The semester has already started, or is about to start, for many of my colleagues in education. I want to discuss the challenges I fear my colleagues will face, when many schools and academic organizations have made it clear that they don’t really care about their safety against COVID, and don’t really care to protect them against a right wing that doesn’t want them to be anti-racist and anti-bigotry.
I wrote earlier in August 2021 about what “caring” means during this ongoing COVID pandemic. I wish I could say that, since August 2021, I thought there was progress at the institutional level by schools (K-12, colleges, universities) as well as in academic organizations. I wish I could say that–but I can’t. I don’t know how education can persist when it is limited to only the audiences it seems those schools and organizations wish to reach.
I don’t mean only in the face of what COVID has done to hinder work and education, but also how the failure of so many academic institutions to speak out against bigotry, whitewashed history, and censorship is perpetuating the same rightwing bullshit that led to this pandemic, that led to white supremacy in the White House from 2017 to 2021, that perpetuates an ongoing threat by a political right wing married to a white supremacist movement.
That’s a lot to unpack, so forgive me for how much I will ramble.
How do you proceed with education without making it inclusive for people who cannot learn in-person? It’s to my shame that I overlooked for so long the failure of us teachers to make our learning accessible for students outside of our classrooms, including students who due to disabilities are learning remotely. While schools insist on a return to in-person learning, the failure to persist with remote learning opportunities, many of which were effective and helpful, is galling.
This says nothing about the failure to retain remote presentation options at conferences: we are depriving audiences of scholars from around the world who cannot attend in person, not just because this pandemic can still kill or debilitated for life, but because of laws, political suppression, cost, and time.
Who has any grounds to say that they are trying to promote caring, compassion, and community during this pandemic, if you are requiring people to learn, work, and present in potentially unsafe environments? How is someone supposed to risk their health, potentially getting sick, when a child, a parent, or another dependent looks to that person for aid and support? How are we to ask someone to show up in person, risk getting sick, and risk bringing that illness home to a child not yet old enough to be vaccinated, or whose health condition prevents them from being vaccinated? How do you say that you care for other people when you will not create safer practices to learn and work?
Exacerbating the situation is a refusal by some schools and organizations to enforce COVID vaccination requirements, mask requirements, and social distancing requirements in any meaningful way, if at all: it’s been more often that I’ve seen schools and organizations promise such requirements, only to relax or eliminate those rules, not because of health-based reasons why someone can’t be vaccinated, can’t wear a mask, or can’t social distance, but out of fear of protests and political blowback from rightwing extremists (redundant phrase, I know) who want this pandemic to persist.
And as I said, these requirements need to be done in a meaningful way. It’s not enough to say you will require vaccination: are you actually carding people? It’s not enough to say you will require masks: what are you going to do to actually have someone removed if they refuse to follow that rule? It’s not enough to say you will require social distancing: if you aren’t creating larger rooms and halls to provide physical distancing between students, faculty, and staff, and if you aren’t lowering the maximum occupancy inside a room or hall, then your requirement is hollow.
I don’t want to be so cynical to suggest that you can’t trust any other people, or that you can’t seek help from other people: what would be as teachers if we did not do all we can to help others, and what would people working in mental and emotional health be if they weren’t working to help? But this pandemic has exhausted the capacity for many of us to work. And this pandemic makes all the more obvious that, while there likely are people around you who will absolutely help you if you ask, not everyone has that help, not everyone can absolutely be trusted to absolutely help you, and you are stuck having to make your own decisions within a set of limited, poor options. What kind of a person would ask you to come into work, to work in-person in a setting without ventilation, masking, and required vaccination, if that work can be done remotely? What kind of a school would not retain options for remote learning, where it is helpful for the student to pursue, or helpful for the teacher to pursue? What kind of presentation is closed to only people who can be in-person, when we should be limiting in-person-only events, not just because we fear serving as super-spreader events, but also because we fear that such boundaries close off knowledge?
And speaking of closing off knowledge, that leads to this recent trend, since at least summer 2021 but obviously part of a larger cycle of such inanity, to close off knowledge by prohibiting discussions in schools about the threats of bigotry, about the value of inclusiveness, about the need for diversity, about making our lessons more accurate to the histories of so many people and about learning how to better understand, discuss, and represent those histories in our discussions, literature, and art.
What kind of school or academic group can say they are a school or an academic group, when they refuse to fight against this rightwing assault on education? How do you look at a white supremacist movement baked into the American rightwing, then see your own colleges and universities welcoming speakers not only endorsing that shit but having worked for Republican candidates and conservative organizations? How, after January 6, 2021, do you think it’s fine for one of your professors to sponsor rightwing clubs on campus and invite rightwing speakers? What kind of a university is hosting these speakers and these rightwing clubs on campus? How do you think serving as these platforms is responsible? This isn’t about hosting a debate with people you disagree with: how do you host a debate with people who think, if you’re gay, don’t talk about it in school, that if you’re Black, your life doesn’t matter, that if you’re Jewish, don’t learn abou tthe Holocaust, that if you have a disability, you’re not entering this room or this discussion? Where are the academic groups doing the simplest thing possible, writing an open letter at least to condemn these attacks, naming the names of the legislators sponsoring these regressive bills, the rightwing occupants of the executive branch at the state and federal levels who sign them into law, the very real right wing that cheered on Confederate flags in the United States Capitol?
After the 2016 election, I heard secondhand an expectation that teachers like me were not to be political in the classroom. How can you not be political, when trying to document our history, when trying to discuss our present situation, when trying to talk about art, reading, speech, and life are all already innately political or have been politicized by the very people telling us “don’t be political”?
I went into education, in one very small part, because I thought that schools would afford protections to the sharing of knowledge. I wasn’t so naive to think that schools would protect me from all the violence that could unfold: I didn’t go through my education in schools and my career as a teacher amidst Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Parkland and come away thinking that my school gave a damn about my life any more than this country gives enough of a damn to actually regulate their needless deadly weapons.
But I had hoped, naively, that when staff, students, and teachers were afforded opportunities to work and learn remotely, that these options would persist beyond this pandemic, to better suit the financial and time needs of those people, as well as to diminish in whatever small way the negative environmental impact that our buildings, roads, and pollution-sputtering vehicles have caused. I am incredibly disappointed and frustrated that, rather than extend these remote options, we have decided to go back to whatever we thought was normal. We have taken away from students and employees options to enhance their time, save their money, and protect their health–because we as individuals, or in collective action by unions or protest, have not cared enough to force our schools and employers to change for the better.
I had hoped, again, naively, after how long the United States suffered under fascism from 2017 to 2021, that schools and academic groups would recognize their value and their responsibility to speak out against such rightwing assaults on freedom, knowledge, education, health, and lives. But that would be “politicizing” issues, and heaven forbid we let that happen, while the boot of fascism worn by a thin-fingered vulgarian stamps our face into the dirt. Heaven forbid any school or academic organization pretending to care actually did care to not just preach for inclusiveness and diversity but actually be anti-racist, be anti-bigotry.
To those educators starting their new semester, or in the middle of one, I say, if we are to be decent teachers in our profession, we are obligated not to only trust the word of what a school or academic group told us, but to take seriously our responsibility to tend to the education of any student who will listen, to create safe and accessible environments for their education, and to actually do the work that is part of caring, not just lie and pretend we do care. A lot of schools and academic organizations will say that they care about the people in their community. Their actions will speak for themselves, whether they actually do care. Don’t just listen to them say that they care: figure out by their actions whether they care. And do the only thing you probably have any control over–take care of yourself, so that you can take care of others.
Derek S. McGrath 