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

I&#x27;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.<p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;You will be asked to arrive in Atlanta between July 24-26 and be required to follow quarantine guidelines.<p>&gt;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.

I&#x27;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&#x27;ll be expensive too. To make matters worse, some classes will be offered online, but students won&#x27;t know if it is until after the semester has already started.

I am a Georgia Tech faculty member. I&#x27;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&#x27;t think I have the bandwidth to respond to all of them but I&#x27;m happy to try and answer some questions. No clue how to verify this but happy to do so non-publicly.

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&#x27;t see anything that is close to the regular operation being possible in the fall.<p>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&#x27;m in Germany where the number of cases is drastically lower than in the US right now, and I doubt we&#x27;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.

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.<p>To enter the buildings in the campus, you need to get a &quot;passport&quot;, 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.<p>It&#x27;s a new world in many aspects.

I feel for the students, but reopening the school for in-person classes makes no sense.<p>If a student flies home, they face one day of risk. If school reopens for in-person classes, then they&#x27;ll face hundreds of days of risk.<p>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.<p>Also, if classes reopen, many of the people that get sick (who&#x27;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.

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.

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

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.

The Board of Regents are political appointees so I&#x27;m not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I&#x27;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&#x27;t really a down-side.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;lancet&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9&#x2F;fulltext" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;lancet&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS0140-6...</a>

Just to contribute. I have student visa and the &quot;problem&quot; 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&#x27;s an immigration problem.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re lost for the rest of the lecture and there&#x27;s no way to rewind and listen again. That&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;d also be great (in the US) to shut down all the sports programs. They&#x27;re like this weird benign tumor on the side of large schools which costs money and does not provide educational value.

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 &#x27;memory machines&#x27; - 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.

What&#x27;s wild is Georgia tech has a very successful online master&#x27;s program that apparently everyone forgot about because it could be a great starting point to do everything online.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>Allowing a gathering of 10+ people in an enclosed space without a mask sounds like a terrible idea.

Title: &quot;Georgia Tech Professors Revolt...&quot;<p>Reality: Georgia Tech Professors release a not-even-strongly-worded letter [1] to express their alarm and recommendations, a letter that doesn&#x27;t even mention actions they might take if those recommendations are not followed. I guess this counts as a &quot;revolt&quot;?<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;e&#x2F;1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntduj3mMhZhhGtF2khGYHNJdZIXu1xBhg&#x2F;viewform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;e&#x2F;1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntd...</a>

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!

Recent and related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23726410" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23726410</a>

Taking a look at excess mortality:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;excess-mortality-covid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;excess-mortality-covid</a><p>(scroll down to the Economist graphs)<p>It would appear that the worst occurred in the April timeframe (Europe, New York), and that we&#x27;ve mostly reached a point of no excess mortality at this point.<p>However, if another wave were to come through, the graphs are pretty sobering.<p>For 65+, excess deaths peaked at 35k&#x2F;week extra<p>For 45-64, excess deaths peaked at 2.5k&#x2F;week extra<p>For 15-44, excess deaths peaked at .8k&#x2F;week extra<p>So, most students returning is a negligible risk, but for some professors, it could be daunting, if there were to be another wave.

Everyone in the USA will get C19.<p>So what&#x27;s the argument here?<p>They will overload the hospital system?<p>The very few (at a university) who might die, might get a extra year of life by the university lockdown for longer?<p>Where they wait for the non existent vaccine or treatment (many years away at best)?<p>Do they have an actual exact reason other than a wishy washy <i>fear</i>?<p>What mathematical model do they hope for by delaying?

Fuck Georgia tech.

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

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

Air Force Academy has already re-opened with next semesters&#x27; students already there. They are marching socially distanced and with masks and elevated hand washing.<p>On a side note - several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown-induced mental health issues a few months back... so it&#x27;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).

What is not discussed there is that all these professors signing the document expect to be paid the same as last year.<p>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&#x27;t possibly be the same as last year.