Many universities have refused to consider family medical risk in determining fall teaching modality (online, in person, hybrid, etc.)

Georgia Tech is now among those, but for even worse reasons: Because the USG told it do, which is the answer for everything now.

We haven’t heard from our president, hired in secrecy by this Chancellor in a closed search last year, for months. His last notable public appearance, of sorts, was in March, when he walked back our (sane) COVID closure because … the USG told him to.

If you are a citizen of Georgia, you pay for our higher education system—all 26 campuses. Your fellow citizens are its students, staff, and faculty. Its highest paid campus presidents earn $1m+ per year to run them.

But they are not “allowed” to do so anymore.

Faculty governance, insofar as it existed, has essentially been suspended. It’s trappings persist, with endless task forces and so on. But their recommendations and requests get batted down, and eventually they cower away in defeat. “The USG won’t let us“ is the new fight song.

The USG central office has a budget of something like $165m per year. That’s just the body that oversees the 26 campuses. What is it doing with that money, besides getting in our way, exerting blind power, fighting with the institutions it supposedly operates?

Nobody in campus leadership will admit all this in public, but I promise you they all detest it in private. Why the mismatch? Their jobs are on the line, in the end. They are protecting themselves, their paychecks, their future ambition. This is why I keep calling them cowards.

The cowardice trickles down. Where are the executives under the presidents, who ought to be pushing them to fight back, to organize, to do their jobs and work for their institutions?

Some are trying, but all of them are also being “practical,” worrying about their own careers.

And so here I am, a lowly professor largely deemed ineligible for “””leadership“”” because I am not sufficiently compliant, basically alone telling you the truth. Disgusting.

The conflicts between the campuses and the USG started long before COVID-19 and it won’t end if we make it through this crisis. This is just the worst surge of a years-long storm.