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Georgia Tech professors revolt over reopening, say current plan threatens lives

192 points by tony101 6y ago

ryandrake 6y ago
Title: "Georgia Tech Professors Revolt..." Reality: Georgia Tech Professors release a not-even-strongly-worded letter [1] to express their alarm and recommendations, a letter that doesn't even mention actions they might take if those recommendations are not followed. I guess this counts as a "revolt"? 1: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntduj3mMhZhhGtF2khGYHNJdZIXu1xBhg/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntd...
- noirbot 6y ago
  If you want to see some more direct anger, as well as some indications why they may not be taking that much public action, you can read some more here: https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21 https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I always thought the word "revolt" implied at least some kind of action rather than mere anger. The instant burial of my comment seems to indicate that the word's definition must have changed recently.
- Anon1096 6y ago
  It also doesn't seem like anyone is actually confirming these staff members to be on board, as evidenced by the interesting signers such as "Mike Hunt" from the College of Cock among others.
- adamsea 6y ago
  It's a news article headline; I don't think anyone clicked on the link with the expectation that the professors would be literally arming themselves or something ...
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    I would tend to agree with the parent comment - while they may not be engaging in armed revolt nor are expected to, it seems to me that the line between revolting and not revolting is when you draw the proverbial line in the sand. When you say, "we are committed to working with...blah blah blah" you haven't revolted yet. Revolt doesn't require violence or anger but it does require saying "I/we are not going to do this thing we are being compelled to, period". Saying "we disagree strongly" is not making an ultimatum. They might be implying that they are considering revolting, though. If I were working there, I would think it better to be more blunt. I bet in private, people are.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      Sure, I could see that. But it’s a newspaper headline. It’s not the title of a scientific paper. And since we can’t devise repeatable experiments for the truth or falsehood of news articles (though I give it 50/50 odds someone might post a comment now proposing how we could ;) ) news articles cannot have the same kind of confidence that scientific papers have. As revolting as that idea may be ;)
Symbiote 6y ago
To make a political post even more political... Do American university staff belong to unions? Including the faculty? Hopefully this can be resolved with words, but striking for better working conditions has a very long history.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  They don't have the right to collectively bargain in Georgia (the state).
  - bumby 6y ago
    Is this because the are public sector employees?
    - vkou 6y ago
      No, because Georgia police officers, who are public employees, have unions.
      - analog31 6y ago
        Likewise in Wisconsin. The state government did what they could get away with. They can deny union rights to public sector employees, but aren't required to treat all public sector employees the same. Still, formal union representation would not prevent a wildcat strike.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- hypersoar 6y ago
  I'm not aware of any faculty unions representing professors. There are some academic student employee (inc. grad students) unions and a handful of postdoc unions.
  - avs733 6y ago
anonms-coward 6y ago
Makes a lot of sense. Professors of high age are at very increased risk. Students fit in tight spaces would for sure include asymptomatic careers. And any hope of expecting an entire student community to take utmost caution is simply futile.
mrtri 6y ago
they should visit third world country vietnam, how they managed to keep the corona deaths to zero. while across the ocean thousands die in the US with better healthcare and hygiene
glofish 6y ago
What is not discussed there is that all these professors signing the document expect to be paid the same as last year. One might argue that if the lectures are online then the tuition (and professor pay) should be proportional to the value they produce - and that can't possibly be the same as last year.
- watwut 6y ago
  Shouldn't salary be market based, theoretically? Salaries are not based on produced value typically. They are result of negotiations.
  - joekim 6y ago
    Yeah, agreed. The market sets the price.
  - glofish 6y ago
    Right, but those negotiations did assume face to face instructions. If they don't teach face to face then the terms need to be re-negotiated. All I am saying here is not that you should push faculty to do things they don't want - just to have everyone understand they can't get the same salary as before if they provide less value as before.
- joekim 6y ago
  How would you calculate the reduction in value of lectures if given online? I'd argue the value of the lectures is about the same for large classes, it's the ability to ask questions or students ability to focus that gets harder online.
  - noirbot 6y ago
    And at the same time though, it's also generally more work to set things up for an online class, or at least it can be, especially for classes with labs, or ones that usually involved using a whiteboard. It may be a reduction in value to the students, but it's also an increase in work for the professors probably.
mnm1 6y ago
Reopening universities and colleges is also a major threat to the entire community. Here in WA over a hundred students tested positive this week after partying at their frat. In Alabama, students are intentionally trying to get infected. This will happen en masse if universities open their campuses and those infected will spread the infections into not only the immediate community but also the ones that many of them traveled hundreds of miles from to attend university. It would be pure madness to reopen or to pretend like university students will social distance and wear masks.
- charliepark 6y ago
  Here's a pretty good thread from a professor arguing that the Alabama story is very likely made up: https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269 https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269 But I totally agree that the entire premise of colleges trying to function as an on-campus institution is absolutely absurd until there's a vaccine.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    > until there's a vaccine Why do people think we're getting some magic vaccine? Gavi/Gates have pushed this "18 months" bullshit, where they're developing some magical vaccine for a family of viruses that's never had a vaccine before, and every previous attempt has been met with either bad immunopathic responses or immune enhancement syndrome[0]. Vaccines takes decades to develop safely, and the techniques being proposed now have never led to a vaccine that made it through clinical trials before. There is no vaccine coming in any reasonable amount of time. The 100+ companies are take a lot of WHO/government money, and who knows if they'll actually produce anything. Safe vaccines for new families of viruses take a decade. There is still no vaccine for retroviruses (herpes, HIV, etc.) It's straight up Gates pipe dream to think a safe vaccine for this can be made in a year. [0]: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-honor/#vacinations-should-not-be-made-in-a-year https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
cglong 6y ago
I'm in a Georgia Tech Facebook group and this has been a really controversial issue, particularly among international students. They only provided 4-6 weeks notice before reopening, so not only is flying risky, it'll be expensive too. To make matters worse, some classes will be offered online, but students won't know if it is until after the semester has already started.
- Archit3ch 6y ago
  Did the students fly to their home countries?
