Dear Nettime, Partial disclosure: I am married to a leading voice in the field of college health, one frequently quoted in national media as universities began to declare suspensions. She has managed campus health at three major research universities over the past 20 years.
I type this sitting at a table facing south-southwest, looking out from a rise from which the basin of South Central LA unfolds before me. In the distance I see planes incoming from the east, descending into LAX all day long. The planes disappear from sight, blocked by another rise beyond which is Venice and the beach towns. Along the far horizon line to the southeast, on clear nights we can see the tiny distant bursts of Disneyland’s evening fireworks. A week ago Disney announced that their theme park and hotels would close as contagion precautions. This follows a series of high profile event cancellations beginning two weeks ago. Touching different worlds but sending a signal of realness to an apathetic or worse unbelieving US public were the announced cancellations of first the South by Southwest music and tech conference in Austin, Texas, and then the suspension of all NBA league play, everywhere. Art institutions around LA, large and small, canceled openings and lectures, and then days later closed galleries, too. For myself, I canceled a late February trip to attend my own opening in Montreal and then canceled an April gig trip to Chicago. Tellingly, the chain of cancellations in the US was started not by any governmental agency or public official at any level, federal, state, county, or municipal. It was led first by private higher education, and then quickly followed by the public universities. Beginning about twenty-five days ago schools around the country recalled students studying abroad, and then a week later announced suspensions of classroom teaching and campus events, and a week after that, the need to clear out dorms and residence halls. Many colleges and universities told students to go on their scheduled spring breaks but to not return for another week, or even for the rest of the semester. Harvard and MIT ordered their students to vacate the dorms with less than a week’s notice. Among my friends who are on faculties, many immediately complained about administrations making decisions with no faculty input, raised worry about their students who may not have ready access to the remote learning portals all were suddenly expected to use‹and how are they supposed to teach a studio class online anyway‹and voiced paranoia over this disaster being the wedge by which the universities will restructure them out of classroom teaching altogether. The lean towards a conspiracy view obfuscates the story of how exactly the schools ended up leading the US response to the virus. For that we need to understand the public health vacuum created by the ruling ideology of modern US conservatism. Like public education, like the public utilities, by mid-century the departments of public health emerged as one of the cornerstone institutions delivering the post-war American way of life: sanitary, healthy, and scientific. Usually most robust at the county level, departments of public health typically inspected restaurants, guided schools on immunization regs, and provided free clinical services for the indigent and uninsured. To American conservatives the field of public health came to represent the worst combination of liberal bogeymen: regulations, a safety net, and pointy-headed experts. By the time Trump disbanded the global pandemic team in 2018 that had been established by Barack Obama, the message was clear: no matter the public health failures of the recent past, loyalty to conservative ideology would be more important than life itself. Hence the tardy, piecemeal, confused and incompetent federal response we’re seeing now, and the defanged leadership from county departments across the nation. In this vacuum the universities acted. As neoliberalized as they are, the major universities still possess much of the following relative to the degraded public sphere: A) Expertise from within. Including that of virologists, infectious disease labs, and epidemiologists. The voices of experts retain credibility in the university. B) A global perspective in everyday operations. This is due to having large numbers of international students, extensive study abroad programs, and international cooperation in research. International students from China were among the first to raise concerns. C) Insulation from political concerns in decision making. No need to make decisions through the heavily corrupted channels of so-called democratic bodies. D) Emergency preparedness. From meningitis outbreaks to massacres by firearms, to student riots over football games, all modern American universities have threat assessment in place, even the Bible colleges. For example, few other US institutions‹hospitals included‹have as much experience in placing people in quarantine. Many universities have managed minor student quarantines over mumps and measles in recent years. Some have marveled at how quickly universities across the country, from Boston to Austin, began the shut down process nearly in parallel, seemingly without coordination from above. That is because campus health officers have been talking to each other, just as they have for years now regarding the aforementioned campus threats. In sum, higher education‹a field comprising hundreds of incredibly complex and diverse institutions‹has proven itself to be the sector most well organized and responsive to pandemic in all of US society. This happened largely in spite of the reactive nature of today’s university presidents, people hired for their ability to fundraise and smile through the many crises that the operations staff are constantly managing. The college health people overcame the presidents’ fear of bad publicity partly by dangling the dream of remote learning as a way to keep revenues uninterrupted. In the end being technocrats themselves, the college health experts took remote learning in its unproven and untested state, as part of the answer to the challenge of dispersing the student bodies. This is the contradiction at work: though population-oriented by training and socially-oriented in their problem solving, by buttressing sound public health arguments with visions of operational continuity through remote learning, the college health experts opened the door for the ideologues intent on stripping the campuses of the humanities completely. So the cries of disaster capitalism are not unfounded. But they remain only cries. The discussion of practical resistance thus far has been limited to a few voices encouraging faculty to “teach poorly” online, a kind of self-sabotage passing for a strategy. That impulse says as much about the “stuck-ist” tendencies of the US left as it does the baffling new conditions. Critique is the way of the modern intellectual; organizing is far less common. This pattern seems to be holding under the new circumstances. My suggestion for my faculty friends (yes, extremely easy to offer from my independent artist/house husband perch) is to revive an old form for the current moment: the teach-in. Teach-ins gained currency in the early days of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. The teach-ins helped to establish the popularly understood context in which to critically analyze US military involvements abroad. And more than that, the form was a way for professors and students alike to cooperatively address the moral complicity and structural allegiances of the institutions to which they belonged by self-consciously politicizing their assigned roles as researchers and learners. The best teach-ins, whether about the war in Vietnam or apartheid South Africa, ultimately informed the question, What do WE do about this? As teaching moves online for the rest of the spring and possibly beyond, I am hoping to see professors interrupting their courses for a virtual teach-in of their own, to devote a week or even a single lecture to the self-reflexively considered questions: What is a virus, what is a pandemic, and why were college students, teachers, and campus communities the ones called upon to first respond to this situation?? No matter the course, no matter the discipline. Now is not the time to take cover in one’s specialization. Without such intellectual intervention from within satisfying the directive to convert courses will help the displacement of classroom teaching gain permanent traction, particularly at the non-elite levels, and hasten the move of higher ed away from exploratory learning and towards certification. At this time, having had a week or two to absorb the new situation, many students are expressing grief over their sudden loss of campus life‹schoolmates gone, spring rituals canceled, phantom graduations. Faculty, being the university employees closest to the students, have been the first to express sympathy. But now they need to write the narrative and not just complain about it. The campus health people met their challenge, with plenty of improvisation and difficult decisions. Their moment is over. Now the faculty need to step up and meet theirs, and I hope it happens before the next wave of grief overtakes all, the one brought by the loss of life yet to come. All best, Dan W. -- Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center IG: type_rounds_1968 danswang.xyz # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
