I don’t think that’s a winning argument. Not trying to strawman, but a reasonable analogy might be hiring a guy on parole/probation. If that guy commits a parole violation and must go to jail, the employer couldn’t just say, “Please don’t enforce the law, it would be an undue burden on us.”
I would assume the lawyers would make a better argument than that? One of the departments I was in would have been forced to temporarily shut down I think. We had about 40 graduate students of which ~75% were international. Removing them in July would have closed the lab a lot of medical research was running through and forced faculty on 1-0 / 1-1 type gigs to go 3-3 or more. Some of them probably would have quit, resulting in further strain. Would have also completely wrecked the PhD matriculation requirements going forward. I realize the fascists see all of those things as features, not bugs, which is why I think the schools need to challenge it. Like maybe they ultimately lose but they could win a temporary injunction so we aren’t doing crazy ecosystem-wrecking shit like booting a million students because they aren’t white.
In the meantime, your school announced that it would be holding F2F classes, so it wouldn’t be an easy and obvious target like Harvard. The hierarchy given in that memo is schools > programs > individual students. I assume their effort to enforce would follow that order. Couldn’t the department enroll the non-candidates in independent studies that aren’t listed as online courses? I have no idea how big your department is or what the courses look like, but if it’s what I think then small seminars should be doable this way?
A lot of immigration lawyers are now arguing about how to interpret this announcement. It isn’t clear at all what is going to happen. There is some speculation that those who choose not to stay in the US (or must leave) will also lose their SEVIS record and therefore their student status. So there isn’t even the option to go to their home country and study and teach online. As just one example, everyone in India will no longer be a student because all the airports are closed and they can’t return even if they want to. This is insane.
This is where there’s a difference between what the school said and how people (including me) interepreted it. What people are realizing now (and getting angry about now) is that my school promised that students would be returning to campus this fall. They didn’t make any promises about there being f2f classes for them to take. The school is just hoping that colleges and departments are able to provide a healthy number of in-person classes, without any way of mandating it. So a large number of students are furious (I see this on reddit) that they’ve returned to campus and leased an apartment only to find out that all of their classes are online.
I still don’t know what my schedule is or what mode it will be taught in, and classes start in 6 weeks.
The issue I’m trying to figure out right now is what exactly determines whether a class counts as “in person”. I think the deciding factor is not whether a student CAN take the class in person, but rather whether a student COULD successfully complete the class without ever being there in person. If the answer is that a student could complete the course requirement without ever being there physically, it wouldn’t count as an in-person class even if most students did attend in person (I think).
Suppose I’m teaching a doctoral seminar for 5 students and say, “This is going to be held in person in room 100. But I understand if you’re not able to be on campus, so you can participate via Zoom.” If 4 students attend the physical class for the entire semester and 1 student participates remotely via Zoom, I believe that the course would be considered an online class and would not satisfy the requirements for a visa (for any of the students).
To add on top of all of this, a student might even do everything they are supposed to do and border patrol could just decide that they didn’t at reentry and the student is out of luck, loses SEVIS status, and is no longer enrolled in the program.
International students will be unable to leave the country if they want to make sure they remain enrolled. And even if they do that, they might get deported if the wrong person interprets any of this differently.
If this ICE thing took effect when I was in business school (the innocent days of post-9/11 GWB), I would have lost half my classmates or some shit. Also my best classmates.
Is this seminar an article discussion round table format?
It’s even worse than that:
If a school changes its operational stance mid-semester, and as a result a nonimmigrant student switches to only online classes, or a nonimmigrant student changes their course selections, and as a result, ends up taking an entirely online course load, schools are reminded that nonimmigrant students within the United States are not permitted to take a full course of study through online classes.
I get more and more anxious each day. I’m supposed to run band camp in three weeks. School starts in five weeks. Apparently, the plan is to run normal school until something bad happens. Meanwhile, after already cutting K-12 by $150million or so, the state is going to spend $10million on a fucking assessment to see how far behind we are. Brilliant.
Sorry. Not sure what else to say.
Yes
Lots of sympathy for everyone in here going through this.
Should be the easiest one to game if it comes to that. The worst scenario is obviously if your school files as online only by the July 15 deadline. Hopefully no schools will actually do that and hopefully there will be a speedy injunction.
I have until next Wednesday to decide if I want my kids to go virtual (well, their schooling, not like their bodies or souls or anything like that) or get back to in-person. I hadn’t taken a firm stand in our household because of my fear about keeping them home was fucking up their socialization and I knew my wife was like 80% on the “in-person” side.
It turned around today. My wife actually said she thinks we should keep them home - the massive increase in cases have spooked her (not that she didn’t understand things, but she still really wanted the kids to be able to be in school, which I totally get). We haven’t made a final decision, but looks like we might make my youngest really happy and my oldest really sad.
We still let my oldest go back to gymnastics and if she reports back that their precautions suck we could pull her out, but that’s not set in stone, either.
My wife is starting a new job and working from home for at least the rest of the year. I work and home, too. And with the kids possibly being home, I might shell out some dough and upgrade my router and modem. They aren’t old, but we’ve been having some connection problems lately.
EDIT: My wife and I are both on a Facebook group for our kids’ school’s parents. She’s been on it longer than I have. At the beginning of July, someone posted a poll on what decision the parents were going to make (the original deadline for our school was 7/10). It was like 90-13 for in-person. I don’t think a new poll has been created, but my wife said from her monitoring, the tide is slowly turning.
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It sucks. We’ll have to make a decision sometime soon, and my wife and I are getting closer and closer to remote. People here (even if it’s just a minority) are too fucking selfish to follow basic rules and there’s just no way that the schools are going to be safe.
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School to prison pipeline continues even with virtual learning
One of our dorm-resident students just tested positive. Still no word on transition to online learning. I’m working on getting an outdoor projector. Gonna’ do my best to teach outside unless there’s an active hurricane.
My wife made a good point as to what started changing her mind from in-person to virtual school. She said that as much as we all want our kids to have a “normal” school experience, the online option will almost certainly be more stable. There will be (at least according to our school district’s plans) a structure to the day. You know what to expect at home.
In-person, though, the kids will have to constantly be concerned with social distancing, masks, hand washing, not touching their faces, and wondering if someone is going to get sick. Their learning might get disrupted if they have to go get tested and quarantine or if the school shuts down again. So on and so forth.