4 June 2023: Cancer Crawl

I’ve just completed a period of intense conferencing. Three in-person conferences in five weeks. Plus a number of Zoom talks on top of it. For me, it was wonderfully social and intellectual. In addition to getting to meet and see work by a new generation of grad students and assistant profs, whom I’d not “discovered” due to the pandemic, I also got to catch up with old friends in Washington DC, Cambridge MA, and Toronto.

It’s been great to see so many people again after the pandemic.

However. I always get questions about my health, and I realize it’s been quite some time since I said anything publicly, and there’s always the possibility of messages getting transformed in a game of telephone, so here’s the latest.

tl;dr

I’m fine! Or “fine.” My cancer is best understood as a chronic illness now. It could get worse; but I could also live indefinitely on my current treatment regimen. My endocrinologist, whom I refer to as “the Terminator” due to his non-touchy-feely-ness which will be evident in the next clause of this sentence, says I will “die of something else.” My oncologist says I’m one of his patients doing the best on my current drug regimen, which is great, though there is always room to fall.

State of the cancer: ideally, not going anywhere

I have a rare form of aggressive papillary thyroid cancer, which has metastasized to my lungs. My thyroid is gone, so there’s that.

On a CT scan, the insides of my lungs still look like “night on Earth” photos. Lots of small spots light up, but I have plenty of lung volume, and the Lenvima has slowed their growth. There are a couple bigger ones, and in my twice-annual CT scans, the radiologist measures their growth in millimetres. My neck remains clear and there are no other mets besides my lungs. There is no surgery or chemo to get rid of this kind of cancer. If a few spots get too big, they can be subjected to external beam radiation. But external beam radiation bites, so I would rather avoid that if possible.

How I’m feeling: “fine”

The irony of this particular chronic illness is that I don’t feel the actual cancer. What I feel is the iatrogenic side effects of my drugs. Fatigue, digestive issues, hand-and-foot syndrome (where the medicine leaks out of my smallest capillaries and causes pain in my hands and feet), occasional dizziness, “interesting” muscle pains, proneness to bleeding and slowness to heal, and very occasionally other weird shit, for which I have a rule: if it doesn’t last a week, it’s not a side-effect. Oh, and I am immunocompromised to some degree, but we don’t know exactly to what degree.

For the most part I have strategies for dealing with all of this, more or less. I sometimes hit a wall in the winter and had to miss band practice after teaching. Even though I wear gloves to cook, play music, do laundry, etc., sometimes I have to work through pain to do something I want to do. I would sometimes have to teach with enough Imodium in me to feel like I’m on recreational drugs. I asked a few introverts how they “do” conferences, and then tried to follow their leads instead of my old practices that amounted to attending absolutely everything all the time.

Chronic illness means you have good days and bad days. It’s not constant like some disabilities can be. I probably “look fine.”

Me, my condition, and the pandemic
This has meant that I have been slower to come out of the pandemic than others; I still tend to mask in crowded public spaces; and as someone who was never good with understanding my own limits, I have a tendency to overdo it and then hit a wall in the fashion of Wile E. Coyote.

This fall was particularly complicated, as McGill forced all teaching staff back into classrooms, immunocompromised or not (this is not in line with Quebec employment law, despite what they say). In my case, I wanted to go back but wasn’t sure how wise it was, so I just took the plunge with masks on. I asked my students to mask and had good compliance, even in my 200-student lecture course (no, 200 people don’t show up every day, at least not after add-drop). This was because the university provided free masks for us to distribute. It was extra work, but it was something.

The struggle for me was actually breaking a number of habits that had built up during the pandemic when I was working from home. I don’t know about you, but work and meetings somehow colonized more time — most notably the time that used to be for commuting — and that meant at the beginning of the term I was unprepared to protect my time the way I needed to in order to actually do my job. With chronic fatigue this is particularly difficult to work out.

At my last meeting with my oncologist, I asked about masking and his sense of where we are at in the pandemic, as I always do. He gave me the go-ahead to start, well, effectively taking more chances and “live my life” as he would say. I am still masking up in crowded public places, public transit, etc., but I’ve also been out to eat a lot as a result of all the recent travel, so the seal has been broken there for sure. For now, I’ll still be careful when I can, but will be a little less careful than I have been. That said, I’m not under any illusions that any of this is an individual choice about “assessing your own risk” — it’s just as much about my risk to other people.

