Brief Friday comment: A good read on the future of colleges during the COVID pandemic
I don't have much new to say on this, but I will direct your attention to a very good article at Vox about the Fall semester, down whose barrel some of us are staring. The article begins with a great quote from Scott Galloway, a Marketing professor at NYU. Galloway accurately says that the narrative spreading within every university about COVID and how to manage it is, "this is unprecedented, and we're all in this together." He goes on to say, "which is Latin for, 'we're not lowering our prices, bitches.'"
Read the article.
This is chaos. You have no idea how chaotic this is. And Galloway nailed it. Colleges and universities do not have viable plans for in-person instruction or anything like orderly on-campus operations, but they don't want to admit that because they don't think they can get people to shell out full price for fully on-line instruction, and they don't want to cut their prices to something that accounts for on-line only instruction.
Hence, everything follows from the Galloway principle: "we're not lowering our prices, bitches."
The initial worst-case scenarios for COVID have not happened so far because we have done a lot to contain them. We shut down the economy for that. I ran the numbers for you, months ago. Assume 1/3 contagion with a 2% mortality rate under the worst case scenario, and you would get a death toll of around 2 million in the US alone. 330,000,000/3 = 110,000,000. 110,000,000*.02 = 2,200,000. What would you do to prevent 1/6th of a Holocaust?
Or would you pull some money-making scam on a physical space where you can't enforce social distancing because, to quote Scott Galloway, "we're not lowering our prices, bitches?"
In tenure veritas. Academic freedom.
Somebody's gonna get sick. A lotta people gonna get sick. Somebody's gonna die. Somebody's gonna get sued for this.
What's ironic here is that institutions are acting a lot like Donald Trump, in their denials, motives, and in the short-term nature of their thinking. Trump is in total denial about the state of the pandemic, acting like he can bluster and lie his way through to the election with a reopened economy. University administrators are acting like they, too, can bluster their way through to reopen, for financial reasons, with no plan, risking lives, and their thinking is completely short term. If they wind up in lawsuit territory for their short-term thinking, it will all be for nought.
Trumpian thinking-- by which I mean crass corruption, sociopathy and anti-intellectualism-- is everywhere.
Read the article.
This is chaos. You have no idea how chaotic this is. And Galloway nailed it. Colleges and universities do not have viable plans for in-person instruction or anything like orderly on-campus operations, but they don't want to admit that because they don't think they can get people to shell out full price for fully on-line instruction, and they don't want to cut their prices to something that accounts for on-line only instruction.
Hence, everything follows from the Galloway principle: "we're not lowering our prices, bitches."
The initial worst-case scenarios for COVID have not happened so far because we have done a lot to contain them. We shut down the economy for that. I ran the numbers for you, months ago. Assume 1/3 contagion with a 2% mortality rate under the worst case scenario, and you would get a death toll of around 2 million in the US alone. 330,000,000/3 = 110,000,000. 110,000,000*.02 = 2,200,000. What would you do to prevent 1/6th of a Holocaust?
Or would you pull some money-making scam on a physical space where you can't enforce social distancing because, to quote Scott Galloway, "we're not lowering our prices, bitches?"
In tenure veritas. Academic freedom.
Somebody's gonna get sick. A lotta people gonna get sick. Somebody's gonna die. Somebody's gonna get sued for this.
What's ironic here is that institutions are acting a lot like Donald Trump, in their denials, motives, and in the short-term nature of their thinking. Trump is in total denial about the state of the pandemic, acting like he can bluster and lie his way through to the election with a reopened economy. University administrators are acting like they, too, can bluster their way through to reopen, for financial reasons, with no plan, risking lives, and their thinking is completely short term. If they wind up in lawsuit territory for their short-term thinking, it will all be for nought.
Trumpian thinking-- by which I mean crass corruption, sociopathy and anti-intellectualism-- is everywhere.
Comments
Post a Comment