Chairs and Directors meeting on Zoom, a reassuring gathering of concern even during Spring Break! (Indeed there were another twenty; people's images moved into view if they spoke.) Along with the fascination of what's in the background behind each person, there were moments of levity as one very little girl showed up on someone's lap (she's there at top right, no longer on the lap), and and then a tiny baby jiggled on another's knee... and then someone's cat processed by just as she was speaking, managing - as cats will - to turn of the mic in the process!It was so good just to be with people, even in this remote way... for, of course, what we were discussing wasn't fun at all: what to tell our faculty about how to finish the current semester, all of it now definitely online. The pedagogical challenge of working online can be sort of exciting (at least for those of us whose classes are seminars, not labs or studios or performances), but thinking about grading, about students who have and will have various degrees of access, etc., is not.
That far, we could discuss as if we were in familiar territory, but that we in fact have no idea of the territory ahead became clear when the apparently mundane subject of registration for Fall courses came up. Currently that's supposed to happen as scheduled, a week after Spring Break. But will any of our students be in the right frame of mind to think about next semester? Will some of our classes still be online, and should some hard-to-do-online classes be postponed until Spring? How many students will be be able to return in the Fall anyway - we're not an inexpensive school - and how many new students are we likely to get? "Illness" was mentioned too, if only once, "trauma" several times.
It's often said, and surely true, that there's enormous energy and creativity already going into adapting to our rapidly changing circumstances: what new discoveries and synergies await! But the rapidly changing circumstances are changing altogether too rapidly to know what we should be adapting to.