I’m skeptical of recent federal and provincial public health policies that have amounted to an official position of “fuck it, some people will die” given the history of eugenics in health disability policy. Masking and free tests are imperfect but easy and effective. But that is for another post.

3 June 2023: We apologize for the interruption

I’d been noticing that a subset of the substack crew would use their weekly social media posts as the basis for blogging. That sounded nice. I missed blogging!

Then I went on vacation, came back and the semester turned into a sprint, and I stopped posting much on social media. So I guess I’ll just have to try again. The next couple months will likely be on the quiet side though.

Nice things; Lessons in humility

I’ve had a fantastic year for awards. In fall 2022 I was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (had to wait on formal induction till fall 2023 due to existing travel plans); in the last week I was elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association; and Diminished Faculties won the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award from the Canadian Communication Association.

These are all nice, as I’m still the kid who sits at the front of the class and raises his hand, so a little approval is honestly nice. But it’s important to maintain some humility and beginner’s mind as well.

Here’s a quote from Morton Subotnik, on trying to buy a copy of Silver Apples of the Moon, after he was signed to his first big recording contract:

I went in and said to the clerk, “I hear there’s this record, Silver Apples of the Moon.” He said, “Yeah, but it’s shit. We’ve sold it out. I don’t know why they’re buying it. I can show you some really good LPs.” He brings out the Columbia-Princeton [Electronic Music Center] LP. I said, “No, no! I really want Silver Apples of the Moon.” He said, “Maybe we have one more copy,” and I bought it. I walked in a giant; I walked out a midget. It really put me in my place. I walked down the stairs feeling so big, but I could barely make it back up the stairs, they were so big. I thanked him for that.”

“We Are Who We Invent” Tape Op

In related news, Volte spent a weekend in May recording with Ky Brooks, and I have to say I managed to hear every little mistake I made. More time with the metronome for me.

24 Feb 2023

Starter Pack

I now have a starter pack I send to welcome BIPOC people, especially femmes, who are questioning whether they might be autistic, filled with essays, memes, hashtags, and online assessment tools. Many people with all kinds of disabilities are doing the same thing, even when we also pursue an official diagnosis—the first hints we had POTS or EDS or fibro or Chiari formation or OCD often came from other disabled people with those body/mind conditions.

–Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future is Disabled (14)

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote lately and the idea of a “starter pack” for disabled and chronically ill friends, colleagues, students. Since Diminished Faculties has come out I’ve had a steady stream of emails from readers. By virtue of teaching disability — as a course, as a topic in courses, and just being out in the classroom — I also regularly hear from students who are thinking about their experience in new ways. I’m slowly assembling a modular starter pack. Right now it’s more on the academic side of “disability studies 101” — my latest undergrad syllabus if they’re not already students in the course, recommendations for some basic readings (Kafer, Price “time harms,” Samuels if they have an invisible disability or chronic illness, Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mia Mingus, etc), and then it depends on the person. New “cancer friends” who are also profs often want career advice or need to navigate the institution; some people want to know where the “community” is (I don’t feel like there’s a single community here); others need to sort out dealing with the local medical system.

If you’ve got something like a “starter pack” I would love to hear what’s in yours.

Killing Prosthetic Metaphors Dead

This came up in my grad seminar this week. Media studies is still full of prosthetic metaphors: where technologies “extend” senses or agency in one way or another. Writers also occasion use the opposite–amputation. The problem with all disability metaphors (see “blind” “deaf” etc) is that they metaphorize stigmas attached to the positions, not the actual experiences of people who use prosthetics, are blind, or are d/Deaf. So what does one do? The answer is of course find other metaphors. Labour metaphors are great because often we are talking about semi-automated processes that have a labour component in them. Writers like Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour will talk about “delegation” which is also interesting (though in Latour’s case separated from real labour politics that perhaps should be considered). There are plenty of other metaphors out there in the sea–go troll for some.

Hybrid Education, or, why I miss the media cart

I receive a pitch from business students who are starting a company to offer students the opportunity to attend class remotely while wearing VR headsets. I am very strongly in favour of hybrid education and have been doing it since before the pandemic. But there’s a right and a wrong way to do it. We need better infrastructure in classrooms–especially around sound–as well as better technical support. People with real access needs should be the priority as well, which has not been the case thus far, at least not at my university.