  - Donald 6y ago
    They moved online after spring break. Many students went to their home countries and were asked not to come back for the remainder of the term.
    - avs733 6y ago
      and the online transition was bungled when the state university system overuled GT's president and insisted they stay in person, then changed their minds. So campus went from 'we are coming back after break' to 'online after spring break' to 'coming back after an extended break' to 'online after spring break' in something like 96 hours.
  - cglong 6y ago
    As an American, I saw a lot of notices at the beginning of the pandemic encouraging Americans abroad to return home ASAP. I'd imagine other countries did the same.
  - xeromal 6y ago
    Lots of universities closed their campus housing
tomohawk 6y ago
Taking a look at excess mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid (scroll down to the Economist graphs) It would appear that the worst occurred in the April timeframe (Europe, New York), and that we've mostly reached a point of no excess mortality at this point. However, if another wave were to come through, the graphs are pretty sobering. For 65+, excess deaths peaked at 35k/week extra For 45-64, excess deaths peaked at 2.5k/week extra For 15-44, excess deaths peaked at .8k/week extra So, most students returning is a negligible risk, but for some professors, it could be daunting, if there were to be another wave.
- hef19898 6y ago
  You mean another one than the one currently happening in South America, India and the US? Also, it is not just deaths. The less at risk groups infect others, that can be more at risk.
  - tomohawk 6y ago
    It's unfortunate that the excess mortality is not a metric that is rigorously collected at this time. As a result, it lags quite a bit. We'll know in a week or so how June looked. You're right that it is not just deaths, but morbidity. Someone who gets on a vent due to covid may never regain the life they had previously. However, we've learned a bit since April. Wearing masks works with social distancing, but requires administrative enforcement. Sweden has kept their schools open during this time (through high school) and offers an interesting point of comparison. It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them. The main problems they've had are in the immigrant communities (220% higher rates of covid) and in elder care facilities.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them. By which you mean, it is neck-and-neck with the United States and Brazil in daily cases per capita, and is soundly leading both countries in deaths per capita? Their strategy of 'isolate the vulnerable population and do little else' worked great, except for the part where it hasn't worked at all because... The vulnerable population is getting sick and dying.
fabian2k 6y ago
Given the current numbers in the US, it does not seem likely that you can reopen universities in any kind of safe way. Anything that puts a lot of people into small rooms is problematic, and I really can't see anything that is close to the regular operation being possible in the fall. The only way to be able to reopen inherently risky activities like this is to suppress the virus sufficiently that you can handle the remainder with mask mandates, contact tracing and prohibiting mass events. I'm in Germany where the number of cases is drastically lower than in the US right now, and I doubt we'll be able to reopen universities fully in the fall. With the dramatic numbers from the US right now, it does seem extremely unlikely that they could be controlled enough in the fall to make any kind of reopening safe.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The goals are different, though. US universities don't hope to find a reopening plan that won't spread the virus at all; they just want to find a way to keep it from spreading too much.
  - ethanbond 6y ago
    I don’t get the impression that anyone expects anything to be 100% safe. This is a straw man. Everyone agrees the goal is to prevent it from spreading “too much,” but any proposed school reopenings (from kindergarten up to university) look like they’d land way above the line of acceptable spread. Maybe a line we can all agree on is: If the expected resulting R_0 is above 1, it’s probably not a good plan as it will not be sustainable. Since you probably can’t know whether it’ll result in an R_0 above 1 before doing it, then in order to reopen you must have robust surveillance in place to quickly detect the R_0 and have a plan to shut back down in the case it reaches 1.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      There's quibbles about whether the boundary needs to be exactly 1, but yeah, I agree with your core point. A reopening plan needs a strategy for how to scale back if something goes wrong, and it's hard to imagine how you could scale back transmission in a dorm full of college students.
stu2b50 6y ago
I'd add that Georgia Tech is asking for Out-of-State and International Students to come in on July 24-26th, which is 2 weeks after the announcement was made (very recently). Which seems kinda absurd. >If you have secured, or expect to have secured your visa, and plan to enroll for the fall semester on the Atlanta campus, you should plan for in-person, residential instruction. >You will be asked to arrive in Atlanta between July 24-26 and be required to follow quarantine guidelines. >Per guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, any individual who is traveling to the U.S. from an international destination should quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, monitor their health, and practice social distancing. This guidance should be followed by students planning to live in either on-campus housing or private housing located off-campus.
- avs733 6y ago
  and also effectively binds them to this process because now you are making people fly domestically or internationally on very short notice...and will look ridiculous if they cancel that a week or two later.
molmalo 6y ago
In some universities in Spain, they have mandatory antibody tests, and they divide students in 3 groups: the ones with antibodies, the ones without and sick people that can follow the classes online. To enter the buildings in the campus, you need to get a "passport", after completing antibody test and lots of questions... Some preconditions, like being asthmatic disqualifies you (so you need to follow classes online). Also, they have several new rules, like using only stairs to move across floors, minimum distance, thermal cameras, etc. It's a new world in many aspects.
- luxurytent 6y ago
  Reading this, I can't believe how far behind North America is with respect to this virus. When it comes to day to day life, we have very little new, quality information compared to March. I'm not saying what Spain is doing is great, but it feels like an iterative step to remove a few top layers of anxiety
  - gdulli 6y ago
    It's been fascinating in a dark way to see how cultural differences from place to place are translating into vastly different responses to this situation (and vastly different outcomes) from country to country and from state to state within the US. How often do we get to see the entire world deal with the same problem at the same time for such a sustained period?
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  From a game theory perspective it seems very risky to give young people an incentive to be infected. When people have tangible benefits from having antibodies, a subset of the population is sure to "aquire" them. With those complex rules (have antibodies but use an inhaler means you are banned), would it not just be better to have everything online?
umvi 6y ago
Air Force Academy has already re-opened with next semesters' students already there. They are marching socially distanced and with masks and elevated hand washing. On a side note - several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown-induced mental health issues a few months back... so it's pretty safe to say that the cure is more deadly than the illness (at least currently... 0 cadets have died from covid-19 while 2 have died from suicide).
