10 thoughts on colleges reopening

1. Not every college is the same. There are community colleges, private colleges, public colleges. Some have 1,500 students, some have 50,000 students. Some are in rural areas and small towns, some are in densely populated urban centers. Some have wild and uncontrollable Greek life, some (very much) do not.

2. Not every place is the same. There are regions, locales, and states that are still hot spots on lockdown, and there are others that are in rather better shape.

3. Not every institution is the same. Some are cash-strapped or risk-averse or profit-driven or top-down—or what have you—and some have resilient and time-honored habits of shared governance.

4. Not every professor is the same. This applies not only to characteristics like age or discipline but also to personal judgment or preference: universities are not split, in a perfect dichotomy, between administrators who are pushing forward with reopening and faculty who are pushing back.

5. Economic pressures are real. Although it is a sad and lamentable fact, American higher ed is a teetering tower ready to topple over at any moment. Without relitigating the relevant history, that is where things stand. Many, perhaps most, colleges were forced to make an impossible decision: reopen residential instruction, or initiate systematic lay-offs, firings, departmental cuts, and program eliminations. If the latter would have been truly unavoidable, how many staff and faculty would have opted to go fully online?

6. Students and families have agency. No one and nothing is forcing students to return to campus; if families preferred doing a gap year, getting a job, or learning online, there are readily available options for all three of those routes. Students and their families are making their own assessment of the risk. It is far from irrational to select residential college instruction, given the options.

7. Consider the alternatives for students. If a 20-year old who would be in college isn't in college, what is she doing? Either she is quarantined at home, working (likely not from home), or living it up with friends. The latter two options entail levels of risk commensurate with or far greater than residential college life. And the first follows on the heels of six full months of functional social lockdown, in the best of circumstances alone with a couple family members, in the worst trapped in dysfunctional households with negligent or unhealthy persons. We are only beginning to reckon with the effects of such extended isolation on young persons' mental health. In any case, there is no prefabricated universal calculus for what would be best for each person: continued isolation versus greater risk of exposure, and if the latter, at work or at college. Given the fact that so many families have chosen to send their children to college, shouldn't we presume a reasonable assessment of the risk and of the various options, and respect the possibility that such a decision was wise (or, again, the least bad choice, given the options)?

8. It follows from all of these reflections that there is no one-size-fits-all judgment upon "American colleges reopening." I have no doubt that some colleges should not have reopened; that some could have done so wisely but have not implemented adequate precautions; that some made the decision largely out of fear; that most did so as a financial necessity; that plenty did so cynically, hoping to make it long enough to capture non-refundable tuition. But those facts, in the aggregate, have little to say regarding particular cases; nor still do bad actors or even commonly held bad motivations per se mean that most colleges should not have reopened. The need for tuition and the precarity of jobs, on the one hand, and the rational desire of families to have a residential college to send their children to, on the other, can all coexist together.

9. What has been ascendant these last few months is a species of scientism that supposes questions of politics and prudence can be answered by experts in epidemiology and pandemics. But they cannot. What is needed instead is wisdom, the virtue of phronesis that puts practical reason to work in making global judgments, in light of all the evidence and the totality of factors, about what is best to be done in this case for this person for these reasons. Those reasons cannot be put under a microscope or studied in a lab. They are not verifiable. But resort to them is what is sorely needed in this moment.

10. In addition to wisdom, what we need is grace. Prudence can be applied differently; different people come to opposed judgments, either about distinct cases or about the same one. That is okay. We can live with that. I understand and respect those friends and writers and fellow academics who think reopening is foolhardy or unwise; I know they have their reasons. But such a judgment, even if correct, is not self-evident or uncontested. We have to have grace with one another, we have to learn how to be patient. I myself am impatient in the extreme. We have to try nonetheless (I have to try). That's the only way we're going to get through this together.