What a selfish, entitled young person! I have very severe lung disease but even I and most patients with very severe lung disease can and will wear a mask properly over nose & mouth indoors.
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I am so angry,I canât even type straight!! I have had to delete my reply and start again twice! That student is so entitled, selfish and arrogant that not only did she not care about the professor, she doesnât even care about the other 24 students!! 
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The easiest solution was to remove the student. Some kids needed the class to graduate on time⊠I am impressed he came back at 88 to teach and you would think the school would bend over backwards to accommodate him and others like him. I feel at times the youth just doesnât have the respect that we did and gave others when we were youngerâŠ
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That is just unbelievably disrespectful and disgusting. Regardless of the (lack of) policy and her ârightâ to not wear a mask, to treat an elderly person with such casual disdain is truly shocking, and I assume that attitude goes against the school values. Has the university president come out with a comment to the community? This has to be addressed; itâs so shameful.
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The department and the school was not going to back him because they canât require masks. He knew that.
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It is true that without a mask-required policy, the department and school are in a tricky spot to âback himâ by forcing the girl to wear a mask; but that doesnât mean they canât back him and say that while true she is not absolutely required to listen to his request and out of graciousness and kindness comply with the request, it is the Bulldog Way (Iâm making this up) to be supportive of fellow Bulldogs and certainly it is admirable to behave like a decent human being around a treasured elderly professor, etc etc. I mean, they can at least come out and publicly shame that girl and express their displeasure with her given the specific circumstances (this veteran not only being 88 years old but having additional diabetes, etc). So they can express displeasure with her and also express remorse that this occurred and share what a treasured community member he is. They may not have a school-wide mandate, but that doesnât mean that community members canât still be expected to be respectful especially towards a nearly 90 year old wonder!!
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Well saidâŠ
I totally agree.
Apparently, after he quit, she made a flippant comment about the class being cancelled in front of a bunch of students who needed it to graduate. It sounds like the students are more pissed off at her than him (at least the ones who spoke up).
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If this Reddit thread is to be believed, Cornell has more positive cases than can be held at its quarantine site, and a significant number of infected students are moving about and living in dorms like normal, with no evidence of contact tracing or an organized response.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cornell/comments/pe5d3c/covid_response/
This needs to be verified, of course, but what an awful, unacceptable mess if true.
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It is not tricky.
It requires a small dose of courage. The very most that the administrators, who all have well-feathered nests, are risking is a post. Most or all are tenured and will not lose their professorships, just an administrative job. They will not lose their homes, their childrenâs education, their retirements, their next lifetime of meals. But they will not open their mouths, and their being such good girls and boys is why they have those jobs in the first place.
As for the argument that the state will cut them off: insert rude English word for seedcase here. All these red-state state-U systems are billions of dollars in hock, and the only way to go on servicing the debt is to keep the universities as healthy as they can. The alternative is to cut off funding, make the university wither, and then still, in the legislature, have to pay the tens to low-hundreds of millions of dollars annually on the debt which will still very much exist. In other words, they would have to pay a substantial fraction of what they pay now towards the state universities, only they wouldnât get universities for their people in the process. While Iâm sure there are some state reps who would rejoice at that, the majority of even GOP state reps would recognize this as an enormous own-goal and would back away.
Like I said. A small dose of courage. But they havenât that, so itâs up to 88-year-old airmen.
This is a bit of an odd story about the 88 year old instructor who resigned. He should have been able to work with the department to get the course assigned to a large-enough room so that the instructor didnât feel he was at risk and the students could decide to mask-up or not. It was a 25-person seminar, not a large-lecture course. Faculty (even teaching faculty) who need accommodations should be able to request them. Most situations of this sort in my experience are worked out well in advance and with civility. Departments donât want to lose instructors because that just becomes a headache for the person running the undergrad program and possibly even the department head (who might now have to ask colleagues to step in and teach). Iâm wondering why this wasnât worked out.