This term I’m teaching two seminars, and I’ve been using a Meeting Owl that the dept was able to buy with some funds from an associate dean. It sits in the middle of the seminar table, plugs into my laptop as the camera, mic, and speakers, and the remote students are visible to me but I don’t project them on the screen. One could, but the projector in my classroom has a loud fan that I don’t want to listen to for 3 hours, and it also shines a blue light in my eyes. (It would also require connecting what I have come to call “the media hose,” which barely reaches my computer). It’s not perfect, and like many such devices, the Owl’s video is better thought through than its audio, but it has been very helpful. I haven’t magically become not immunocompromised since returning to campus and this allows me to tell students to stay home if they’re sick. Also, sick students can attend class.

Fall’s lecture course used a classroom recording system that’s ok. The only problem with all this tech is I have to set it up and take it down. I am the wrong generation for the “media cart” with a giant CRT TV and VCR on it, but I had teachers roll those things into classes, and I kind of wish it was that simple to set up.

Anyway, here’s my reply to the VR query.

I’m very curious about the university administration’s response to this.  A number of immunocompromised students sought continued remote learning accommodations due to the ongoing pandemic and were refused.  Will the admin even allow this kind of remote learning, when existing and adequate Zoom options are currently policed and disallowed?  It seems like if there are tech issues with this setup, you’re also putting extra troubleshooting on the shoulders of faculty in the absence of any kind of institutional support for it (see also: online teaching during the pandemic).  The problem isn’t getting the tech into classrooms.  The problem is keeping it working.  W120 Arts was a shining new example of cutting edge instructional design a few years ago.  A student told me the speakers all crackle and some of the mics are broken.  What’s your plan for infrastructure and maintenance?

I should be the target audience for something like this — I’ve been an early adopter of new instructional tech since the 1990s.  I was at conferences with Second Life in the 2000s when they were trying to get profs to have online classrooms full of avatars.  (Look them up — they tried your business plan).

Honestly, I can’t imagine anything I want less than a VR classroom.  I love my students, but I have less than zero interest in teaching in a VR headset or seeing my students as shitty airbrushed-looking cartoon avatars with no legs.

If I can’t see my students, I’d rather they just put pictures of their pets in their Zoom windows, which this is what we actually did during online teaching in the pandemic for those who did not want to appear on camera.

Sometimes lower tech solutions are better solutions.

Invented Scales

One of the fun things about Volte, my instrumental post-rock band, is that sometimes we write music in “invented scales.” I mean, we probably didn’t invent them because I imagine there’s music in pretty much every arrangement of 12-tone-equal-temperment notes by this point. But sometimes the notes of a piece will not fit on any particular scale I know. We’re heading into the studio in early April, so I need to nail down a solo I have been playing, as I haven’t been happy with what I am doing. So I sat down and just tried to figure out all the notes I could use with it to construct some new melodies, and had one of those “wow, so I guess I’ll just use this weird jumble of notes for it and they sort of work” experiences. Now to actually make the melody.

Capitalism is Theft (this category used to be called “Impotent Rage at Telephone Customer Support”)

We were zonked last night and ordered a bunch of food from Chu Chai through Skip the Dishes. Somehow, the app decided we wanted it delivered to an address in Outremont, even though we live in Villeray. I was very tired so I didn’t catch it until the order went in. There was no way to contact the driver through the app to fix it. I couldn’t get through to tech support. So it was delivered to someone in Outremont. Carrie hops in the car to go get it. When she gets there, the person at the address says “I refused it, and the driver took it away.” The driver never even tried to call us. Meanwhile, I finally get through to support (an hour or so after the first try) and am told “it was delivered, if it wasn’t delivered, it was your own fault, and we have a picture of the food on the porch.” So they gave us 50% of the price in “Skip Credits.” I’ll be contesting the charge on the credit card when it shows up, but it should not have been that difficult. We wound up just making the same order and Carrie picked it up from Chu Chai (we had to pay again but it’s not the resto’s fault). Obviously, we would have had an easier time if we’d just cooked something.

Pauses

Last week I was in Minneapolis visiting family — I basically stole time away for the trip since we didn’t go over the holidays. Next week I’m on vacation at an undisclosed sunny location for spring break, so this space may be quiet again.

10 Feb 2023

New Text

Here’s a new interview with me about Diminished Faculties.

And I have a newish piece with Mehak Sawhney on machine listening and the will to datafy. I’ll get it up on the site, but if you’re at a university, your library should get Kalfou. Happy to email PDFs to people, too. Just ask.

