Online teaching and self-fulfilling prophecy

My university is in the throes of figuring out what Fall 2021 looks like for teaching – while working under the enormous handicap of not knowing what Fall 2021 will look like for anything else: student demand, vaccination uptake, variant persistence, not-yet-relaxed Public Health limits on classroom capacities, you name it. This has of course brought with it another round of existential-angst-ridden debate over whether another semester of partly-to-mostly-online teaching will be a way out of our conundrum or the end of higher education as we know it.

It’s easy to be tempted into “end of higher education as we know it”.

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Let’s be astonished that we get to criticize vaccine rollouts

Either yesterday or today, the number of Covid-19 vaccine doses administered globally will have passed 200 million. Some countries, like Israel and the UK, are quite far along; others haven’t yet started; and it’s fair to argue that the developing world is spending too much effort worrying about its own citizens and not enough developing vaccination strategies for the global South. You don’t have to look far to find media stories excoriating governments and other organizations for vaccine rollouts that are slow, uneven, and inequitable.

But hold on here. 200 million doses. Of a vaccine aimed at a virus we’ve known about for less than 15 months.

One year ago, on February 23, 2020, the pandemic was not yet pan.