You have to understand, so long as peer institutions have similar policies and parents yelling similarly, they’re much less worried about you than they are about staffing. Universities are all about longevity of problems, wars of attrition, things like that. People there literally wait for administrators and tenured people to retire or die; it’s sometimes the least expensive, most efffective way of dealing with a serious problem. Individual students and parents are gone in the blink of an eye, along with their grievances.
In the end the admin is always engaged in a game of chicken with the faculty and, to some extent, the staff. If it’s clear that significant numbers of faculty and instructors are going to refuse, they’ll find ways to back off.
Oh, @homerdog, this is academia generally, and has been since long before both of us were born. I mean these realities are where the academic farce comes from, long line from Lucky Jim to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to…what was the Mamet one? Oleanna, and that Ian McEwan novel from a few years back. Solar, that was the one. Nabokov had a go at it, and so did Malamud. Even Polanski. That very dangerous mincing Ivy academic in The Ghost Writer – spot on, hats off. (Oh. And The Browning Version, there’s a heartbreak. Not farce, that one, but absolutely on the nose, how the school robbed that poor grim old dutiful teacher. Got the academic manner of putting the knife in down pat.) As long as we’re on comic verisimilitude: A Serious Man. Both the blinkeredness of the protag and the – I can only describe it as “the academic lean”, when the department chair shows up in the protag’s office to mention, elliptically, the poison-pen letter about his tenure promotion and leans against the doorjamb, and tell him that it’s nothing to worry about, meaning it’s a five-alarm fire. Mwah. Perfection.
You’re not supposed to be bothered with any of this, of course. You’re there to drop off the kid and the money, and be Parent of [Firstname Lastname] on the mailings. But, you know, since you want to talk operations, here we are.
My university certainly is awful, but it’s awful in depressingly average ways. I mean to most non-rankings-hyperventilating collegegoing students in this country, my U looks pretty good because it’s stuffed with gear of all kinds and has a lot of majors and buildings and whatnot, also much sportsball and cheering. The pity is that these places are capable of more. Just this morning I was realizing that I happened to get here in the middle of this place’s golden age, and that this is why people so revere the president who was one before the one I first knew. It’s like in history where a king is called “the Good”. They only call him “Good” because most are so wretched anyone who’s actually good is a major standout. The next two after him were also pretty darn good, and that was reflected in the quality of the university, but by then the politics of the state had changed, K-12 had started crumbling, and they finally managed to run off the last of the Good presidents. Haven’t had one in decades. So it goes. Same story in much of state-U land. If you want a rough guide, have a look at how many billions of dollars a state system’s in the hole – it’s directly proportional to the grifting at admin level.
All of this would be crummy if they didn’t have such a racket going that they’re both wasting so many of the kids’ time and impoverishing families intergenerationally. You throw the impoverishment in there and it’s not just a bunch of nerds entertainingly if very slowly stabbing each other in modern-day royal-court dramas. (Oh, right, I hear that Netflix thing’s also accurate, but I can’t bring myself to watch it.) Then it becomes something unconscionable. But! Here we are. My advice, as ever: at least don’t pay money for it.
Most universities will open. Most students and faculty and staff will get sick. Some sizeable proportion of them will be sick for a long time, and most of them won’t be able to afford it. Is this necessary? No. That’s where we are.
