Morning all.  The good news is: the blog is back!  The bad news is: that means summer’s over.  My apologies.

Not that “summer” has been more than a vague reference to warmer temperatures this year.  Instead of a mixture of research and downtime, what we’ve had this summer is – for most, anyway – an all-out effort to make a semester (fingers crossed) of remote teaching workable.  The aggregate sum of all these incredible efforts is a remote semester that might not be too bad after all.  Certainly, a lot has been promised and by and large it seems students are prepared to give the system a chance – all indications are that domestic enrolments are near what they were last year and there is very little organized pushback around paying something close to full fees.  These are good things.

To see how it could have been different, look south of the border.  There, many schools promised a face-to-face fall semester, but professors nevertheless worked hard – like those north of the border did – to make an online term workable.  But it was without the same kind of institutional support because universities didn’t want to spoil the whole “we’re going to be normal!” narrative.  And then, in the last week of July, when it was too late for high-paying out-of-state students to switch schools – BAM!  A switch to remote teaching, often with an “it’s only for a couple of weeks” message. Of course, this is what everyone said in March, too.  So now you have students justifiably thinking they have been the victims of a bait-and-switch and that this is  just a “zoom semester”.

(Could be worse, of course.  Many schools in the US are sticking with in-person semesters in the midst of exploding COVID levels, which is a recipe for disaster.  The New York Times is keeping track of reported COVID cases on campuses across the US, and it turns out that as of Thursday just the top seven institutions – Alabama (Birmingham), UNC Chapel Hill, Central Florida, Alabama (Tuscaloosa), Auburn, NC State, and the University of Georgia – have more active cases than all of Canada.)

So, two cheers for us, I guess.  But dangers still lurk in terms of the way our institutions are handling the transition.  The widespread lack of clear minimum standards for re-designing courses means that there will be cases of dipping quality (institutional support, or lack thereof, may play a role here as well).  The fact that some institutions have encouraged students to physically come to the city where the university is located and, in some cases, re-opened residences is a cause for concern.  As we have seen in the US, the terms “social distancing” and “on-campus housing” don’t rest easily with one another; residences can be, as one wag said back in March, “cruise ships sitting in the middle of campus”.  Now, that doesn’t mean we should expect UNC-style plague outbreaks in Canada, because North Carolina’s background rate of community transmission is much higher (150 per million vs. about 11 per million up here).  But it is a risk, and one some institutions may come to regret.

And of course, we are no further along in terms of government financial back-up.  The feds came up with an oddly designed research subsidy in May (which somehow managed to give proportionally more money to institutions that are less research intensive), but since then: nothing, nada, zip.  And provincial governments aren’t saying anything either, at least publicly (I am told that there have been constructive behind-the-scenes discussions in a couple of provinces but it’s hard to know what this means when everyone is keeping shtum). 

It’s hard to design a decent rescue package when you don’t yet know the extent of the damage, and universities and colleges face split imperatives.  They will want to big up their losses to government as a claim for aid, but none will wish to signal to the public and to students that they are in a precarious situation.   We’ll get hints: the more secure institutions won’t mind being honest about losses (here’s Santa Ono talking about UBC taking a quarter-billion hit), and in the Atlantic there is a scheduled early-October enrolment data release from the AAU.  But still, the correct take would have been to get the feds to, at a bare minimum, put in place some kind of liquidity back-stop for institutions in trouble, to keep them on their feet until all this is over.

Because it is going to end.  Soon(ish).  And we’re going to get back to a pre-COVID normal relatively quickly.  People telling you this is the new normal are trying to sell you something.  It is quite remarkable to go back to the early 1920s to see what economic and cultural traces the 1919 influenza pandemic left, and the answer is basically none.  There’s no obvious reason why things will be different this time.  And so, the safe bet is that all the problems and challenges and strengths we had eight months ago will simply re-emerge.  The best way to think of COVID is as a small meteor hitting the earth: thunderous short-term consequences, sometimes altering the physical landscapes quite a bit, but life goes on.

Someone smarter than me on Twitter – apologies, I forget who – made a literary analogy a few months ago to the effect that while in March and April COVID was the plot, since then it has become the scene.  And that’s the right way to think about it.  Which is why over the course of the next few months (the coming week excepted) you won’t see me talk too much about COVID, or remote teaching or anything like that.  I know it is overwhelming, I know it’s the now, but it’s not the future.  And if this blog is about anything, it’s about keeping our collective eyes on where we’re going as a sector.

This is a fragile time.  Some institutions are financially fragile.  And on-campus, professors and students are exhausted and worried for all sorts of reasons.  But if we keep calm and support one another, we’ll get through it.  Together.

Good luck, bon courage and now – back to work.