I upgraded my router last week. It was necessary with everyone in the house using our internet connection continuously and the effects of heavy traffic and distributing ourselves about the space for privacy caused our old one to show its age. Of course, we also paid the monthly bill. First class into the new semester, now that I am teaching on Zoom due to the constraints on campus access, I realized my work suppled MacBook Pro was not going to cut it when delivering a lecture. It’s just too hard to watch the slides and hope to see the gallery of student faces at the same time.
So a new monitor is needed now. I was informed there was no funding for such but if I wanted to go to my office and remove my large desk monitor, I had permission to take it home for now. Great — why not reproduce my office on my dining table, adding another string of cables and power cords to the rats nest that has taken over part of the house. We also learned that if students have technical problems with their old computers which they bought to use for papers and web access, perhaps to bring to class but certainly not to deliver their classes, then they could apply to a centralized fund for help. The fund has a whopping $15k in it to help the 50,000 students we have, though in fairness, only 20,000 might actually be on campus this fall (quick math — 75c per student?). Welcome to the modern campus.
It is striking to me, under these conditions, universities are mainly insisting on charging the same price as usual. Tuition has not declined wherever I look but the costs of providing courses has taken a sudden turn and it’s faculty who are underwriting the cost of online classes with their home digital infrastructure. Maybe some are getting support for this (typically, we are never openly told, rumors merely suggest) but the majority of faculty I know are buying their own special equipment, paying their own cable bills, and giving over space in their homes to run classes, offer student advising and attend the endless compulsory meetings required by their universities. For us, we also have to use dual factor authentication just to check the library, so add in the cost of another device for this too. And all this in a year when our last president decided to leave during a pandemic for pastures new and inform us there would be a salary freeze for the rest of us in the coming year.
You don’t hear this because nobody talks about it. I get it, there are way more pressing issues in our world right now but the slow erosion of norms, the shifting of costs, and the refusal to consider a new model will likely have consequences. The best way to deal with this change is to address it openly, not pretend everything is basically normal just so tuition costs can be retained.