It’s Spring break. We definitely need a breather. As our Chancellor has said, the university has pulled together. As far as we know, UC Berkeley has reported only one positive case of COVD19. Yes, the university has pulled together-but it is closed. And for many, there is no elsewhere that offers the prospect of a safe retreat. Many students have simply no home to go to. Or they come from destitute communities where already-high unemployment has suddenly soared, communities where social distancing is sometimes impossible. Undergraduates are worried about their future, their grades, their degrees, their lives. They feel their precarious future has been blown up. Not surprisingly, some are demanding a tuition refund. Graduate students, of course, were having to stitch together a succession of temporary jobs in order to survive. Now they are even more desperate, their COLA demands even more vital. The virus has geographical breadth, but the consequences add to the depth of the social and economic divide.
As for faculty: we’ve been thrown into solitary confinement, zooming out to disconsolate and sparse audiences, wondering for how long we will be struggling with remote learning, wondering if all this extra effort will be exploited in the future. We are lucky, perhaps, that as salaried employees, we can still count on a regular income; our jobs are not yet threatened. But labs are frozen; research libraries are inaccessible; the tenure clock ticks (though it might be a good idea to have it rewound); every aspect of academic life is affected. The shock will not go away. But we can begin the process of recovery by focusing on the human beings who make up our community.*
*Leslie Salzinger prepared this information package for her students that might be useful for other faculty.
Michael Burawoy and Celeste Langan for the Berkeley Faculty Association