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  > several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown-induced mental health issues a few months back. My condolences. The Air Force Academy is a golden ticket to become an Air Force pilot. I can't imagine what it would take to override that prospect in one's mind to the point of bringing them to the brink of suicide. I understand that forced isolation sucks, but not to this point.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket-in-2019/ https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket-in-2019/ > A total of 137 Airmen took their own lives in 2019—a 33 percent increase from the 103 suicides in 2018 despite service efforts to tackle the problem. I'm not sure you can conclude much from two.
mnky9800n 6y ago
What's wild is Georgia tech has a very successful online master's program that apparently everyone forgot about because it could be a great starting point to do everything online.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Online degrees that are marketed as online degrees carry a stigma among employers, because they are perceived as being lower quality than not-online degrees, and the stuff of diploma mills. My final semester will be entirely online, but I couldn't care less, since my degree isn't an online degree.
  - just-juan-post 6y ago
    > Online degrees that are marketed as online degrees carry a stigma among employers, because they are perceived as being lower quality than not-online degrees, and the stuff of diploma mills. Do you have some survey results or where are you getting this "fact"?
    - HenryKissinger 6y ago
      Sure. > In 2009, Norina L. Columbaro and Catherine H. Monaghan, researchers at the Cleveland State University, published an article analyzing dozens of studies and popular articles on employers’ perceptions of online degrees. By and large, they found that “gatekeepers”—for example, employers and hiring managers—“have an overall negative perception about online degrees.” In their survey, Columbaro and Monaghan also found several recurring concerns about online degrees. These concerns ranged from a perceived lack of rigor to concerns about the increased potential for academic dishonesty. Not surprisingly, the fact that online degrees were still associated with an earlier generation of diploma mills was also a concern. https://news.elearninginside.com/have-online-degrees-and-credentials-finally-lost-their-stigma/ https://news.elearninginside.com/have-online-degrees-and-cre...
      - perl4ever 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410
AlexCornila 6y ago
I assume this is a $ issue for them, they won’t be able to charge what they normally charge for online classes so they try to bring people in somehow edit: normally charge for campus
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  That may be part of it, but a not-insiginificant part of the issue is that Georgia Tech, as an institution, isn't allowed to set the rules. The Georgia Board of Regents has relatively tight control (presumably through budgetary means, if not explicit control means) over the policies schools are allowed to implement. So even if GT leadership wanted to implement something like a mask-required or an online-classes-by-request, no questions asked rule, it isn't actually allowed to by the state. GT's leadership is still somewhat culpable, don't get me wrong the President could be doing better, but the buck doesn't stop with him in this case.
  - dpeck 6y ago
    This is right on, and just another example of GT (a top tier engineering school) being physically located in, and largely beholden to, a state that doesn’t care about, or is downright hostile to all things “technology”/“smart”. I love my alma mater, but I wish somebody over at Emory would have figured out a way to buy out the state at some point and have us as part of them.
    - zbaylin 6y ago
      > a state that doesn’t care about, or is downright hostile to all things “technology”/“smart”. I know this is a generalization, but I find it kind of egregious. Georgia is one of the only states left (AFAIK) where you can essentially attend an in-state college for free if you have a high enough GPA [0]. You can argue about the means by which that is achieved (the lottery), but as a current Tech student I know plenty of very talented students who wouldn't be able to attend college, let alone an engineering school, without these scholarship programs. I doubt that a state/government that truly was anti-technology or anti-"smart" would funnel what must be billions of dollars a year into academic scholarships. [0]: https://www.gafutures.org/hope-state-aid-programs/hope-zell-miller-scholarships/ https://www.gafutures.org/hope-state-aid-programs/hope-zell-...
pmoriarty 6y ago
I feel for the students, but reopening the school for in-person classes makes no sense. If a student flies home, they face one day of risk. If school reopens for in-person classes, then they'll face hundreds of days of risk. That single day of flying may not even be as risky as a single day of classes (never mind hundreds of days of classes), because not nearly as many people fly these days due to fear of the pandemic. Also, if classes reopen, many of the people that get sick (who'll be far more numerous than those that get sick from flying a single day) will spread the sickness to others, causing way more knock-on effects than those caused by a small number of students flying one day.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't really get online and I'd hate to be forced to be online only. We've lost a whole year, to a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as anyone thought it'd be, and it will likely die, or we'll reach herd immunity, long before any virus can be safely manufactured. I feel like a lot of this is fear, hysteria and an completely inability for humans to properly assess risk, mixed with just a plethora of bad and conflicting information.
  - acalmon 6y ago
    How about faculty? Professors are, on average, more than 40 years old. Do you think they should teach in person?
    - zbaylin 6y ago
      During lecture at least, students are always at least 6 feet away from the professor. Moving to and from classes is a different story, though.
      - CydeWeys 6y ago
        6' is nowhere near enough distance to be safe indoors in a room with potentially up to hundreds of other people in it. The virus can stay airborne for hours in enclosed indoor spaces. If you have a lecture hall of 100 people that meets regularly each week, and the people in it aren't wearing good masks, it's practically a guarantee that by the end of the semester everyone there will have gotten it.
adamsea 6y ago
"Faculty were already feeling anxious about the upcoming fall semester, GPB News was told, but a recent decision by the Board of Regents and state university system to not require students wear masks in classrooms sent faculty over the edge." Allowing a gathering of 10+ people in an enclosed space without a mask sounds like a terrible idea.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way out. Let's stop the mass hysteria
  - throw-away_42 6y ago
    This is not what "on it's [sic] way out" looks like: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/record-spikes-in-us-coronavirus-cases-push-up-hospitalization-rates-in-16-states.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/record-spikes-in-us-coronavi...
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way out. Let's stop the mass hysteria Not based on active hospitalization counts in the current hot zones... complain all you want about test numbers not be comparable day over day, but I haven't seen anyone explain THAT away.
georgeburdell 6y ago
The Board of Regents are political appointees so I'm not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I'm generally not a fan of blanket shelter in place rules on freedom grounds, but the science is clear on the positive benefits of masks [0]. And there isn't really a down-side. [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- djsumdog 6y ago