“I’m so busy”

In my experience academics love to talk about how busy they are. It can be a sort of performance/or olympics thing on social media or in conversation, a kind of protestant/grind culture thing (“spring break is a great time to get caught up on my email”), or a status game. Sometimes people are genuinely excited about what they’re doing and just reporting that (on social media this can be read in an unnecessarily hostile manner). We’re not unique if you look at hours logged in some corners of the tech industry, law, medicine, and other professions.

But there has been a shift since the pandemic. Now, more often, among many faculty and staff around me, protestations about busyness have taken on a tone of desperation: “help! how do I make it stop?” This is a labour-management problem. As administrations fail to replace staff and faculty, or do so with contingent or outsourced labour, more work gets dumped on everyone. It also seems admin jobs have shifted and in some cases also doubled–for instance, deans didn’t always spend so much time on fundraising. In my faculty, staff jobs have doubled and in some cases tripled in terms of responsibilities in the time I’ve been here. This has ramifications for everyone.

The solution to this problem is not complicated, but it is hard: labour organizing. Generally academic unions fight for tangible things: wages, benefits, etc. Management may concede some of these things, then create workarounds (like new job classes outside the bargaining unit). But I am curious what a quality of life academic union movement would look like.

h/t JRo

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No, click here, not there.

I’ve also become fascinated with the increasing reliance on software-managed work processes over the last few years. They are, quite simply, everywhere. They also add needless cognitive load and box-ticking.

In the 2010s I spent a lot of time talking with people who design software for musicians and sound artists. To the one they identified with the group they were serving, and often used their own tools. When I look at the software systems universities and grant agencies ask me to interact with, it seems they are almost never designed by — or with — the actual people who use them.

Again, I suspect this is a labour-management issue, though you’d also have to add consultancy and conglomeration to the mix. There is a tangible difference from bloatware like MS Word. It’s design actually makes no sense from the standpoint of the people who have to use it the most. (See also: Canadian Common CV.)

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The joy of rereading old work

This week I taught Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts” in my grad seminar. It’s interesting how things age, and what stories do and don’t get told about them. It had been a long time since I had revisited the essay. I forgot, for instance, how tentative they were about “relevant social groups” — famously sent up by Langdon Winner with his “irrelevant social groups” — and how clear they were that SCOT wasn’t just a model to stamp on everything.

Also, I could totally hear Trevor’s voice when, talking about the black boxing of scientific and technical processes, he wrote “they might as well be making meat pies.” I was supposed to be on a panel in 2004 discussing the 20th anniversary of that piece but something came up and I couldn’t go. For all the talk of FOMO, this is one of the few events I actually remember having missed.

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Effortful Mastery

In the same seminar, we had a nice conversation about people encountering new ideas and going running for their bookshelves as a kind of defence mechanism. We’re used to being good at stuff and get impatient when we’re not.

See also: me muddling through Hard Red Spring songs on touch guitar in Tuesday’s practice. At least in Volte practice on Thursday I felt in command of the instrument and all was right in the world.

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This comment is not promoting a product; oh shit it is

The Swedish design house Teenage Engineering, famous among musicians for a small synthesizer they make, announced a $1500(US) work table. All I can think of is the Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalogue.

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Power and Power

Last weekend we lost power for about 19 hours. On the second coldest day of the year. I did not like it. We should have crashed with friends (we had offers) or gone to a hotel. Instead we white knuckled it and slept in our clothes. Thanks to decent insulation it only got down to 13 degrees (celsius, people) but that’s pretty cold. I was very angry with the power company. I’m sure the people in Parc Ex, who were without power longer than me, had it worse. And it just shows how entitled people like me feel to infrastructure that works all the time and generally stays in the background. Everyone should have that entitlement; relatively few actually do. On the plus side, our fridge is now very clean and well-organized.

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Not Doin McLuhan

A lot of people have a lot of feelings about the McLuhan Centre not being the McLuhan Centre anymore. Just please always remember: some of McLuhan’s most important ideas were really racist. Here’s a good thread.

Twitter Post condemning the McLuhan Estate’s childish behaviour and reactionary whining.

3 Feb 2023

Let’s get back to it. There’s catching up to do but in the meantime, I invite you to join me in the middle. Here are some thoughts from the past week.

Reproducibility

As part of my Interfaces seminar this term, I am having students do their projects around a process I called “hermeneutic reverse-engineering” (this term is stolen from Anne Balsamo and Heather Love; the process is partly stolen from Chandra Mukerji and Josh Kun). The basic idea is that humanists need to be intentional about what parts of others’ research we reproduce and how. Too often it’s a simple citation, a reproduction of findings (I call this “shopping for panopticons” ) or the profusion of a single metaphor or stylistic tic of an author’s influence. If we are, instead, intentional, then even scholarship we disagree with is available as a rich intellectual resource. And as a bonus, we also have a much more critical relationship to reproducing the methods, findings, or politics of other scholarship.

