OMG! - This email, from a Yale administrator to returning students, is *stunning*

[kpete]

“We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community,” Santos’s email reads. “You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”

Link to tweet

?s=20
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/08/18/school-of-public-health-study-says-students-may-be-able-to-safely-return-to-campus/

[gratuitous]

1. This sounds like something the CO would say on the eve of battle

What it tells me is "Yale really couldn't give less of a flying fuck about students' health or lives; you're on your own, kids, because we're far more interested in whether your tuition check cashes than if you live to the end of the semester."

[unblock]

3. institutions don't always speak with one voice.

this looks to me like it was written by an administrator who argued strongly for the campus to not open up, and lost that battle.

so all in all, yeah, that's the collective message, but i don't think whoever decided to open up the campus would have written anything like that.

[uponit7771]

10. +1, but at least grunts would have something to fight with this guys not giving them much

[moondust]

2. Will dormitories be the new hospital wards?

[brush]

4. This can't be an official release from the university. Who would even come to campus...

after getting such an email?

[frazzled]

7. It is official, to the extent that the email was from

the head of the largest "residential college" on campus. From the whole article:

In a July 1 email to Silliman College residents when Yale first announced its plan to reopen on-campus housing, Head of College and psychology professor Laurie Santos warned Yale’s “community compact” was not to be taken lightly, treated like some course readings and skimmed for main ideas. She explained that some staff members are from sectors of society that are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and that they do not have the choice of whether to come to campus. At the time, Yale was planning to test returning students once per week — a plan that the University modified several weeks later, when it announced that it would instead test students twice weekly.
“We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community,” Santos’s email reads. “You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”

This administrator of the college probably had no recourse in the decisions being made higher up to re-open. She appears to thus be writing her charges, whom she will oversee and be responsible for, that they'd better follow the rules, and it will be life-and-death. It's kind of honest.

I had to see my eye surgeon for a checkup yesterday. She said she'd just driven her son to college, and made a face. I said "I bet you're plenty scared." "I am, she replied, and I'm expecting that he'll be back home in two weeks when they have to close the university." It's really a mess right now.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. More to the point, why would they open the campus if

they think people there are going to get sick and die.

Somehow, losing a semester or several of school seems a lot more reasonable.

I'm just glad I don't have school age kids. I do have a son working on his PhD in astronomy, but he's finished all of his coursework, and is now simply concentrating on his research. He's an RA, a research assistant, not a TA, teaching assistant, so he has no need to go to the school campus whatsoever. And all of the various conferences that take place in his field are all being done over the internet.

[pamdb]

6. School

Strikes me this would be a good time for a gap year. Of course we can’t go anywhere...

[exboyfil]

8. Yale is obviously different

but if my daughter was still in her state school, we would welcome the opportunity to avoid dorm expense and the expensive meal plan if the classes were offered online.

My daughter did her first two years of engineering online (except for Chemistry I). Saved a lot of cash by doing this.

[Squinch]

9. This is the height of stupidity. If they know this, how can they justify opening??

[Brainfodder]

11. $

.