The Sound of One Shoe Dropping

The California State system has shifted to mostly online education for fall 2020.

The 23-campus California State University system plans to all but cancel in-person classes in the fall and instead will offer instruction primarily online, Chancellor Timothy White announced Tuesday. The vast majority of classes across the Cal State system will be taught online, White said, with some limited exceptions that allow for in-person activity. The decision comes as schools throughout the country grapple with how long to keep campuses closed amid the coronavirus crisis.

Many mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, watching faculty and administration try to work its way through what an opening would look like has been painful, and it’s been clear that bringing the students back effectively means embracing a herd immunity strategy, with all that entails. On the other hand, I find the idea of returning to some form of normalcy deeply appealing, and the Cal State decision may well catalyze similar decisions across the country. Or perhaps not; given the ideological baggage that virus response has acquired, we may seen an uneven patchwork of state university system responses across the country, with Republican-governed states remaining open while Democratic states close.

I hate our new normal.