fail option for classes, given that so many of them have changed so fundamentally. Normally, a proposal like that wouldn’t even come up, or if it did, would immediately get eye-rolled out of the room. But with the pace of change going on now, what seemed radical a few weeks ago, and still a little provocative now, may seem obvious in a few weeks. Suddenly the idea of asking our four-year counterparts to take grades of “pass” in transfer doesn’t seem so unthinkable.
The Boy wants to work at Six Flags this summer as an EMT. He’s a trained EMT already, and normally that would be an ideal summer job for someone going away again in the fall. Suddenly, it’s not obvious that the option will even exist.
The silver lining of liminal moments like these is that they can bring the more normal times into a different sort of clarity.
The point of a community college is to help members of the community make their way in the world. Semesters, grades, seat time and the like are tools to do that, but that’s all they are. The point isn’t any of those things. Some of those tools may not make much sense anymore, but sheer inertia prevented serious consideration of alternatives. If a pandemic does nothing else, it radically shifts inertia. (In poli-sci terms, it shifts the Overton window.) That can do a lot of short-term damage, but it can also open up possibilities for new ways of doing things.
When this surreal interlude ends, which it will, we’ll have a choice to make: learn from it, or not. I’m an educator; I root for learning. We may need to lead by example.
