These are bleak times. As numerous crises – a pandemic, mass unemployment, racial injustice, multiple wildfires – converge, so each intensifies the others. The fires engulfing the region can’t be put out because the incarcerated fire-fighters are missing, released to counter the pandemic spreading through prisons. Indoor spaces that might provide relief from smoke-filled air are closed. It’s all happening in the context of the most severe economic crisis and class polarization since the Depression. Clearly, the worst is yet to come.
Our departments have been told to cut and cut. There’s nothing left to cut except people. In the meantime, we wait for the real cuts from UCOP, which is waiting for the Governor, who is waiting for a Congress that is waiting for Godot. Everyone is waiting, as though we are living some nightmare from which we will awake and life will return to normal.
So—welcome back? Many of us have not ventured very far from home, but we’re also not returning to campus any time soon. Remote teaching is going to be tough enough for faculty, but it is going to be far tougher for many of our students. Ironically, teaching is suddenly once again the essential function of the university, the material basis of the university; it can no longer be taken for granted.
We will do the best we can, not expecting the results to match those from the past. Perhaps we’ll learn a trick or two that can benefit us in a nebulous future of in-person teaching; perhaps we will learn the resilience and humanity of our students; perhaps we will pull together when the savage cuts descend on our campus. Perhaps.
Michael Burawoy and Celeste Langan for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.