  There are a lot of downsides if asymptomatic spread isn't really true (the WHO said it wasn't and then walked it back .. reading a lot of the studies, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest there is little to no asymptomatic spread; and the push to say otherwise is very political). Masks are very bad psychologically. They cause judgement and distrust, plus they're a pretty useless placebo effect. This virus is clearly no where near as dangerous as original made out to be, and I the normalization of the mask directly lead to an increase of violence during the recent riots all around the nation. They have the potential to lead people to take more risks and do things they wouldn't normally do[0]. It's absurd to think masks don't have any downsides. They certainly do. [0]: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/ https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/
  - tripletao 6y ago
    Your link is vaguely Freudian storytelling, evoking a sort of secular spirituality more than anything resembling objective science. Here's a sample: > The wearing of a mask, under conditions in which an individual is aware that their face is no longer their ‘face’, will lead to a transformation away from the usual ‘self’ through a self-attributional process. Whatever the negative consequences of that self-attributional process, nurses, cleanroom operators, and countless others who routinely wear masks seem to have gotten over it, and to enjoy basically normal social interactions. You didn't quantify your claims as to the dangers of the virus, but ~0.3% of NYC--of the total population, not those confirmed or estimated infected--is dead from the coronavirus. Treatment has improved (no early ventilator use) since then, but that's a rough lower bound for the IFR. Herd immunity should come much sooner than 1-1/R0 of the population due to heterogeneity, but even a lower bound for IFR times a lower bound for total infected is a lot of dead people. Finally, the case count is increasing. So regardless of whether the people spreading it are truly asymptomatic, misattributing light symptoms to allergies or similar, or aware that they're seriously sick but going out anyways, they're out there spreading. A mask seems likely enough to help in all three such cases to be clearly cost-effective to me. Have you tried wearing a mask? What bad experience did you have? Some of the fabric ones are near-impossible to breathe through (especially the handmade ones in that pleated pattern everyone seems to have adopted). Lighter cotton or surgical-style seem fine to me, and are widely used here in California--and have been widely used in East Asia for decades--without obvious negative consequences.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Reopen for the students, have those at risk work remote or lecture remote. We can’t assume a vaccine will be developed, so we need to act accordingly.
m0zg 6y ago
I sure hope we as a society figure out a way to make college campuses (and physical presence of students) largely unnecessary eventually. I don't expect it to happen in a year, but in-person lectures seemed ridiculous to me 25 years ago, and they seem even more so now when there's abundance of tech and anyone can record 4K videos of arbitrary length. Most of those lectures also sucked ass, since they were slow-moving, but if your attention lapses for like 3 minutes of a difficult lecture, you're lost for the rest of the lecture and there's no way to rewind and listen again. That's not to mention the time spent writing on the chalkboard and speaking - you could take in the same amount of information from a book at easily 3-4x the speed, leaving more time to do practical work that actually helps build the skills. Of course one still needs to be able to go to labs if one is doing research, but those could be bolstered by not investing in auditoriums, halls, cafes, and other physical infrastructure. It'd also be great (in the US) to shut down all the sports programs. They're like this weird benign tumor on the side of large schools which costs money and does not provide educational value.
aurizon 6y ago
This sounds like a plot to deal with faculties top-heavy with senior tenured profs - who will be on that top rung of risk in the death lottery = save Georgia Tech a bundle. Prove me wrong!
aurizon 6y ago
A well designed online course needs online tested milestones, segment by segment. Student get an online automated test. What he gets wrong creates a fork to an online module to teach that item. Fail again = re-teach in a different way. Repeated failmode might attract an online human to step that person along. Then back to the lessons. This is just smart teaching programs do. Labs can be done youtube style, but need careful design to deal with each possible fork in the road where a student can get off track. Some people might not be smart enough for complex abstract stuff - I have met and failed many 'memory machines' - students who can read and repeat everything they see, but are unable to use the knowledge in a novel way that has not been worked out in examples before.I used to tutor goofs like that in Engineering Physics at U of T. They had near perfect recall, but off the beaten track they could not solve new problems. Weekly problem sets were made to make them fail. They fought back with study groups - I was always in demand to help. In the end they failed the problems exams or at year end in the exams because they were basically dummies with near total recall.
avs733 6y ago
I am a Georgia Tech faculty member. I've been reading this thread and considering how to respond, and decided I should be transparent. There are a lot of things being discussed here and I don't think I have the bandwidth to respond to all of them but I'm happy to try and answer some questions. No clue how to verify this but happy to do so non-publicly.
- avs733 6y ago
  to answer a few questions I've seen in the thread -no, faculty are not unionized -nominally the concept of self governance and faculty roles in governance still exists at GT. However, when this began I'll be honest and saw a minimum amount (or role) of faculty governance involvement...which at the time didn't strike me as bad, until I saw how utterly unprepared the nominally professional management was to deal with things. - We have gotten very mixed communication on fall instructional planning. By mixed I specifically mean what we have been told has changed AND is insufficient to make decisions about research, classes, or other things. - We are also expected to support online only courses for international students and students with ADA accommodations who cannot attend classes in person.
- avs733 6y ago
  I'll add a couple other notes... It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of Georgia. Basically, GT is in the same boat as many other places...working on the assumption that students will pick the university with in person or take a gap year before doing online. So everyone, to some extent, is bluffing each other. Now it's a race to see who admits they were wrong first. You are starting to see it (or have already seen it) from private universities mostly because they have total control over their financial state and (in some cases) an immutable reputation that won't be damaged (think: MIT, Harvard, etc.) by being conservative. For everyone else, it's a crap shoot.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    > It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of Georgia. It's a tech school, and this is a tech blog, plus GA (as a proxy for the south in general) has a lot of the COVID and has not done a fantastic job managing outbreaks. Makes sense it's a source of scrutiny.
tijuco2 6y ago
Just to contribute. I have student visa and the "problem" is that with our visa (F1) we are not allowed to have online classes only. We have to attend class for X hour every week. This or we lose our visa. It's an immigration problem.
Sybth 6y ago
Fuck Georgia tech.
aaron695 6y ago
Everyone in the USA will get C19. So what's the argument here? They will overload the hospital system? The very few (at a university) who might die, might get a extra year of life by the university lockdown for longer? Where they wait for the non existent vaccine or treatment (many years away at best)? Do they have an actual exact reason other than a wishy washy fear? What mathematical model do they hope for by delaying?

