From Forbes:
Harvard announced that it would conduct most of its classes and work remotely for the first three weeks of January. Also this week, Stanford University, Columbia University, Duke University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, Temple University, the University of Washington and all the campuses in the University of California system have announced they will begin their spring semesters remotely. … Yesterday, Yale University announced that it would delay the start of the spring semester for a week. To accommodate that delay, Yale’s spring break will be shortened by one week. In addition most courses will be taught online from January 25 through February 4. … On December 23, University of Chicago Provost Ka Yee C. Lee and Katie Callow-Wright, Executive Vice President of the University and Chief of Staff to the president, sent a message to students and employees indicating that the university would delay the start of Winter Quarter for most schools and divisions by one week—to January 10, 2022. Additionally, a remote-only instructional format will be used for the first two weeks of the quarter, with a return to in-person instruction anticipated beginning on January 24.
UO should follow its betters er, uh, join its elite peers, and go remote until the covid situation clarifies.
I’m fine with in-person classes or online start; online WOULD HAVE BEEN fine if we had been given proper lead time. What I do not appreciate is later this week the Provost finally putting his finger in the wind, seeing what everyone already did two weeks prior, and then telling us to go online. That is what, in normal institutions, would be called poor leadership.
Presumably he’s holding the announcement until after the bowl game – don’t want to send contradictory messages.
What? UO as betters or elite peers? Surely you jest, UO certainly
is Uniquely Excellent; expect to see the O evolve to the E eventually
Is UO relying on different models of virus impact from what other schools are relying on? Is it calculating potential harm or drain on support services differently? What we don’t know about Omnicron is almost everything. Great interview here: Wallace-Wells: Is Omnicron a New Wave or a Parallel Pandemic? New York Mag: Intelligencer. –Or is UO taking greater risk for greater reward? What is that reward?