I'm getting really fucking sick of hearing that anyone who questions of the logic of reopening campuses--anyone who questions the plans for face to face instruction-- wants faculty & staff to be furloughed or fired because of revenue loss or even wants higher ed to fail.

First, these conversations among faculty and staff are conversations among the rank and file not management. The powers that be are not listening to these conversations because they are hellbent on face to face & using the threat of severe austerity to manufacture tacit consent.

Nonetheless, when someone such as myself or several of my colleagues raise our concerns the replies from the powers that be and those carrying their water is that we are responsible for coming up with better plans or else people less fortunate than us will lose money and jobs.

The choice should not be "face to face instruction or the death of the university."

It seems to me that face to face instruction will be more catastrophic in the long run, not only in terms of the health of all parties involved (including local communities which have zero say in what universities and colleges are planning).

Such plans will also cause severe financial problems in the future if lawsuits follow the inevitable student deaths.

At the very least, we need to wonder what will happen when students get pissed about the bait-and-switch we pulled when we told them to come to campus and then send them home when the second, third, or fourth wave hits.

The threat of austerity if we don't fully open is laughable given that we are already facing austerity situations.

Things can get worse, but they are going to get worse regardless if we can't come up w/ better alternatives than the fantasy of in person instruction coupled to an inevitable exacerbation of the COVID crisis, on one hand, or the end of all higher ed things, on the other.

This WaPo article gets at some of the problem, if unintentionally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/06/16/many-colleges-are-bringing-students-back-campus-this-fall-why-some-faculty-are-very-concerned/.

The student quoted at the beginning is well within her rights to demand the college experience, one she has no doubt been looking forward to for a long time. However, I think that, as faculty & staff, we have an obligation to educate students about the realities of the situation.

Yes, you want to come and do the things that college has traditionally entailed, but if we allow that to happen the long term problems may well be insurmountable.

What will happen when students die? What will happen when parents no longer want to spend money on universities that are more concerned about that money than they are about the lives of those who are spending it?

The second issue in the article is Purdue president Daniels saying that "45,000 students want us to open up" (or words to that effect). This is a dubious claim, namely that students are in lock step with one another about what they want.

More importantly, it treats that demand as a force of nature, one that must be obeyed and one that cannot be changed or directed. Again, it's our job to educate, and this seems like a moment that needs to be made "teachable" for the sake of our lives and our future.

And we should never forget one of the most important lessons from genre horror: horror involves the already there that has been invisible because of historical circumstances: because of a good economy, because of the state of knowledge production, because of ideology.

Here, the problem being exposed (among other things) is the fragility of this system. Here in Colorado, we get almost no state funding and our budget is extraordinarily dependent on out of state tuition.

As such, we are being threatened w/ catastrophe if we can't recruit all that &&& I mean students from California, Texas, Florida, and so on. But the pple voicing this threat are the same people who created this fragile system, one whose failure is inevitable regardless of COVID.

What was going to happen when the population crunch strikes in a few years? There are only so many out of state dollars I mean students to go around.

The system can't produce them and it will increasingly be in competition with other systems (or other parts of the same system) to sustain itself.

In short, we are being told that we have no choice but to risk our health so that we can maintain a failing system for a few more years. No one is trying to come up with a way to protect both the system or our health.

And you can forget about addressing the deep, infrastructural, ideological problems now being exposed (or more clearly exposed, especially to those of inclined to ignore them under better circumstances).

Like so much of neoliberal discourse, the rush to reopen is presented in terms of TINA: There Is No Alternative. The system that we rely on, that some of us hand a direct or indirect hand in creating, is simply the way it is.

It cannot be changed. Anyone who questions this system is or will be responsible for all the terrible things that happen to other people as a result of its failure.

Anyone who questions this system is or will be responsible for all the terrible things that happen to other people as a result of its failure.

And of course, in keeping with neoliberal ideology, we all have a choice: work under threat to our health and lives for far less than we are worth or starve to death.

This thread has some traction, which is rare for me so here's my soundcloud:

Black Lives Matter
Abolish police
Believe women
Trans women are women
Trans men are men
Decolonize your syllabus
Center marginalized voices
Fuck ableism