192 points by tony101 6y ago

Title: "Georgia Tech Professors Revolt..." Reality: Georgia Tech Professors release a not-even-strongly-worded letter [1] to express their alarm and recommendations, a letter that doesn't even mention actions they might take if those recommendations are not followed. I guess this counts as a "revolt"? 1: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntduj3mMhZhhGtF2khGYHNJdZIXu1xBhg/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntd...

noirbot 6y ago
If you want to see some more direct anger, as well as some indications why they may not be taking that much public action, you can read some more here: https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21 https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I always thought the word "revolt" implied at least some kind of action rather than mere anger. The instant burial of my comment seems to indicate that the word's definition must have changed recently.
Anon1096 6y ago
It also doesn't seem like anyone is actually confirming these staff members to be on board, as evidenced by the interesting signers such as "Mike Hunt" from the College of Cock among others.
adamsea 6y ago
It's a news article headline; I don't think anyone clicked on the link with the expectation that the professors would be literally arming themselves or something ...
- perl4ever 6y ago
  I would tend to agree with the parent comment - while they may not be engaging in armed revolt nor are expected to, it seems to me that the line between revolting and not revolting is when you draw the proverbial line in the sand. When you say, "we are committed to working with...blah blah blah" you haven't revolted yet. Revolt doesn't require violence or anger but it does require saying "I/we are not going to do this thing we are being compelled to, period". Saying "we disagree strongly" is not making an ultimatum. They might be implying that they are considering revolting, though. If I were working there, I would think it better to be more blunt. I bet in private, people are.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Sure, I could see that. But it’s a newspaper headline. It’s not the title of a scientific paper. And since we can’t devise repeatable experiments for the truth or falsehood of news articles (though I give it 50/50 odds someone might post a comment now proposing how we could ;) ) news articles cannot have the same kind of confidence that scientific papers have. As revolting as that idea may be ;)

Symbiote 6y ago

To make a political post even more political... Do American university staff belong to unions? Including the faculty? Hopefully this can be resolved with words, but striking for better working conditions has a very long history.

stu2b50 6y ago
They don't have the right to collectively bargain in Georgia (the state).
- bumby 6y ago
  Is this because the are public sector employees?
  - vkou 6y ago
    No, because Georgia police officers, who are public employees, have unions.
    - analog31 6y ago
      Likewise in Wisconsin. The state government did what they could get away with. They can deny union rights to public sector employees, but aren't required to treat all public sector employees the same. Still, formal union representation would not prevent a wildcat strike.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
hypersoar 6y ago
I'm not aware of any faculty unions representing professors. There are some academic student employee (inc. grad students) unions and a handful of postdoc unions.
- avs733 6y ago

anonms-coward 6y ago

Makes a lot of sense. Professors of high age are at very increased risk. Students fit in tight spaces would for sure include asymptomatic careers. And any hope of expecting an entire student community to take utmost caution is simply futile.

mrtri 6y ago

they should visit third world country vietnam, how they managed to keep the corona deaths to zero. while across the ocean thousands die in the US with better healthcare and hygiene

glofish 6y ago

What is not discussed there is that all these professors signing the document expect to be paid the same as last year. One might argue that if the lectures are online then the tuition (and professor pay) should be proportional to the value they produce - and that can't possibly be the same as last year.

watwut 6y ago
Shouldn't salary be market based, theoretically? Salaries are not based on produced value typically. They are result of negotiations.
- joekim 6y ago
  Yeah, agreed. The market sets the price.
- glofish 6y ago
  Right, but those negotiations did assume face to face instructions. If they don't teach face to face then the terms need to be re-negotiated. All I am saying here is not that you should push faculty to do things they don't want - just to have everyone understand they can't get the same salary as before if they provide less value as before.
joekim 6y ago
How would you calculate the reduction in value of lectures if given online? I'd argue the value of the lectures is about the same for large classes, it's the ability to ask questions or students ability to focus that gets harder online.
- noirbot 6y ago
  And at the same time though, it's also generally more work to set things up for an online class, or at least it can be, especially for classes with labs, or ones that usually involved using a whiteboard. It may be a reduction in value to the students, but it's also an increase in work for the professors probably.

mnm1 6y ago

Reopening universities and colleges is also a major threat to the entire community. Here in WA over a hundred students tested positive this week after partying at their frat. In Alabama, students are intentionally trying to get infected. This will happen en masse if universities open their campuses and those infected will spread the infections into not only the immediate community but also the ones that many of them traveled hundreds of miles from to attend university. It would be pure madness to reopen or to pretend like university students will social distance and wear masks.

charliepark 6y ago
Here's a pretty good thread from a professor arguing that the Alabama story is very likely made up: https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269 https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269 But I totally agree that the entire premise of colleges trying to function as an on-campus institution is absolutely absurd until there's a vaccine.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  > until there's a vaccine Why do people think we're getting some magic vaccine? Gavi/Gates have pushed this "18 months" bullshit, where they're developing some magical vaccine for a family of viruses that's never had a vaccine before, and every previous attempt has been met with either bad immunopathic responses or immune enhancement syndrome[0]. Vaccines takes decades to develop safely, and the techniques being proposed now have never led to a vaccine that made it through clinical trials before. There is no vaccine coming in any reasonable amount of time. The 100+ companies are take a lot of WHO/government money, and who knows if they'll actually produce anything. Safe vaccines for new families of viruses take a decade. There is still no vaccine for retroviruses (herpes, HIV, etc.) It's straight up Gates pipe dream to think a safe vaccine for this can be made in a year. [0]: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-honor/#vacinations-should-not-be-made-in-a-year https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...

cglong 6y ago

I'm in a Georgia Tech Facebook group and this has been a really controversial issue, particularly among international students. They only provided 4-6 weeks notice before reopening, so not only is flying risky, it'll be expensive too. To make matters worse, some classes will be offered online, but students won't know if it is until after the semester has already started.

