The message was Garbered on the front page:
"Harvard will reopen in the fall, but whether it’s remote or on campus is uncertain" by Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, April 27, 2020
Harvard University officials said Monday that the school is preparing for many, if not all, of its classes to be delivered remotely when the fall semester starts in early September, an acknowledgment that it may be unsafe for students to immediately return to campus.
Harvard said on Monday that it briefly considered delaying the start of the academic year until spring 2021, but ultimately rejected that idea.
University classes will begin on schedule Sept. 2, but whether students are on campus or learning virtually remains uncertain, Harvard provost Alan M. Garber wrote in a message sent to the community Monday afternoon.
“Our goal is to bring our students, faculty, postdoctoral fellows and staff to campus as quickly as possible, but because most projections suggest that COVID-19 will remain a serious threat during the coming months, we cannot be certain that it will be safe to resume all usual activities on campus by then,” Garber said. “Consequently, we will need to prepare for a scenario in which much or all learning will be conducted remotely.”
Related: The Future of Higher Edu¢ation
Harvard’s announcement left many questions unanswered, including whether online classes would cost less for students than in-person instruction.
Universities are under increasing pressure from rising freshmen, returning undergraduates, and graduate students and their families to offer some understanding of what the fall semester could look like amid the pandemic. A group of incoming freshmen at Harvard sent an open letter to university president Lawrence Bacow last week asking him to postpone the fall semester if it is going to be online because low-income, first-generation students would be at a disadvantage learning remotely without in-person interactions.
With all due respect, I could not care le$$ about who will, be drafted into Harvard to service the New World Order. Lesser kids have bigger problems, like their futures have been ruined and robbed from them.
Other college and university presidents are also weighing if and how they can reopen their campuses in the fall.
“Every university I know of is engaged in a huge planning effort,” said Larry Ladd, a higher education consultant in Falmouth. “It’s more intense and more complicated, in part because you don’t know how many students are going to show up.”
Boston University said it plans to have a decision by July and is considering several options, from a phased-in start to delaying in-person classes until January.
Merrimack College, in North Andover, has told students that it plans to open as a residential campus in the fall, although it is considering alternatives, including delaying the student return by a month or more. Merrimack officials said remote learning would only be an option if public health and state officials mandated it.
Yale University will announce its decision about the fall semester by July. Stanford University officials are considering several recommendations that will be presented to their president in late May, including delaying the start date until the winter quarter.
On Monday, the University of Pennsylvania told parents and students that it was "planning for a likely combination of in-class and virtual teaching (particularly for large lectures) depending upon the circumstances.”
In an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday, Brown University president Christina Paxson wrote that reopening colleges and universities in the fall should be a “national priority” and called for putting appropriate testing, tracing, and containment practices in place now. Many institutions face financial catastrophe if they don’t start the next academic year this fall, Paxson wrote.
“The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple — tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester,” Paxson wrote. “Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.”
It's more indu$try now, one of indoctrination and inculcation.
Unlike the decision to close campuses and shift to remote learning, which occurred swiftly across the country in the space of about a week in March, higher education experts expect that the approach to the fall semester will vary.
Urban and rural schools may come to different decisions, experts said, and they will be guided by the rules of individual states. Individual colleges and universities will also have to consider whether they have the financial ability to provide only online education or postpone start dates.
Many institutions are considering hybrid models if it remains unsafe to have hundreds or thousands of students back on campus, living in dormitories, sharing bathrooms and dining halls, sitting in lecture halls, and partying on and off-campus on the weekends. Some colleges are looking at breaking up large lecture classes or shifting them online.
Colleges may also bring back segments of the college to campus for a few weeks at a time for in-person learning and activities and then send them back home to continue with remote instruction, Ladd said.
That could mean dorms that traditionally house 200 students could be repurposed for social distancing and serve 50 students at a time, he said.
“My prediction would be the best that could happen is a hybrid sort of instruction with modified residency,” Ladd said.
In its announcement Monday, Harvard said it will bring students back on campus in September if it has adequate supplies of personal protective equipment, reliable and convenient viral testing, robust contact tracing procedures, and facilities for quarantine and isolation, but Garber, the provost, also cautioned that the fall semester plans for the undergraduate college may differ from those at the graduate and professional schools. Harvard’s graduate schools, such as the Kennedy School, rely heavily on international student enrollment, and it is unclear whether it will be safe for those students to travel to the United States from their home countries or if they will be able to get the appropriate visas.
Harvard graduate schools may be forced to offer more online educational opportunities if students can’t get to Cambridge. “Because our schools have different approaches to learning and research, aspects of the fall semester will likely vary among them,” Garber said
Garber added that Harvard is planning for a “notably different” remote learning experience from what the university rushed to provide this spring. College students now scattered across the country and globe have grumbled that the online, video-conferenced classroom experience has fallen short of in-person classes.
Too f***ing bad!
“With more time to prepare, we are confident we can create a better, more engaging experience for the fall, should many of our activities need to be conducted remotely," Garber said. “Rather than seeking to approximate the on-campus experience online, we can focus our efforts on developing the best possible remote educational experience.”
Campuses are never reopening, for they are to be converted into COVID-19 concentration camps.
Garber said if students cannot return to campus in the fall as usual, the university will also consider ways to offer extracurricular activities and research experiences remotely.
Garber did not say when Harvard will make a decision about how the fall semester will shake out.
Then why is this a front page story?
It's nothing but filler, folks!
Also left unanswered is whether the university will charge students the same tuition for remote learning and what staffing levels will be in the fall. Harvard is paying its dining workers, custodians, and security officers through the end of May.
“The consequences of any major decision for a large and complex university like Harvard are themselves complex and highly uncertain,” Garber wrote.
