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I’m concerned about the pandemic, but I passed the losing-sleep stage on that after a few weeks. It’s part of the background noise at this point. I’m concerned about The Boy at UVA, but confident enough in his judgment that it’s a manageable concern. I’m concerned about the latest round of state budget cuts, which came on the heels of another round, which came on the heels of years of declining enrollment, but that, too, is within the bounds of normal. I don’t like it, but anyone who falls to pieces at news of state budget cuts has no business working in public college administration these days.
What keeps me up at night is the prospect of sustained internet failure.
We’ve had hints of that over the last few weeks. At home, we had a power outage for three and a half days that forced me to drive to campus just to be able to do Zoom meetings. Then on Monday, Zoom itself went down for a couple of hours. (I admit a guilty smirk at the headline “Zoom is down. We’re free! Free!”) Now we’re heading into the heart of hurricane season, and we’re already to letter "L" in the storm names, with Laura supposed to come through on Saturday.
Severe storms can bring down power lines.
That’s annoying on a good day. But with the semester starting in a couple of weeks and nearly everything relying on the internet in one form or another, sustained loss of power and/or connectivity could do tremendous educational damage.
That’s magnified by the uneven effects of power outages across towns. We have students living throughout the county and a few neighboring ones; it’s not uncommon for one town to be off the grid for close to a week while the neighboring town is back online within hours. A professor who lives in East Hypothetical might be fine, while a student in nearby West Hypothetical may be off-line for days. When everything is conducted virtually, that’s devastating.
With the August storm, the volume of classes running online was relatively small. We were able to get through it with some patience and some elbow grease. But if the same thing happens in mid-September, the scale of disruption would be exponentially greater. The Zoom outage this week was brief, and it happened during academic downtime. Imagine the equivalent lasting for a week during the heart of the semester.
And that’s not counting the disruptions that students and employees would face in other aspects of their lives. Someone whose kids are doing K-12 online would suddenly have a whole new layer of challenge if connectivity is lost for an extended period.
Even the “drive to campus” solution may not be an option. Power may be out there, too, or downed trees could block the roads there.
By necessity, we’re making a big bet on the resilience of the electrical and internet grids. I’m on board with that, if by default. But those grids are looking more fragile than I had realized even a month ago, and soon we’ll be relying on them at unprecedented scale. Colleges in Louisiana and southeastern Texas are facing this right now. Power has always mattered, but it matters much more now.
Yes, budget cuts are frustrating. Yes, the pandemic is an ever-present issue. But the thought of unreliable connectivity during the semester for days at a time is actually keeping me up at night.