Archit3ch 6y ago
Did the students fly to their home countries?
- Donald 6y ago
  They moved online after spring break. Many students went to their home countries and were asked not to come back for the remainder of the term.
  - avs733 6y ago
    and the online transition was bungled when the state university system overuled GT's president and insisted they stay in person, then changed their minds. So campus went from 'we are coming back after break' to 'online after spring break' to 'coming back after an extended break' to 'online after spring break' in something like 96 hours.
- cglong 6y ago
  As an American, I saw a lot of notices at the beginning of the pandemic encouraging Americans abroad to return home ASAP. I'd imagine other countries did the same.
- xeromal 6y ago
  Lots of universities closed their campus housing

tomohawk 6y ago

Taking a look at excess mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid (scroll down to the Economist graphs) It would appear that the worst occurred in the April timeframe (Europe, New York), and that we've mostly reached a point of no excess mortality at this point. However, if another wave were to come through, the graphs are pretty sobering. For 65+, excess deaths peaked at 35k/week extra For 45-64, excess deaths peaked at 2.5k/week extra For 15-44, excess deaths peaked at .8k/week extra So, most students returning is a negligible risk, but for some professors, it could be daunting, if there were to be another wave.

hef19898 6y ago
You mean another one than the one currently happening in South America, India and the US? Also, it is not just deaths. The less at risk groups infect others, that can be more at risk.
- tomohawk 6y ago
  It's unfortunate that the excess mortality is not a metric that is rigorously collected at this time. As a result, it lags quite a bit. We'll know in a week or so how June looked. You're right that it is not just deaths, but morbidity. Someone who gets on a vent due to covid may never regain the life they had previously. However, we've learned a bit since April. Wearing masks works with social distancing, but requires administrative enforcement. Sweden has kept their schools open during this time (through high school) and offers an interesting point of comparison. It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them. The main problems they've had are in the immigrant communities (220% higher rates of covid) and in elder care facilities.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them. By which you mean, it is neck-and-neck with the United States and Brazil in daily cases per capita, and is soundly leading both countries in deaths per capita? Their strategy of 'isolate the vulnerable population and do little else' worked great, except for the part where it hasn't worked at all because... The vulnerable population is getting sick and dying.

fabian2k 6y ago

Given the current numbers in the US, it does not seem likely that you can reopen universities in any kind of safe way. Anything that puts a lot of people into small rooms is problematic, and I really can't see anything that is close to the regular operation being possible in the fall. The only way to be able to reopen inherently risky activities like this is to suppress the virus sufficiently that you can handle the remainder with mask mandates, contact tracing and prohibiting mass events. I'm in Germany where the number of cases is drastically lower than in the US right now, and I doubt we'll be able to reopen universities fully in the fall. With the dramatic numbers from the US right now, it does seem extremely unlikely that they could be controlled enough in the fall to make any kind of reopening safe.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The goals are different, though. US universities don't hope to find a reopening plan that won't spread the virus at all; they just want to find a way to keep it from spreading too much.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  I don’t get the impression that anyone expects anything to be 100% safe. This is a straw man. Everyone agrees the goal is to prevent it from spreading “too much,” but any proposed school reopenings (from kindergarten up to university) look like they’d land way above the line of acceptable spread. Maybe a line we can all agree on is: If the expected resulting R_0 is above 1, it’s probably not a good plan as it will not be sustainable. Since you probably can’t know whether it’ll result in an R_0 above 1 before doing it, then in order to reopen you must have robust surveillance in place to quickly detect the R_0 and have a plan to shut back down in the case it reaches 1.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    There's quibbles about whether the boundary needs to be exactly 1, but yeah, I agree with your core point. A reopening plan needs a strategy for how to scale back if something goes wrong, and it's hard to imagine how you could scale back transmission in a dorm full of college students.

stu2b50 6y ago

I'd add that Georgia Tech is asking for Out-of-State and International Students to come in on July 24-26th, which is 2 weeks after the announcement was made (very recently). Which seems kinda absurd. >If you have secured, or expect to have secured your visa, and plan to enroll for the fall semester on the Atlanta campus, you should plan for in-person, residential instruction. >You will be asked to arrive in Atlanta between July 24-26 and be required to follow quarantine guidelines. >Per guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, any individual who is traveling to the U.S. from an international destination should quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, monitor their health, and practice social distancing. This guidance should be followed by students planning to live in either on-campus housing or private housing located off-campus.

avs733 6y ago
and also effectively binds them to this process because now you are making people fly domestically or internationally on very short notice...and will look ridiculous if they cancel that a week or two later.

molmalo 6y ago

In some universities in Spain, they have mandatory antibody tests, and they divide students in 3 groups: the ones with antibodies, the ones without and sick people that can follow the classes online. To enter the buildings in the campus, you need to get a "passport", after completing antibody test and lots of questions... Some preconditions, like being asthmatic disqualifies you (so you need to follow classes online). Also, they have several new rules, like using only stairs to move across floors, minimum distance, thermal cameras, etc. It's a new world in many aspects.

luxurytent 6y ago
Reading this, I can't believe how far behind North America is with respect to this virus. When it comes to day to day life, we have very little new, quality information compared to March. I'm not saying what Spain is doing is great, but it feels like an iterative step to remove a few top layers of anxiety
- gdulli 6y ago
  It's been fascinating in a dark way to see how cultural differences from place to place are translating into vastly different responses to this situation (and vastly different outcomes) from country to country and from state to state within the US. How often do we get to see the entire world deal with the same problem at the same time for such a sustained period?
teruakohatu 6y ago
From a game theory perspective it seems very risky to give young people an incentive to be infected. When people have tangible benefits from having antibodies, a subset of the population is sure to "aquire" them. With those complex rules (have antibodies but use an inhaler means you are banned), would it not just be better to have everything online?

umvi 6y ago

Air Force Academy has already re-opened with next semesters' students already there. They are marching socially distanced and with masks and elevated hand washing. On a side note - several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown-induced mental health issues a few months back... so it's pretty safe to say that the cure is more deadly than the illness (at least currently... 0 cadets have died from covid-19 while 2 have died from suicide).

