We are so special

The president of my university has sent down a message to all the branch campuses. Mine gets some special love.

For Crookston and Morris:

Move-in for University housing in Crookston will continue as scheduled, and on-campus Morris students should remain on campus. Classes on both campuses will proceed as scheduled. Our approach is different here because of timing and because both campuses operate in communities where reported case numbers are lower than in other areas of Minnesota. We also believe the likelihood of widespread disease transmission to be lower on both campuses compared to our other campuses that have higher campus and community densities and more consistent traffic in and out of campus areas. Both campuses continue to work closely with our Health Emergency Response Office (HERO) and local and state public health officials. We are closely monitoring the situation with Chancellors Holz-Clause and Behr, and will continue to revisit our plans daily and consider any necessary adjustments to protect the health and safety of these campuses. Watch your email closely for updates from your Chancellor.

We opened first, so the word is to just continue as we are with no adjustments. Isn’t that nice? They also promise to watch us guinea pigs closely — if we start dropping dead, they’ll change their policy. Very reassuring.

For the other campuses, though, she announces a “pivot” (there’s a word that has been wearing out its welcome.)

For Duluth, Rochester, and the Twin Cities:
Move-in dates for University housing on all three campuses are postponed for at least two weeks to provide additional time to evaluate new and emerging federal testing guidance, as well as continued evaluation of techniques used to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This window helps us avoid moving large numbers of students into on-campus housing and then moving them out again if public health conditions eventually require distance learning for the remainder of the fall semester. Students who plan to live in University residence halls or apartments will soon receive more information from the relevant office on your campus.
If University housing is your safest and best option, or if you are an international student with no other housing option, we will work with you to ensure you have a place to stay on campus. Duluth, Rochester, and Twin Cities housing will remain open to students facing these challenges, much as it has for a small number of students during the spring and summer terms. Students should contact the housing office on their campus with concerns.
Undergraduate courses for all three campuses will proceed as scheduled, but will be wholly online for *at least* two weeks with some limited exceptions. Prior to the start of the semester, students will be informed by their professors about how courses will change, if at all. After the Regents meeting next week, please contact your advisor or student success coach if you have questions or concerns about your schedule.

Oh. So they’re sensibly backing away from their plan to open classes for in-person instruction…but while leaving my campus dangling. They’re tentatively planning to open up again after two weeks, if all goes well. I guess if they hear screams and moans from Western Minnesota, they’ll scrub that plan, too.

Meanwhile, here in that western community that opened up on Wednesday, I saw a young woman celebrating the first weekend of the school year by buying four pizzas and several liters of Coke. She didn’t look big enough to be eating them all by herself, so she must have brilliantly figured out to eat pizza in a group while wearing a mask.

Nah, I shouldn’t be so cynical. Our students are wise, she was probably just delivering boxes to her friends, and they’ll maintain a responsible distance while eating far apart, and I won’t have to worry about a cluster of cases in two weeks, just when the central campus is looking our way to see if we’re dying yet.

I don’t know that I like being on the other side of the microscope

Nature puts an uncomfortable twist on our current situation: Millions of students are returning to US universities in a vast unplanned pandemic experiment. Gosh, I guess I am like a big flask of hot agar, fresh out of the autoclave and getting poured into petri dishes for the students to contaminate. Let’s see what grows, OK?

Bringing so many university students to crowded campuses is uniquely risky in the United States, which has seen the largest number of deaths to COVID-19 of any country and has active community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic. Other large countries with surging infection rates, such as India and Brazil, are not opening up campuses to the same degree.

According to the College Crisis Initiative, a research project at Davidson College in North Carolina, more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States will bring students back to campus in some form, with 45 operating “fully in person”, another 446 as “primarily in person”, and nearly 600 offering various combinations of online and in-person classes as of 7 August. But plans change daily, with many universities that boldly planned to hold in-person classes deciding at the last minute to switch to virtual versions.

