Students in your class receive approval for the accommodations for all online instruction. They do not even have to have medical reasons. Why is this not extended to employees? The few class meetings, which will probably end by October anyway, will just be collective explanation of instructions.

You plan to assign films for one class. Legitimate, award-winning documentary series that will serve as textbooks, with supplementary articles that can be downloaded from databases. This also serves to cut the costs of textbooks for the students. The library holds only DVDs for some of these videos. Students no longer have DVD players in their computers. Even if they could check them out, they cannot watch them.

You find the films on YouTube. You link to those and hold your breath that the copyright holders don’t remove them before the end of the semester. Nevertheless, you anticipate complaints about technological problems that you cannot fix because if you could, you would probably be in another line of work by now (except for your love of research).

You would at least know that you had other options for work and be less exhausted. One of the things that exhausts you is the effort you exert in denying or convincing yourself against the possibility of your school shutting down and you, at your age and rank, wholly unassociated with elite universities and therefore (in the minds of academics) not really very smart, thrust back onto the job market. You are not able to retire yet, and may never be. They did suspend all retirement contributions this year, in addition to your pay cut. The pay cut was determined on your salary before the raise that you earned and would take effect this year.

Pay cuts capped at a salary level below the CFOs, just as a reminder.

To the president of the college’s credit, she offered to take a much larger pay cut. She has her moments. The Board of Trustees refused. They said it would make the college look bad, as if it were in worse financial trouble than they pretend it is.

They also insisted that she rent a house closer to campus, to show she’s “part of the community.”

Campus activists agitate. They tend to be on the left; but the right has their own methods. The election looms. The last one brought out both sides, and terrible ugliness from the right. Dumbassery rears its head perennially. The administration “urges” professors to record classes. You sense potential for disaster from all sides. Already you’ve been attacked by people you have defended, whom you support, even as you were attacked by their opponents. The same for colleagues. Teaching about civil rights in this environment will not allow for nuance.

The Dean holds a Zoom meetings for faculty in his purview to address concerns about the fall. You reluctantly sign in on the day he meets with the liberal arts. You write in your question about the above concerns. You see his toothy smile freeze as he reads your question. You see him skip it. Forty minutes later, you write it again. You see his toothy smile freeze again. He asks for verbal questions. He asks again. You can almost hear him say “Bueller.” He adjourns the meeting. You have never seen someone running a meeting shut it off so fast.

“We let the freshmen know that racism WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!” write well-meaning colleagues who just discovered that racism still exists. In the North. Today. Again. “The freshmen have a unit on racism in their COR 100 class,” they assure you. As if that has not been the case for the past eight years that COR 100 has been implemented. As if that matters in a 3 hours per day, five days a week, outdoors, social distanced, class. As if one day of those 3 hours, outdoors, social distance classes will address all of the nuances of racism and conflict that they will encounter.

As if that will begin to address the shitstorm that heads our way.

Yes, one shitstorm at a time. Perhaps the first one will obliterate the need to address the second, if we are all back at home by October.