And as I also posted in that other thread: https://www.ajc.com/education/georgia-professor-bucks-administrators-to-order-masks-in-classrooms/D4GHWJU2TVE3ZLEY2A67XR6KYM/?outputType=amp
Asked about Luedtkeâs case, Georgia State spokeswoman Andrea Jones said, âThe university has a remote work policy and American Disabilities Act accommodation process. This employee was not eligible under the universityâs guidelines for remote work and did not participate in the ADA process. She was terminated for refusal to work.â
Again, an instructor who didnât ask for accommodations. There is a process for this at any university. She sounds like she wanted to take a moral stand and made that choice to do so. I share her concern for her studentsâ safety and she has the right not to hold class if she personally feels that doing so would be contributing to an unsafe environment. Of course, as this is a personal viewpoint and not an option offered by her employer (usually you have to actually do the job in order to be paid) her employer then had the right to fire her for cause. I wonder if she thought everything through before making this decision.
You may want to come out of theoretical ideas of how departments and universities are supposed to work and read your own industryâs journals about whatâs going on. There are no accommodations. It doesnât matter if youâre immunocompromised. People already know this because theyâve been seeking accommodations for months now. And quitting, and frankly disobeying admin. Thereâs a quiet war going on around you. Unlike meatpackers, most people in academia have choices and do not have to sacrifice their lives or health, or their childrenâs, for this.
Admin is doing its best to pretend this isnât happening and to ignore that all over the country, people are just walking out the door. And it doesnât matter that there are students needing classes to graduate, or paying gazillions to be there. Where admin is too scared to implement the necessary measures to protect health, people who have already been abused for years are just getting up and walking out, or disobeying and telling admin, âTry me.â Because theyâre fine with being fired. Theyâve already made plans B, C, D. Theyâre good at that.
Iâve worked with hundreds of PhD students over the last several years. I can think of five whoâve decided academiaâs for them, and only one whoâs chosen to go the R1 route. By which I do not mean that they wanted to go R1 and failed: they looked at it and said âAbsolutely not.â Many have gone and had prestigious postdocs, then bailed. The only people who see them as failures are older R1 profs who cannot imagine anything outside the hierarchy they entered long ago: by and large the students look at those profsâ lives and feel sorry for them.
Iâm not seeing anything in the last two years thatâs made academia more attractive to them, and I suspect that the only thing thatâs going to save a lot of departments and possibly even colleges from imploding is that thereâs a lot of consolidation going on. Of course, given the amount of institutional debt floating around, I donât know how thatâs going to play out financially. And I donât even want to think about whatâs happening on the staff side.
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I hope her name gets revealed in the media, and that grad schools, jobs, etc. see what she did.
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Sorry, Iâd meant to get back to this and dropped it.
It doesnât really matter that DHHS has this guidance if the docs themselves are reluctant to identify a constellation of problems as âlong covidâ, let alone describe those problems as disabling. As someone whoâs had experience as caregiver to someone who did manage to qualify for private, but not SS, disability, and has devoted more time than I like to think about to these questions, I can tell you that struggling to connect doctor to DHHS guidance and make SSD or private long-term disability insurance payments fall out of it, while actually disabled by long covid, is not something I would want to attempt.
You would definitely want coding for âlong covidâ or whatever the name will someday be, because the individual symptoms themselves are indeterminate. That exhaustion and brain fog: are they ME? Migraine? Perimenopausal hormonal fluctuations? You could go around in circles for a long time without a definitive, codable diagnosis collecting all these things and connectable to the disability claims.
My guess is that as more and more people are trying to live with longterm post-covid symptoms, the definitions of âdisabling long covidâ will shift and narrow pretty substantially. Again, weâre just at the beginning of this.
But youâre right, by far the best option is just not to get it.
Campuses have a limited number of classrooms. To properly social distance a 25 person seminar on our campus requires a room that normally holds 75. Our college doesnât have a lot of those, but maybe their university is different.
He wasnât objecting to the classroom size though. He was objecting to the mask policy, and I donât think the size of the room affects that. If students donât have to mask properly sitting in the back row they donât have to mask when they walk up to faculty to ask questions either.
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Right. Even without walking up to the instructor, if someone maskless and infected is just sitting there breathing into the room for an hour or so, thatâs a high-risk situation for someone whoâs medically vulnerable, even if heâs vaxed.
Itâs really important for people to get it through their heads that deltaâs super-easy transmission means the old social-distancing rules are out the window.
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