Next term is going to be awful in pretty much every way imaginable.  But it could be worse.  Most obviously, it would be worse if a remote fall term is not a one-off.  It’s possible the virus will not be contained sufficiently for a resumption of face-to-face classes or international travel by January.  We could be looking at a full year of this, in which case i) many will wish they spent more time working on better online delivery over the summer, ii) we’re going to have some serious drop-out and deferral numbers to deal with and iii) the financial situation our universities and especially colleges will be just beyond awful, due to the absence of international students.

I would now put the odds of this kind of outcome – in Ontario and Quebec at least – north of 20%, mostly because these provinces have not been as vigilant about stay-at-home as some other jurisdictions, and also because neither still has anything resembling a clear test and trace strategy in place.  (But sure, the weather is warm now so let’s open everything up!)

In the UK – which now leads the world in death rate per million thanks to the alternatingly frivolous and callous asshattery of the Johnson government – we are starting to get a taste of what a longer shut-down might look like.  Cambridge University, for instance, became the first university in the world (to my knowledge) to say it would shut down lectures not just for Fall 2020 but Winter 2021 as well.  Now this means a little bit less at Cambridge than it would to 99.9% of universities in the world, because so much of their instruction is via tutorial.  But still, at one of the most important medical universities in the world, the consensus is that lectures will not be safe for another 12 months.  Chew on that for a bit.

(Meanwhile, it looks like most Australian and New Zealand universities will be back to modified face-to-face by late July/early August.  Just sayin’.)

But I guess the only thing worse than being shut down in January would be opening in September.  And yet, somehow this seems to be the dominant option under discussion in the US.  The big private unis have not made formal announcements yet (though Brown University’s President, Christina Paxson, kicked off the debate with a particularly horrendous NYT op-ed a few weeks back, which seemed to suggest that keeping prestigious institutions was the main reason the US should conquer COVID); that said, a number of flagship publics where international/out-of-state students (i.e. those paying full freight) account for 35% or more of the student body have certainly started announcing plans and they are pretty much all “DAMN THE TORPEDOS, WE ARE OPEN”

Part of this is about money (for reasons I outlined on Monday): many of these institutions worry they won’t be able to get people to pay their high fees unless education is face-to-face.  But part of it is rooted in the (to Canadian eyes) deeply weird geography of American higher education, where many of the country’s most important universities are in towns the size of Medicine Hat or Belleville.  Naturally, at these places, virtually everyone on campus is “from away” and a very high percentage of students live on campus or in quasi-official housing like fraternities and sororities (anyone who doubts Greek organizations as a major source of campus housing needs to take a stroll down Capstone Drive in Tuscaloosa and see what a real frat row looks like), or in student-specific private townhomes/apartment buildings.  So, there’s a kind of fantasy that these institutions are bubbles that can be protected.

If you want to see this fantasy on full display, check out Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels’ op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday.  The basic thrust of the argument is that COVID is low-risk for students: this bug, so risky in one segment of the population, poses a near-zero risk to young people. Among covid-19 deaths, 99.9 percent have occurred outside the 15-to-24 age group; the survival rate in the 20-to-29 age bracket is 99.99 percent. Even assuming the United States eventually reaches 150,000 total fatalities, covid-19 as a risk to the young will rank way below accidents, cancer, heart disease and suicide. In fact, it won’t even make the top 10.   It does not seem to occur to him that students infected with the disease could possibly interact with anyone else in a more vulnerable situation, or if he does, that there is any kind of moral imperative for Purdue to do anything about it. (Indiana has a COVID-related death rate about midway between Ontario’s and Quebec’s; the county in which Purdue is located has a slightly above-average infection rate).  And that’s not even getting into questions about how academic staff are going to feel on campus.  In a recent CNN interview, he suggested there might be a lot of teaching from behind plexiglass shields. Oy.

Madness, really.  I hope my friend Robert Kelchen was right when he wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that this is all some kind of kabuki theatre and that US colleges won’t really open in the Fall for the obvious health reasons, but man, every day they claim to be planning an in-person re-opening is a day they are not spending improving their online offerings. (You can listen to a recording of a conversation I had with Robert here).  I would not want to be at one of those campuses the day they changed their minds. 

Not all American universities are like this.  A lot of community colleges have said they will be online in the fall, as have some state systems which aren’t reliant on out-of-state fees (e.g. the Cal State system).  And at the other end of the prestige spectrum we are getting the exact opposite of a re-open announcement: Princeton’s Sociology department has said it is not taking applications for its graduate program for fall 2021 because it doesn’t think it can do so and make good on its existing financial commitments to current students.

Anyways, at the moment I’d say Canada is in a Goldilocks position: neither as pessimistic as Cambridge nor as outlandish as America.  It might not stay that way, particularly if certain provincial governments start coming up with bright ideas about re-opening.  But we can keep our fingers crossed.