HenryKissinger 6y ago
> several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown-induced mental health issues a few months back. My condolences. The Air Force Academy is a golden ticket to become an Air Force pilot. I can't imagine what it would take to override that prospect in one's mind to the point of bringing them to the brink of suicide. I understand that forced isolation sucks, but not to this point.
ceejayoz 6y ago
https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket-in-2019/ https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket-in-2019/ > A total of 137 Airmen took their own lives in 2019—a 33 percent increase from the 103 suicides in 2018 despite service efforts to tackle the problem. I'm not sure you can conclude much from two.

mnky9800n 6y ago

What's wild is Georgia tech has a very successful online master's program that apparently everyone forgot about because it could be a great starting point to do everything online.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Online degrees that are marketed as online degrees carry a stigma among employers, because they are perceived as being lower quality than not-online degrees, and the stuff of diploma mills. My final semester will be entirely online, but I couldn't care less, since my degree isn't an online degree.
- just-juan-post 6y ago
  > Online degrees that are marketed as online degrees carry a stigma among employers, because they are perceived as being lower quality than not-online degrees, and the stuff of diploma mills. Do you have some survey results or where are you getting this "fact"?
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    Sure. > In 2009, Norina L. Columbaro and Catherine H. Monaghan, researchers at the Cleveland State University, published an article analyzing dozens of studies and popular articles on employers’ perceptions of online degrees. By and large, they found that “gatekeepers”—for example, employers and hiring managers—“have an overall negative perception about online degrees.” In their survey, Columbaro and Monaghan also found several recurring concerns about online degrees. These concerns ranged from a perceived lack of rigor to concerns about the increased potential for academic dishonesty. Not surprisingly, the fact that online degrees were still associated with an earlier generation of diploma mills was also a concern. https://news.elearninginside.com/have-online-degrees-and-credentials-finally-lost-their-stigma/ https://news.elearninginside.com/have-online-degrees-and-cre...
    - perl4ever 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410

AlexCornila 6y ago

I assume this is a $ issue for them, they won’t be able to charge what they normally charge for online classes so they try to bring people in somehow edit: normally charge for campus

joshuamorton 6y ago
That may be part of it, but a not-insiginificant part of the issue is that Georgia Tech, as an institution, isn't allowed to set the rules. The Georgia Board of Regents has relatively tight control (presumably through budgetary means, if not explicit control means) over the policies schools are allowed to implement. So even if GT leadership wanted to implement something like a mask-required or an online-classes-by-request, no questions asked rule, it isn't actually allowed to by the state. GT's leadership is still somewhat culpable, don't get me wrong the President could be doing better, but the buck doesn't stop with him in this case.
- dpeck 6y ago
  This is right on, and just another example of GT (a top tier engineering school) being physically located in, and largely beholden to, a state that doesn’t care about, or is downright hostile to all things “technology”/“smart”. I love my alma mater, but I wish somebody over at Emory would have figured out a way to buy out the state at some point and have us as part of them.
  - zbaylin 6y ago
    > a state that doesn’t care about, or is downright hostile to all things “technology”/“smart”. I know this is a generalization, but I find it kind of egregious. Georgia is one of the only states left (AFAIK) where you can essentially attend an in-state college for free if you have a high enough GPA [0]. You can argue about the means by which that is achieved (the lottery), but as a current Tech student I know plenty of very talented students who wouldn't be able to attend college, let alone an engineering school, without these scholarship programs. I doubt that a state/government that truly was anti-technology or anti-"smart" would funnel what must be billions of dollars a year into academic scholarships. [0]: https://www.gafutures.org/hope-state-aid-programs/hope-zell-miller-scholarships/ https://www.gafutures.org/hope-state-aid-programs/hope-zell-...

pmoriarty 6y ago

I feel for the students, but reopening the school for in-person classes makes no sense. If a student flies home, they face one day of risk. If school reopens for in-person classes, then they'll face hundreds of days of risk. That single day of flying may not even be as risky as a single day of classes (never mind hundreds of days of classes), because not nearly as many people fly these days due to fear of the pandemic. Also, if classes reopen, many of the people that get sick (who'll be far more numerous than those that get sick from flying a single day) will spread the sickness to others, causing way more knock-on effects than those caused by a small number of students flying one day.

djsumdog 6y ago
The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't really get online and I'd hate to be forced to be online only. We've lost a whole year, to a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as anyone thought it'd be, and it will likely die, or we'll reach herd immunity, long before any virus can be safely manufactured. I feel like a lot of this is fear, hysteria and an completely inability for humans to properly assess risk, mixed with just a plethora of bad and conflicting information.
- acalmon 6y ago
  How about faculty? Professors are, on average, more than 40 years old. Do you think they should teach in person?
  - zbaylin 6y ago
    During lecture at least, students are always at least 6 feet away from the professor. Moving to and from classes is a different story, though.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      6' is nowhere near enough distance to be safe indoors in a room with potentially up to hundreds of other people in it. The virus can stay airborne for hours in enclosed indoor spaces. If you have a lecture hall of 100 people that meets regularly each week, and the people in it aren't wearing good masks, it's practically a guarantee that by the end of the semester everyone there will have gotten it.

adamsea 6y ago

"Faculty were already feeling anxious about the upcoming fall semester, GPB News was told, but a recent decision by the Board of Regents and state university system to not require students wear masks in classrooms sent faculty over the edge." Allowing a gathering of 10+ people in an enclosed space without a mask sounds like a terrible idea.

djsumdog 6y ago
It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way out. Let's stop the mass hysteria
- throw-away_42 6y ago
  This is not what "on it's [sic] way out" looks like: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/record-spikes-in-us-coronavirus-cases-push-up-hospitalization-rates-in-16-states.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/record-spikes-in-us-coronavi...
- majormajor 6y ago
  > It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way out. Let's stop the mass hysteria Not based on active hospitalization counts in the current hot zones... complain all you want about test numbers not be comparable day over day, but I haven't seen anyone explain THAT away.

