Fall Semester?

The President of my university issued a statement Sunday claiming that we are full steam ahead for fall 2020 semester live on campus:

President Bendapudi made the following announcements:

• The University of Louisville will have regular campus operations for the Fall semester.
• This entails students living on campus, learning on campus and online, and faculty and staff working together to advance our mission of teaching, and research, and service. 

Many faculty members have spent part of their day exchanging email and social media messages reflecting unhappiness with this decision. One issue is lack of consultation with faculty and staff. The decision undercut the work of committees that were supposed to meet this week to discuss this issue. The President acted without our input.

If the current situation with COVID-19 does not change, however, then the idea is completely unworkable. And that actually seems kinds of obvious to me. I suspect that University officials realize that public health uncertainty is going to reduce enrollments and tuition revenue, so they are saying something to seem positive and decisive. The latest message is basically PR, appealing to students and parents, as well as potentially gullible media who might report this uncritically. Administrators still have plenty of time to backtrack if the disease prevalence is significant and the case fatality rate (CFR) remains high.

If central administration does not realize this, then I am quite concerned. Universities are kind of like nursing homes, meatpacking plants, ships, and prisons (the 4 places that have suffered the worst outbreaks) in that people are in close proximity to one another for prolonged periods day after day. These are clearly incubators of the disease and some local facilities have suffered outbreaks of half to two-thirds of their populations. If half of the UofL community of 28,000 students and employees gets COVID-19 and the CFR is a fairly conservative 0.35%, then that’s 14,000 infections and nearly 500 fatalities. Even if it’s 0.01%, then that’s 140 deaths.**

No one will risk those lives, I would assume.

Before faculty and students can possibly return to crowded classrooms, the USA needs far more testing for the disease and antibodies, as well as extensive contact tracing --  unless there proves to be some kind of miraculous treatment for the disease in the next few months. The federal government has bungled its response, letting February pass without strong contact tracing and testing in isolated hotspots -- and the problems have only magnified in the subsequent months as testing continues to lag and contact tracing is nearly forgotten.

In short, I’m not optimistic that the situation is going to improve, so I’m not certain how we can possibly plan for anything other than online education.  Given that most faculty in A&S (by far the largest teaching unit) are not paid for work in June and July, any efforts to improve distance education needs to be happening NOW, in May. Exams are over and faculty cannot travel for personal or professional reasons, as many ordinarily would during May.

After performing well in March and April, UofL is botching its ongong COVID-19 response. .


--------------

** Yes, I realize the case fatality rate is unknown, but see this post for an explanation of my use of 0.35.  I also realize that the population of a university community skews young and that's a population that has a lower mortality rate from the disease.  However, I'm also ignoring the probability that students will transmit the virus to family and community members in their jobs and homes. Louisville is a commuter school and most students work -- at least when the economy is functioning.


Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.