BY MARTIN KICH

During the lengthy contract impasse that led up to our three-week strike in winter of 2019, our administration made many draconian proposals. That their proposed gutting of the retrenchment article of our contract was the most draconian is evidenced by their removing that one article from the contract that they imposed, provoking the strike. I believe that they reasoned that if we did not strike over everything else in the imposed contract, they could impose that article a year later, when a new contract would have had to be negotiated, without much risk that we would strike.

Their retrenchment proposal essentially would have allowed them to eliminate any faculty position—regardless of tenure, seniority, rank, or continuing contracts, and without having to justify the elimination of the positions with any demonstrated declines in enrollment in a program. I was certainly not the only member of our negotiating team who described this proposal as an attempt to render tenure meaningless, but at one point the then chair of our board of trustees cut me short and said very adamantly, “You need to sop calling our proposal as an attack on tenure! Anyone who has not been culled will still have tenure!”

I was reminded of that moment this morning while watching Inside Politics on CNN. Dana Bash was filling in for Jake Tapper, and her first guest was Betsy DeVos. DeVos described at length how multiple departments and agencies in the Trump administration have collaborated on developing very extensive guidelines that will allow the nation’s schools to re-open, on time and full-time. But when Bash asked her what contingencies are in place for schools that cannot meet the guidelines, either because of a lack of sufficient resources or because the pandemic has not subsided enough in the surrounding area, DeVos asserted that the guidelines are meant to enable the full re-opening of schools and not to prevent such a re-opening.

It went on like that for a bit, and it became clear that once schools re-open, they will be expected to remain open, regardless of the broader state of the pandemic.

Thankfully, it is a very unlikely that this specific doubletalk is going to work.

As Bill Maher has frequently bemoaned, the argument of last resort for politicians pushing a dubious, ideologically driven proposal is to connect it to the protection of the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of our nation’s children. Well, for the very reasons that such arguments continue to resonate, DeVos and Trump’s arguments are not going to resonate. The pandemic has shown us that many Americans will risk their own lives to continue to support their families or to meet an ingrained sense of obligation to their communities or to their professions. But polling shows that three-quarters of Americans are most worried about the risks that the pandemic may pose for their children and grandchildren—despite the evidence that pre-adolescent children seem to be the least at risk of all age groups.

Also, we are seeing the devastating results of very similar doubletalk right now—as daily counts of confirmed cases rise to new record levels on an almost daily basis. There were CDC guidelines for re-opening state economies that were formally endorsed by the administration. But less than two weeks later, the president badgered governors into starting to re-open. At that time, only one state—North Dakota—had met the CDC guidelines, and not long afterwards, when the stage two re-openings began to be announced, only three states had met the guidelines for a stage-one re-opening.

One of the specious arguments made by many of those opposed to the initial lockdowns has been that the most vulnerable demographic groups–in particular, the elderly—could have been easily isolated. But no one has ever explained how, exactly, that might be accomplished. Many of the elderly live in senior communities or in extended care facilities. The whole point of such places is that people too old or too infirm to care adequately for their properties or for themselves will pay to have those services provided for them—by younger people. Likewise, in New York City, when homebound elderly people began to die, critics of the lockdown saw it as evidence that the lockdown didn’t work. It was, instead, evidence that isolating the most vulnerable is almost impossible to do. In multi-generational family situations, the elderly cannot be confined to their bedrooms, with their meals being passed through pet doors installed in their bedroom doors.

Very similarly, anyone who has ever revisited the elementary school that he or she attended and felt something like Gulliver in Lilliput can attest to the challenges in trying to space desks six feet apart while accommodating the same number of students. It’s not going to work in almost any elementary school, regardless of how affluent the school district is. The buildings were designed to accommodate, as efficiently as possible, as many little people as possible.

We have established a disastrous pattern in our response to this pandemic: we don’t do what is necessary, and then we compound those errors in judgment by doubling down on them—in effect, insisting that they weren’t mistakes at all.

If we can get the case counts down to what they now are in New York, we can expand testing and contact tracing and effectively control the incidence of the virus enough to re-start much of the economy.

Any other propositions are just, at best, very fanciful thinking and, at worst, very dangerous disinformation.