<nettime> Coronavirus journal: higher ed

[Dan S Wang <danswang@protonmail.com>]

Dear Nettime,

Partial disclosure: I am married to a leading voice in the field of
college health, one frequently quoted in national media as universities
began to declare suspensions. She has managed campus health at three major
research universities over the past 20 years.
 

I type this sitting at a table facing south-southwest, looking out from a
rise from which the basin of South Central LA unfolds before me. In the
distance I see planes incoming from the east, descending into LAX all day
long. The planes disappear from sight, blocked by another rise beyond
which is Venice and the beach towns. Along the far horizon line to the
southeast, on clear nights we can see the tiny distant bursts of
Disneyland’s evening fireworks.
 

A week ago Disney announced that their theme park and hotels would close
as contagion precautions. This follows a series of high profile event
cancellations beginning two weeks ago. Touching different worlds but
sending a signal of realness to an apathetic or worse unbelieving US
public were the announced cancellations of first the South by Southwest
music and tech conference in Austin, Texas, and then the suspension of all
NBA league play, everywhere. Art institutions around LA, large and small,
canceled openings and lectures, and then days later closed galleries, too.
For myself, I canceled a late February trip to attend my own opening in
Montreal and then canceled an April gig trip to Chicago.
 

Tellingly, the chain of cancellations in the US was started not by any
governmental agency or public official at any level, federal, state,
county, or municipal. It was led first by private higher education, and
then quickly followed by the public universities. Beginning about
twenty-five days ago schools around the country recalled students studying
abroad, and then a week later announced suspensions of classroom teaching
and campus events, and a week after that, the need to clear out dorms and
residence halls. Many colleges and universities told students to go on
their scheduled spring breaks but to not return for another week, or even
for the rest of the semester. Harvard and MIT ordered their students to
vacate the dorms with less than a week’s notice.

Among my friends who are on faculties, many immediately complained about
administrations making decisions with no faculty input, raised worry about
their students who may not have ready access to the remote learning
portals all were suddenly expected to use‹and how are they supposed to
teach a studio class online anyway‹and voiced paranoia over this disaster
being the wedge by which the universities will restructure them out of
classroom teaching altogether.

The lean towards a conspiracy view obfuscates the story of how exactly the
schools ended up leading the US response to the virus. For that we need to
understand the public health vacuum created by the ruling ideology of
modern US conservatism. Like public education, like the public utilities,
by mid-century the departments of public health emerged as one of the
cornerstone institutions delivering the post-war American way of life:
sanitary, healthy, and scientific. Usually most robust at the county
level, departments of public health typically inspected restaurants,
guided schools on immunization regs, and provided free clinical services
for the indigent and uninsured. To American conservatives the field of
public health came to represent the worst combination of liberal bogeymen:
regulations, a safety net, and pointy-headed experts.
 

By the time Trump disbanded the global pandemic team in 2018 that had been
established by Barack Obama, the message was clear: no matter the public
health failures of the recent past, loyalty to conservative ideology would
be more important than life itself. Hence the tardy, piecemeal, confused
and incompetent federal response we’re seeing now, and the defanged
leadership from county departments across the nation.
 

In this vacuum the universities acted. As neoliberalized as they are, the
major universities still possess much of the following relative to the
degraded public sphere:

A) Expertise from within. Including that of virologists, infectious
disease labs, and epidemiologists. The voices of experts retain
credibility in the university.

B) A global perspective in everyday operations. This is due to having
large numbers of international students, extensive study abroad programs,
and international cooperation in research. International students from
China were among the first to raise concerns.

C) Insulation from political concerns in decision making. No need to make
decisions through the heavily corrupted channels of so-called democratic
bodies.

D) Emergency preparedness. From meningitis outbreaks to massacres by
firearms, to student riots over football games, all modern American
universities have threat assessment in place, even the Bible colleges. For
example, few other US institutions‹hospitals included‹have as much
experience in placing people in quarantine. Many universities have managed
minor student quarantines over mumps and measles in recent years.
 

Some have marveled at how quickly universities across the country, from
Boston to Austin, began the shut down process nearly in parallel,
seemingly without coordination from above. That is because campus health
officers have been talking to each other, just as they have for years now
regarding the aforementioned campus threats. In sum, higher education‹a
field comprising hundreds of incredibly complex and diverse
institutions‹has proven itself to be the sector most well organized and
responsive to pandemic in all of US society.

This happened largely in spite of the reactive nature of today’s
university presidents, people hired for their ability to fundraise and
smile through the many crises that the operations staff are constantly
managing. The college health people overcame the presidents’ fear of bad
publicity partly by dangling the dream of remote learning as a way to keep
revenues uninterrupted. In the end being technocrats themselves, the
college health experts took remote learning in its unproven and untested
state, as part of the answer to the challenge of dispersing the student
bodies. This is the contradiction at work: though population-oriented by
training and socially-oriented in their problem solving, by buttressing
sound public health arguments with visions of operational continuity
through remote learning, the college health experts opened the door for
the ideologues intent on stripping the campuses of the humanities
completely.

So the cries of disaster capitalism are not unfounded. But they remain
only cries. The discussion of practical resistance thus far has been
limited to a few voices encouraging faculty to “teach poorly” online, a
kind of self-sabotage passing for a strategy. That impulse says as much
about the “stuck-ist” tendencies of the US left as it does the baffling
new conditions. Critique is the way of the modern intellectual; organizing
is far less common. This pattern seems to be holding under the new
circumstances.

My suggestion for my faculty friends (yes, extremely easy to offer from my
independent artist/house husband perch) is to revive an old form for the
current moment: the teach-in. Teach-ins gained currency in the early days
of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. The teach-ins helped to establish the
popularly understood context in which to critically analyze US military
involvements abroad. And more than that, the form was a way for professors
and students alike to cooperatively address the moral complicity and
structural allegiances of the institutions to which they belonged by
self-consciously politicizing their assigned roles as researchers and
learners. The best teach-ins, whether about the war in Vietnam or
apartheid South Africa, ultimately informed the question, What do WE do
about this?
 

As teaching moves online for the rest of the spring and possibly beyond, I
am hoping to see professors interrupting their courses for a virtual
teach-in of their own, to devote a week or even a single lecture to the
self-reflexively considered questions: What is a virus, what is a
pandemic, and why were college students, teachers, and campus communities
the ones called upon to first respond to this situation?? No matter the
course, no matter the discipline. Now is not the time to take cover in
one’s specialization. Without such intellectual intervention from within
satisfying the directive to convert courses will help the displacement of
classroom teaching gain permanent traction, particularly at the non-elite
levels, and hasten the move of higher ed away from exploratory learning
and towards certification.
 

At this time, having had a week or two to absorb the new situation, many
students are expressing grief over their sudden loss of campus
life‹schoolmates gone, spring rituals canceled, phantom graduations.
Faculty, being the university employees closest to the students, have been
the first to express sympathy. But now they need to write the narrative
and not just complain about it. The campus health people met their
challenge, with plenty of improvisation and difficult decisions. Their
moment is over. Now the faculty need to step up and meet theirs, and I
hope it happens before the next wave of grief overtakes all, the one
brought by the loss of life yet to come.

All best,

 
Dan W. 


--
Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center
IG: type_rounds_1968
danswang.xyz






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