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Here are some thoughts from this college professor about what’s happening at colleges around the country right now....
Let’s take sex, drugs, and parties out of the equation. When college students come to university, they’re placed in communal living situations so that they develop social structures. This is their first time living away from home, away from their family support...
...and community networks. It’s a tremendously disruptive transition and living at college is designed to provide them social support to get through that transition.
What did we expect these students were going to do? Be removed from their families for the first time in their lives, show up in a new town, and live completely and entirely isolated? That would be cruel and counterproductive to their emotional and intellectual development
We had two choices. Leave their social structure intact and let them learn remotely, or accept that they are going to need new support networks and that will likely involve fraternizing in groups, leading to the spread of the virus.
Because even if they all were totally compliant with social distancing and did nothing but study and stay in their little rooms, that would be incredibly harmful and developmentally inappropriate to ask of a teenager that has never lived in their own before.
They are adults capable of moral and ethical decision making, but development is still a spectrum and it is unfair to put them in a position that we know will be damaging to their psyche as the trade off for education.
This is why I pleaded with my youngest stepchild to not go away to college this year and do remote learning. I knew he would be torn between suffering with the isolation or engaging socially for his own mental health.
I hope some of us remember what it was like to sit on their dorm room bed after their parents left. That feeling of being “on your own” for the first time. I don’t blame these students. I feel sadness they were put in this position at all.