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Related:
With campus closures, LGBTQ students face uncertainty and disconnect
I'm sick of bending over backwards for the confused or mentally ill.
Mnuchin is the Man
The loan controversy has gone down the memory hole.
"People donated millions to buy protective gear for hospitals. These Harvard students figure out where to spend it" by Andy Rosen Globe Staff, April 27, 2020
People have donated millions of dollars to help hospitals get crucial protective equipment that is being sold at a huge markup because of global demand associated with the coronavirus, but even for those that have the money, the competition to get the gear can be brutal.
Tell it to the head of Baystate.
To help ease the burden on purchasing teams at the region’s medical centers, a hastily assembled team of Harvard Business School students has joined the fray ― pulling overnight shifts from their apartments and working contacts in China, where much of the needed equipment is made.
“It’s a seller’s market,” said Sophie Bai, who grew up in China and is pursuing her MBA at Harvard. “Everybody in the world is flying to China trying to get supplies, and people need to pay premiums.”
Bai is leading a 12-person team of volunteers who are trying to find good deals before somebody else does.
Like Kushner or Kraft!
Of course, the stuff is crap but that doesn't fit the script.
The group, which calls itself PPEople First, has at its disposal about $3 million that has been donated to a fund managed by the nonprofit Boston Foundation. By the middle of last week, they had placed more than $2.1 million in orders for roughly 1.7 million pieces of equipment, including masks, respirators, and protective coveralls.
Related: "nonprofits provide new ways for corporations and individuals to influence"
As if they needed any more.
You know they are tax-exempt, too?
How charitable -- to them$elves!
About 400,000 pieces of that equipment have arrived so far at sites including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Brigham And Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Donors to the fund include Silicon Valley Bank, private equity investor Andrew Balson and his wife, Melora, venture capitalist Jeff Bussgang, and the John W. Henry Family Foundation. (Henry is owner and publisher of The Boston Globe).
The $elf-$erving promotions are considered "news."
Tim Smith, senior director of philanthropy at the Boston Foundation, said he has been struck by the complexity of the endeavor, including “how many people and parties and different types of expertise have to get involved in bringing something to the United States through charitable dollars.”
Smith said he does not know of any similar efforts being undertaken by community foundations, so he and his colleagues have been leaning on expertise from other sectors of the economy.
“Everything we’re doing is learning,” he said, “but I think it will help us prepare, and help the region prepare, for future disasters.”
What else is coming, you sick bastards?
Bussgang described the project as “an only in Boston story,” citing the combination of legacy players such as the law firm Ropes & Gray ― which is representing the fund for free ― and new-economy contributors such as the financial technology firm Flywire, which has offered its platform to quickly process the transactions needed for the deals to go through, but it is the “sweat equity" of the students, as Smith described it, that’s making the program run. In a way, Bai said, the hunt for quality products can feel like an adventure: “We’re basically like a bunch of elves who are treasure hunting,” she said, but Bai said it’s never far from her mind that they are urgently trying to solve a serious problem.
“Many of our friends are doctors here. They are not protected at all, and we are very worried about them,” she said “So anything we can do to help them is what really is driving us.”
Bai, 29, grew up in China and has lived in Boston for about a decade. When she made a trip to Shanghai early this year, Bai noticed that people everywhere were talking about the shortage of personal protective equipment.
“No country was set up to handle that demand for a pandemic like this,” she said.
Then why is it over in China?
As the virus began to spread around the Boston area, Bai said, she began to think about ways she could help and reached out to a family friend back home with connections in the medical supply business. She asked one of her professors for ideas about where there was a need, and he put her in touch with Brigham and Women’s.
Using donated money, she put together an initial order, and when the products came through, she and her colleagues began ramping up operations. Bai spends much of the day communicating with hospitals about their needs. At night here, it’s morning in China, so Bai gets rolling with her contacts there. Later, when she goes to sleep, a colleague on the West Coast takes over, but simply finding products is not enough. Chinese and US standards and regulations that affect the shipping of personal protective equipment are shifting regularly, Bai said, and since many hospitals have been burned before during this crisis, some were at first wary about the quality of the goods they would receive.
“They have been approached by a lot of brokers and resellers, and it leads nowhere,” Bai said. She believes her experience with both countries ― and her ability to understand how regulations work here and overseas ― has helped her bridge the gap
Though the process is different from the one hospitals usually use, the system has been working so far.
“In the battle against COVID-19, personal protective equipment is critically important armor, and we continue to move mountains to get our staff the equipment they need," Beth Israel Lahey Health’s chief executive, Dr. Kevin Tabb, said in an e-mail. "We are grateful to the entrepreneurial Harvard Business School students and others who are working with us and using their skills to address a complex international supply chain challenge.”
Even the f**king doctor has to use war terminology!
SICK!
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At least they have a summer job.
Also see:
"Federal agents didn't entrap the wealthy parents accused of cheating the college admissions process, the man who helped investigators build their case reportedly told the FBI recently, boosting prosecutors' arguments that claims of misconduct are false. Allegations that FBI investigators bullied the witness who helped them build their huge case into lying to trick “Full House" Lori Loughlin, her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, and other parents were “repugnant and untrue," the prosecutors said in a legal filing Friday. The witness — admissions consultant Rick Singer — agreed the investigators did not engage in misconduct, according to the FBI. “Singer noted that the agents didn’t do anything wrong,” according to notes from an FBI interview last week with Singer....."
The $cum CUT HIM$ELF a DEAL!
He should be frog-marched backwards to jail, and the smile was just wiped from her face.
I hereby resolve to... umm... nevermind(sic).
Then I won't.