Meanwhile, the social sciences continue to demonstrate that putatively “scientific” research on culture and society is very very hard to replicate in anything approaching a laboratory manner.

If you are curious about the Hermeneutic Reverse Engineering exercise, here is the handout.

Chat GPT Hot Take

I am so tired of the hype cycle of ChatGPT filling up my social media feeds. I sort of agree with the glib “Mansplaining on demand” meme about it. If it actually worked to produce something accurate and factual, it would be like when calculators showed up in math, science and engineering classrooms. I would consider that useful, not a crisis.

I was teaching part of Alex Galloway’s Interface Effect this week and he has this line about the “paradox” of mediation (I don’t think it’s a paradox): media tend to erase themselves in use but that fact makes them spectacular. People are being blown away that a robot can mimic prose styles and sound confident doing it. But that doesn’t mean it’s good or accurate. For instance, a colleague in science sent me this as an example of how “good” ChatGPT is:

A Twitter post where someone asks ChatGPT to explain how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible.

This is very funny, but it’s actually terrible advice for removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. It makes the task seem way simpler than it actually would be. I think the author is implying that the sandwich is IN the VCR. Chat GPT assumes the sandwich is ON the VCR, which makes it a much simpler problem than intended.

ChatGPT is not very accurate about things that I care about (which oddly does include peanut butter, sandwiches, and even VCRs), it does not do critical thought or interpretation, and worse, if you don’t know, you can’t tell when it’s being shitty. So, in sum, from a pedagogical standpoint, this is like handing out shitty, glitch-ridden calculators to undergrads.

Speaking of which, I asked my undergrads about it–keep in mind these are Liberal Arts majors in a senior seminar so not a representative group–and none of them took it very seriously as a writing tool, and some didn’t even know what it was. I will eventually have more to say about it but right now my position is similar to Cathy Davidson’s: make better assignments.

Meanwhile people are busy designing software to detect if writing was produced by ChatGPT. I do not want to be the police.

We’ll see where we’re at in September when my big lecture course starts up again.

Teaching Highlight of the Week

We are doing a compare-contrast sort of assignment for the first short paper in my undergrad disability seminar. A student comes to meet with me to pitch her idea.

“I want to start with Hamraie’s knowing-making and Piepzna-Samarasinha’s idea of crip wisdom.”

I say ok.

“I’m thinking of this as a sort of disability knowledge management thing.”
I am confused, but I say, ok, continue.

“I want to write it as an actual dialogue.”

I say ok.

“And I want them to be designing a spaceship.”

Yaaaaaaaasssss! My work here is finished.

Art and Pain

Again, there’s lots of music news since I last wrote, let’s just start in the middle.

Hard Red Spring is the only band where I still play bass. Hand pain from my cancer meds has led me to switch from bass to touch guitar as my main instrument. Touch guitar is just less painful (I still wear gloves to play most days); I’ve also spent a lot of time with synthesizers. At Tuesday’s HRS practice, for the first time ever, even with gloves, it was too painful for me to play finger style. So I played everything with a pick and it was better. This leaves me with a decision: do I try to learn all our music with a pick, or do I try and convert all of my basslines to things I can play on the touch guitar? The pick is the technically easy choice since I can already almost do it, but there is still some pain. The touch guitar choice is less painful but more technically difficult because what’s easy on bass (especially that post-punk thing of repeating 8ths) is hard on touch guitar and what’s hard on bass is easy on touch guitar. Over the pandemic I relearned the Volte repertoire on touch guitar but this is a different kind of playing.

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I hate substack

If people can do substacks that are basically compilations of short takes from the week, I can do a blog that is short takes from the week (or an amorphous but regular period), AND I can do it while NOT letting a corporation ask you for money. I’ll be fishing around for newsletter plugins sooner or later.

It’s been awhile

Today I returned to my office at McGill for the first time since February 2020. There was stuff in the fridge that I’d left in 2020. The most frightening thing was some store bought hummus that had not developed any visible weird molds on it. I did not taste it–it is almost more disturbing that it just looks fine than if it add all sorts of funky colours on it. I will also not be buying that brand again anytime soon. It, and everything else in the fridge went in the trash, along with expired medications, print copies of journals that I don’t want (when will they learn?), and so much mail.