georgeburdell 6y ago

The Board of Regents are political appointees so I'm not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I'm generally not a fan of blanket shelter in place rules on freedom grounds, but the science is clear on the positive benefits of masks [0]. And there isn't really a down-side. [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

djsumdog 6y ago
There are a lot of downsides if asymptomatic spread isn't really true (the WHO said it wasn't and then walked it back .. reading a lot of the studies, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest there is little to no asymptomatic spread; and the push to say otherwise is very political). Masks are very bad psychologically. They cause judgement and distrust, plus they're a pretty useless placebo effect. This virus is clearly no where near as dangerous as original made out to be, and I the normalization of the mask directly lead to an increase of violence during the recent riots all around the nation. They have the potential to lead people to take more risks and do things they wouldn't normally do[0]. It's absurd to think masks don't have any downsides. They certainly do. [0]: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/ https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/
- tripletao 6y ago
  Your link is vaguely Freudian storytelling, evoking a sort of secular spirituality more than anything resembling objective science. Here's a sample: > The wearing of a mask, under conditions in which an individual is aware that their face is no longer their ‘face’, will lead to a transformation away from the usual ‘self’ through a self-attributional process. Whatever the negative consequences of that self-attributional process, nurses, cleanroom operators, and countless others who routinely wear masks seem to have gotten over it, and to enjoy basically normal social interactions. You didn't quantify your claims as to the dangers of the virus, but ~0.3% of NYC--of the total population, not those confirmed or estimated infected--is dead from the coronavirus. Treatment has improved (no early ventilator use) since then, but that's a rough lower bound for the IFR. Herd immunity should come much sooner than 1-1/R0 of the population due to heterogeneity, but even a lower bound for IFR times a lower bound for total infected is a lot of dead people. Finally, the case count is increasing. So regardless of whether the people spreading it are truly asymptomatic, misattributing light symptoms to allergies or similar, or aware that they're seriously sick but going out anyways, they're out there spreading. A mask seems likely enough to help in all three such cases to be clearly cost-effective to me. Have you tried wearing a mask? What bad experience did you have? Some of the fabric ones are near-impossible to breathe through (especially the handmade ones in that pleated pattern everyone seems to have adopted). Lighter cotton or surgical-style seem fine to me, and are widely used here in California--and have been widely used in East Asia for decades--without obvious negative consequences.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Reopen for the students, have those at risk work remote or lecture remote. We can’t assume a vaccine will be developed, so we need to act accordingly.

m0zg 6y ago

I sure hope we as a society figure out a way to make college campuses (and physical presence of students) largely unnecessary eventually. I don't expect it to happen in a year, but in-person lectures seemed ridiculous to me 25 years ago, and they seem even more so now when there's abundance of tech and anyone can record 4K videos of arbitrary length. Most of those lectures also sucked ass, since they were slow-moving, but if your attention lapses for like 3 minutes of a difficult lecture, you're lost for the rest of the lecture and there's no way to rewind and listen again. That's not to mention the time spent writing on the chalkboard and speaking - you could take in the same amount of information from a book at easily 3-4x the speed, leaving more time to do practical work that actually helps build the skills. Of course one still needs to be able to go to labs if one is doing research, but those could be bolstered by not investing in auditoriums, halls, cafes, and other physical infrastructure. It'd also be great (in the US) to shut down all the sports programs. They're like this weird benign tumor on the side of large schools which costs money and does not provide educational value.

aurizon 6y ago

This sounds like a plot to deal with faculties top-heavy with senior tenured profs - who will be on that top rung of risk in the death lottery = save Georgia Tech a bundle. Prove me wrong!

aurizon 6y ago

A well designed online course needs online tested milestones, segment by segment. Student get an online automated test. What he gets wrong creates a fork to an online module to teach that item. Fail again = re-teach in a different way. Repeated failmode might attract an online human to step that person along. Then back to the lessons. This is just smart teaching programs do. Labs can be done youtube style, but need careful design to deal with each possible fork in the road where a student can get off track. Some people might not be smart enough for complex abstract stuff - I have met and failed many 'memory machines' - students who can read and repeat everything they see, but are unable to use the knowledge in a novel way that has not been worked out in examples before.I used to tutor goofs like that in Engineering Physics at U of T. They had near perfect recall, but off the beaten track they could not solve new problems. Weekly problem sets were made to make them fail. They fought back with study groups - I was always in demand to help. In the end they failed the problems exams or at year end in the exams because they were basically dummies with near total recall.

avs733 6y ago

I am a Georgia Tech faculty member. I've been reading this thread and considering how to respond, and decided I should be transparent. There are a lot of things being discussed here and I don't think I have the bandwidth to respond to all of them but I'm happy to try and answer some questions. No clue how to verify this but happy to do so non-publicly.

avs733 6y ago
to answer a few questions I've seen in the thread -no, faculty are not unionized -nominally the concept of self governance and faculty roles in governance still exists at GT. However, when this began I'll be honest and saw a minimum amount (or role) of faculty governance involvement...which at the time didn't strike me as bad, until I saw how utterly unprepared the nominally professional management was to deal with things. - We have gotten very mixed communication on fall instructional planning. By mixed I specifically mean what we have been told has changed AND is insufficient to make decisions about research, classes, or other things. - We are also expected to support online only courses for international students and students with ADA accommodations who cannot attend classes in person.
avs733 6y ago
I'll add a couple other notes... It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of Georgia. Basically, GT is in the same boat as many other places...working on the assumption that students will pick the university with in person or take a gap year before doing online. So everyone, to some extent, is bluffing each other. Now it's a race to see who admits they were wrong first. You are starting to see it (or have already seen it) from private universities mostly because they have total control over their financial state and (in some cases) an immutable reputation that won't be damaged (think: MIT, Harvard, etc.) by being conservative. For everyone else, it's a crap shoot.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of Georgia. It's a tech school, and this is a tech blog, plus GA (as a proxy for the south in general) has a lot of the COVID and has not done a fantastic job managing outbreaks. Makes sense it's a source of scrutiny.

tijuco2 6y ago

Just to contribute. I have student visa and the "problem" is that with our visa (F1) we are not allowed to have online classes only. We have to attend class for X hour every week. This or we lose our visa. It's an immigration problem.

Sybth 6y ago

Fuck Georgia tech.

aaron695 6y ago

Everyone in the USA will get C19. So what's the argument here? They will overload the hospital system? The very few (at a university) who might die, might get a extra year of life by the university lockdown for longer? Where they wait for the non existent vaccine or treatment (many years away at best)? Do they have an actual exact reason other than a wishy washy fear? What mathematical model do they hope for by delaying?