It won’t be the students' fault.

It won’t be the students' fault.

Students trust college and universities to take care of them. They tend to believe that if college is open, it’s safe. Nerds like me flip through epidemiology modeling papers that say that regular (every 2 days) surveillance testing, with short turnaround times are needed for safe reopening; well-adjusted college students don’t.

I’m pretty bad at empathizing with students. I’m realizing that I have a weird set of values, i.e., I forewent hundreds of thousands of dollars of engineer salary to get a PhD and do a postdoc so that I could get the job I have that I’d rather do than stuff I could get paid more for. My students are in college, not because they love learning, but because they want to get jobs, which is totally fair, because how else would they pay off the debt that pays my salary? While they’re here, the parts of college that they find meaningful are inevitably in the authentic experiences they have with each other rather than in the interactions with me that yield 3 college credits for 3 hours of class for 14 weeks, plus homework. In contrast, the meaningful part of college for me is in the classroom. The difference in our understanding of what college is about often gets us frustrated with each other. For that reason, I’m trying to approach my work not by thinking about what the classroom is like for me but by remembering what college was like for my classmates.

I was a great undergrad and, even then, campus ministry, the dining hall, having friends, having crushes, staying up until 4 am trying to share the Gospel with my roommate—those were the parts of college that mattered most to me. Why should I expect students to be any more studious than me?

Students will be blamed for having parties and drinking. A lot of Covid-19 will, indeed, be spread at parties. When they get back to campus, students are going to most want to see the friends they have missed since March. When a lot of students get together, we call that a party. At parties, alcohol appears but I don’t think alcohol is the point of parties. Most years, faculty get together at the start of the school year but we call that a meeting or happy hour; we're not so different from students. We aren’t going to happy hour this year because our priorities—being nerds, many with kids and spouses and houses—are different from those of people who work in retail or food service, still play sports, and who don’t know where their lives will take them. I’m afraid of getting Covid, mostly because if my spouse got sick, too, we would have a hard time taking care of our toddler: what’s at stake is tangible. Students are less risk-averse than faculty, partly due to how brain development works and partly because the arcs of their lives are not yet clear so the effects of risk for them on their futures are abstract.

It’s unfair to blame students for having the maturity level and priorities of any previous group of students, including my classmates and me.

I think I’m getting better at empathizing with students. I’ll love them as much as I can this fall.