There were letters and books that arrived in 2020, 2021, and 2022; I took a little time to write thank you notes (and belated congratulations) for some complimentary copies sent by authors.

And there was dust, oh so much dust everywhere. The office had been cleaned, but not fully and mostly in the areas that were being regularly used. I think McGill now employs a single porter per three buildings, so I don’t blame them.

I spent most of the day cleaning, decluttering (a bit) and putting things right. My museum of quirky/obsolete communication technologies is looking a bit worse for wear and may need some refreshing. The walls definitely need some new decorations. I need a new desk chair.

I was in because I had an appointment with an instructional tech person to try out tech in a classroom because it looks like–Covid willing–I will be teaching on campus in the fall. I also needed to check out the classroom in case I had to address other access needs before the term starts. My approach to dealing with the pandemic is simply to follow my doctor’s instructions. I outsource my thinking to him, because he seems to have a good balance between “be careful” and “live your life.” He thinks I can do it and that I won’t be in serious danger (though of course I could get sick and probably will).

It’ll be me and 200 undergrads in a crowded lecture hall, so I wanted to make sure the lecture recording system works with the audio setup I want to use. I want to be able to tell students not to come to class if they are feeling sick, which means providing decent recordings.

Campus is usually pretty deserted in July. In fact, I almost never go in during July, but it’s been a weird month. We pushed off most of our vacation to August, and that’s meant an uncannily busy summer with only 10 days off to go see family (plus nights and weekends). I have never had so much to do in July. I don’t know if it’s because I lost a month to Covid in April and feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ever since (another reason why this space has been all crickets), or if it’s something about the outside world.

The office visit was so incredibly banal, but also somehow punctuated time for me. Things were really different in so many ways when I last set foot there. To say I didn’t know what was coming was an understatement–not just the pandemic but so many other things. I catch myself talking about pre-pandemic time as if that’s “normal” and everything since then is exceptional, but people have started and finished master’s degrees in the time since I last walked in that room. They’re different, and so am I.

McGill faculty: if you don’t provide Covid accommodations to your disabled, high-risk, or ill students, nobody will

Here are some things concerned faculty ought to know about McGill’s return to campus happening next week (or in three weeks, depending).

Faculty need to step up and be the ones to provide accommodation for students who need it. The university is NOT currently accommodating students who are high risk or who live with people who are high risk. (This may change but currently it does not seem to be the case.)

Chairs and faculty are being told that students will be accommodated and to refer them to OSD. THIS IS NOT CORRECT. As this Twitter post from Emily Black explains, OSD is not presently authorized to provide, facilitate, or mandate remote accommodations for students who are high risk or someone who lives with high risk. This is not a criticism of OSD, but rather the executive decision not to allow remote learning as an accommodation. Apparently, students can apply to the Dean of Students, but as of now, there is no announcement as to what accommodations may be available, what support there will be for instructors to make those accommodations, and when people will hear back.

A Twitter post showing correspondence with the OSD. It says in part that the OSD “does not hold the authority to provide remote education as an academic accommodation.”

This means that faculty DO have the discretion to accommodate students, and do not need permission from OSD or deans to decide how to accommodate students’ access needs.

But wait!

It is easier than you think to accommodate students who want to be remote. Last fall I posted a simple guide to hybrid classes (also called hy-flex). It’s not perfect and it’s a skill people have to learn, but you do not need tremendous technical facility to do it. If you are teaching a large lecture course, even just recording it and making it available online, is a good option. If your classroom is not set up for recording, use your phone and upload the recording and your slide deck to MyCourses, or ask one of your students for help. Then, if there is a demand, you could take an hour of class time every couple weeks and do a Zoom meeting for the online students to check in with them.

This can also go in reverse. I am immunocompromised and am teaching online this term, at least until such time as my oncologist says it’s safe to go back to campus. However, I will be arranging for the students who want to be present together in class (or who have to be) to be able to meet in the classroom together and to have the shared experience they want. This is exactly as complicated as doing it the other way around. IE, not that hard.

Students, like faculty, are divided about the best course of action. Though I can’t go back right now, I really would like to and am tired of being on Zoom, so I get it. In an ideal world, we’d have a situation where the people who want or need to be on campus can be, and the people who need to stay off campus could also do that. We’re not going to get to that ideal world in two weeks, but we can do a hell of a lot better than we’re doing right now.