Yay! We get to bear the brunt of American exceptionalism this time around! My university is one of the 600. Yesterday I had my first student write to me to say they won’t be able to attend our in-person lab because they’ve been exposed and are in a two-week quarantine period. I’m glad they’re responsible about it all, but what am I going to do if (when) more students drop out of the lab? I’m definitely not going to penalize anyone for not infecting me, but all of the plans in our great unplanned pandemic experiment are going to crumble fast.

oh god oh god oh god

Classes start tomorrow. I’m looking at my pile of notes and lecture material and plans and thinking, “I’ve got this,” like I do every year, but now I have to do everything over Zoom, which is a real monkey wrench in the proceedings, and I’ve got the specter of disease and death hovering overhead, and who knows, maybe a political coup coming up midsemester, with forces in government working to destroy my profession, and I have to sit through a great long division meeting this morning where we’ll all pretend everything is normal and hear administrators go “wah wah, wa-wa wah wah” because I won’t be able to parse what they’re saying, and I’m going to be trying to finish up my syllabus with Zoom acting as little more than a distraction interfering with getting my actual WORK done, and cops are killing people and other people are gasping out their life on respirators while I’m merely suffering acute anxiety as the world burns, but hey, the flames will get to me soon enough to bring sweet oblivion and no one will care because there are more important things than a story about an old guy’s heart exploding and brain liquifying in an isolated office in the middle of midwestern farmland, so now I’m wondering if my headphones will stopper up my ears enough to prevent the brain goo from dribbling out and making a mess on the carpet.

That’s my workday ahead. How’s yours?

Well, that was quick

UNC opened for in-person instruction just one week ago; they have announced now that they are switching to entirely online instruction.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university.

They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, they said.

What kind of magical, miraculous prophet could have foreseen such an outcome?

I mean, even with that example right in front of our face, no one could possibly predict that all the other universities that are the process of opening up might anticipate a similar result.

I really hope none of those students comes down with a serious case of COVID-19 with long-term consequences. Is UNC prepared to handle the moral and economic effects of that?

Hey, is the University of Minnesota ready?

An appropriate response from the UNC student paper.

Morris is Panic City today

At least for me. The students are back and lurking in the dorms. I have a Zoom meeting with advisees today. Classes start on Wednesday. Everything is Officially No Fun for a while.

Besides the usual fretting over getting courses up and running, now we have the added fun of waiting for the first coronavirus case to show up, and seeing how the university deals with it. At least we have the advantage of seeing other universities’ experience. UNC, for instance, has been open for one week and already has four clusters of cases in student housing.

We’re really opening, huh?

I’ve been doing Instagram wrong

I can look at what I post that people like, and it’s discouraging. So I posted this photo of a spider and her two egg sacs a few days ago, and it has been rewarded with 16 ♥, which is about par for the course. Then late last night, I threw in this quick view of me and Mary standing in a grassy field and…111 ♥ already? What?

I guess everyone prefers pictures of Mary to spiders. I’m going to have to switch to taking nothing but photos of the Instagram model I married in order to become a rich and famous influencer.

Except she doesn’t like to be photographed. Oh well, back to the “trying desperately to make spiders a thing” grind.

Minnesota does not have a mask mandate

We say we do. Governor Walz made a proclamation that everyone is required to wear masks indoor in public places. Everyone ignores it. It’s a lie.

I just got back from Alexandria, and I’m pissed off. We drive 40 minutes away to get our groceries because our local grocery store, Willie’s, is a plague pit that does not enforce the rule, but we walked into that Aldi after our drive and just turned around and left again. A young woman was ahead of us, no mask, with two young kids running around maskless. There was also an older couple, too: the woman was wearing a mask, but her asshole husband had his mask pulled down around his neck. There were two young dudes exiting…no masks. Hell no, I’m worried enough about a flood of students coming in next week without this anxiety, so we were gone.

This is madness. Our county has been quiet for a long time — I’ve been watching the stats for a while, and it was boring because Stevens County just hovered around 2, 3, 4 cases for the longest time. It’s at 22 now, suddenly. We need to take this stuff seriously.

You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?