Wow, this story about Cambridge moving lectures online for next year really blew up, didn’t it? A thread on what it means and what it doesn’t.⬇️ bbc.co.uk/news/education…
Disclaimer 1: I teach at Cambridge but am nowhere near the University’s elite squad of contingency planners (yes, it is actually called Gold Team) so these views are personal and lightly informed. 
Disclaimer 2: ‘Cambridge’ isn’t a single entity. It's more like a monster with dozens of tentacles; or three dozen monsters who share an enthusiasm for education & fortified wine. Important to remember esp. given role of colleges in planning for 20-21.
Disclaimer 3: Yesterday's ‘announcement’ came in an ‘exclusive’ from the student paper; the University didn’t and wouldn’t have put it out at this point because it gives false certainty to a picture that’s still very unclear.
“Moving lectures online” does NOT mean that students will be learning from home. Colleges/departments will be planning for a socially-distanced on-campus experience but with a keen eye on government advice/R.
Different subjects will experience restrictions/changes very differently. In humanities/social sciences most teaching hours are delivered in seminars/small groups. These _may_ be movable to larger rooms, but that’s still not clear.
Science subjects will find it much harder to equip lab spaces for social distancing rules; and when they cancel lectures, they aren’t freeing up space that can be used for practicals. (Is that what they’re called, asks the historian?)
Then there’s the fact that colleges typically provide the rooms for ‘supervisions’ (aka ‘tutorials’), the very-small-group teaching which is Oxbridge’s USP. Do we carry on seeing students in groups of 1-3 in our offices?
This in turn raises the question of inequality between colleges: some have Downton Abbey-style rooms; others offer the full broom-cupboard experience. Will teachers with smaller offices (or grads with no offices at all) have access to larger rooms?
Students are admitted to Cambridge by individual colleges, so there’s also the question of whether some colleges have more space and money to make social distancing work in their student accommodation.
AFAIK all of this stuff is being worked out right now. It’s taking time because (a) it’s super complicated, and (b) the national picture is constantly changing. Yesterday’s story isn’t helpful because it suggests certainty where there is none.
A few other thoughts: if Oxbridge and other rich unis have the resources & space to provide an on-campus experience that’s (relatively) safe, what about universities that don’t – and that need tuition fees to survive?
Is it fair for the swankiest parts of the sector to open their campuses while poorer institutions and their students are forced into the all-online experience? This will only reveal the bankruptcy of our market model & may produce actual bankruptcies of institutions.
Universities are like everything else in this respect: they allow you to see how the pandemic highlights and multiplies existing inequality. The challenge is to find ways to use this as an opening to push back against inequalities everywhere.
Since the Blair years, UK universities have gone from being a public trust/public good to a free-for-all and a private commodity. Students’ forbearance right now will be low because we marketized _everything_ and told them to act like customers.
This means it’s harder to think about decisions that benefit everyone in the sector (and society more broadly), and to redistribute resources in ways that recognise that all parts of HE in the UK (and beyond) depend on each other.
(And this is even before we consider the get-rich-quick schemes of fat-cat university administrators who built Ozymandias Learning Centres and mortgaged their institutions’ futures on tuition fees from overseas students.)
To get back to Cambridge, I should say that the folks I know here who are working these problems are thoughtful & dedicated; it ought to be much easier for Oxbridge to come through this, but that’s not to discount their efforts.
My bigger anxiety is for higher education beyond the wealthiest bits of the sector. Our union @ucu and its leader @DrJoGrady have been battling on multiple fronts and they need our support. But we also need political change urgently.
In particular we need the government to recognize that the commodification of higher ed has left universities in a terrible position going into this pandemic; immediate govt support is needed, then we have to rethink market logic as we come out of this.
The sector was already in crisis before this began: the pandemic has focused and deepened problems that were already debilitating, so we should be clear that the end of the pandemic will do nothing to end those root problems unless we unite and change the narrative.
One last thing to students: I am not in the room where it happens but I can promise you that your lecturers here will do everything we can to ensure that 2020-21 is safe and equitable for you and for _all_ staff – on the teaching, admin & support side, too./
