The South Dakota Board of Regents is gambling that the coronavirus will be contained by August. After an executive session teleconference yesterday, the Regents announced they plan to open South Dakota’s university campuses for face-to-face classes as scheduled on August 24.
The South Dakota Board of Regents announced today its commitment to on-campus operations this fall, with resumption of face-to-face teaching and learning across the public university and special schools’ system.
“The COVID-19 pandemic dictated an unprecedented change this spring in the way we teach,learn, and work, requiring faculty, students, and staff to adapt in extraordinary ways,” said Regents President John W. Bastian. “While our institutions will successfully complete the spring and summer semesters, under conditions that none of us could anticipate, we all must turn attention to a new academic year beginning this fall.”
In discussions among regents’ staff, public university presidents, and the special school superintendents, all have made a commitment to operate on campus and to safely resume face-to-face teaching and learning in fall 2020, Bastian said [South Dakota Board of Regents, press release, 2020.05.01].
The decision from South Dakota’s public higher education system will create pressure fo other universities, public and private, to do the same. This spring’s emergency conversion of normal face-to-face courses to ad hoc online delivery has given lots of students a false but negative impression of the effectiveness of online education. Online or in person, well-prepared classes work, and hastily prepared classes don’t. But most students are going to look at this spring’s unplanned experiment in all-remote learning and clamor for a return to “normal”. With less than four months to decide what to do this fall, a certain proportion of students will choose campuses offering a return to that “normal,” even if that “normal” stands a good chance of being altered by what even the Regents acknowledge in their release is an “evolving public health challenge.”
Did I say “a good chance”? Pardon me—Dr. Anthony Fauci says a second round of coronavirus in the fall is “inevitable“:
The nation’s leading epidemiologist and key member of the White House coronavirus task force said in an interview with the Economic Club Tuesday the virus probably won’t go away due to how contagious it is and its reach around the world.
“I’m almost certain it will come back. The virus is so transmissible and it’s globally spread,” Fauci said, noting that as cases in the U.S. stabilize, parts of the world like southern Africa are seeing an increase in cases.
“In my mind, it’s inevitable that we will have a return of the virus or maybe it never went away,” he added [Joseph Guzman, “Fauci Says Second Wave of Coronavirus Is “Inevitable’,” The Hill, 2020.04.29].
But don’t tell that to the Regents’ recruiters, especially those recruiting the marquee athletes who can’t throw balls remotely (wait—why are we not investing in robot football?). The South Dakota Board of Regents is saying to athletes, “We’ll be open—sign here,” giving them an advantage in recruiting athletes over any institution that is not right now promising play time in the fall.
Can anyone think of a better incubator for COVID-19 than a nursing home or meat packing plant? Yes, a college dormatory. Congratulations, South Dakota Regents, on your decision to kill off the children. You prove once again that low IQs aren’t limited to the Governor’s office.
I don’t think other universities will follow suit. Maybe smaller colleges, like those in South Dakota, can find a way to socially distance in classrooms in upper level classes with fewer students. But a freshman level biology course or an organic chemistry course? That ain’t happening. So, they have to be going on delusional happy talk, not science.
Wow. So a post high school education not only incurs enormous debt, but now possible catastrophic health consequences. That’s a vicious one two punch.
Yeah, Debbo, that’s why it ain’t gonna happen. All the positives from the Sturgis Rally will be showing up right when students are supposed to move in. Now there’s an incentive for a gap year.
Yep. And the prospective students are smarter than the regents.
If they were planning on going to Europe this summer, they will have to take a mandatory 2 week quarantine into the mix. Yup, travelers going to Europe will be quarantined for 2 weeks upon arrival, if they are positive for Covid19, could be even longer. Senior trips are now just another bummer, but hey, Florida is open, and they won’t even count you if you die there…lucky you.
If colleges really do reassemble their student bodies for on-campus classes this fall, we may see an unplanned benefit of the ever-fancier apartment-style dorm rooms colleges have been using to lure students. Dorms that offer full suites with their own bathrooms and kitchens will provide more social distance than traditional dorms (like SDSU Hansen Hall, 1990–1992!) with two people to a room and communal bathrooms for an entire floor of 30–40 students.
Smaller colleges might enjoy an advantage with fewer students crowded together, but larger colleges have access to more resources—health care personnel to carry out screenings, scientists to design and conduct contact tracing and other anti-pandemic measures.
Good point about Europe travel, Jerry. Any college activity involving trips overseas will face delay and uncertainty. Students will have to build in those quarantine periods to their departures to and returns from Europe and other parts of the world. I wonder if any colleges or spring break destinations would enforce similar quarantines. The one-week getaway in March may be impossible.
Coronavirus will also make it harder for international students to come here to study, only deepening the Trump depression in international enrollments.
I’m sure this is being done so enrollment numbers don’t dramatically drop in the fall. My stepson who goes to Mines, and my niece who goes to Iowa State both said they would sit out the fall semester if they had to take online classes.
Remarkable, Scott: they’d chose earning no credits versus making some progress in their degree programs? What if they sit out the fall but the coronavirus risk remains in the spring? How long can students wait to resume their courses?
I would think many on-line classes would be fine. Reading and paper writing courses, such as most introductory literature, sociology, psychology, history courses and the like, can probably be delivered on-line just fine. It certainly helps to have a good prof who can hold your attention. Science courses would be more difficult because you would miss the lab component.
As a senior guest auditor at UW-Madison, I take a course every semester for free, one of the perqs of making it past 60 as a Wisconsin taxpayer. I’m going to have to make a decision to take a gap semester or year, too, if they open up in the fall. My class this semester went on-line. Slides from lectures are already posted on-line, so I just miss the profs take on the slides.