Editor’s Note: Justina Sharp is a creative strategist and student at California State University, Fullerton pursuing a Bachelors of the Arts in Communications with an emphasis on Public Relations and a minor in African-American Studies. Follow her on Instagram here. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
I had just finished paying my rent when I noticed the first tweet that read “CSUs closing to prevent Coronavirus spread,” and I panicked.
Not out of concern for my own bodily health or even my pending graduation in May, but because I’m a student worker at Cal State Fullerton. As of now, CSUF has canceled in-person classes, not closed campuses completely. If our campus does eventually shut down, my job in the library, most likely goes away – and so do the jobs of many others like me. After I saw that tweet and in the hours and days that followed, I immediately started to worry about how I was going to keep my overpriced roof over my head.
This anxiety is an immediate side effect of the lack of information being provided to students on campuses across the country about the realities of in-person class cancellations and campus closures.
Minimum wage at my on campus job isn’t much, but it’s more than the zero dollars a month I’ll be earning if my school closes, essentially making my life a casualty of the cold war against coronavirus.
I get that universities themselves are struggling with incomplete or constantly changing information, and as things evolve minute to minute, they need to be cautious in how they respond. They, like the rest of us, are in uncharted territory, and it shows – and while they are not acting from a malicious or deliberately insensitive place, that doesn’t change how very unseen I feel right now.
My direct supervisor has assured us that as of right now, our schedules aren’t changing - but that’s the most security they can offer in such a rapidly developing situation, and doesn’t apply to all the other students in my position.
For student workers and staff living paycheck to paycheck, campuses closing doesn’t just mean you don’t have to go to the 8:30 a.m. English 100 class that you didn’t study for and weren’t attending anyway.
It’s cancelling the job stability, housing access and food security of thousands of people who rely on their colleges for central services.
I work two jobs to supplement my living expenses and Cal Grant A, a scholarship that partially covers my tuition at a state school for up to four years - and this is my fourth year.
I know the world is facing a growing crisis and it’s clear schools are just trying to do what they can. Still, I’m frustrated and concerned – because it’s not that my school isn’t thinking about the future - it’s that they aren’t thinking about everyone who has to get there.
So who pays for this lack of preparation if I’m not able to finish in May?
According to our student newspaper, the Daily Titan, all of our professors got an email Tuesday morning telling them to “consider how their courses would continue” in case of a shutdown.
In preparation for this potential move online, they installed new webcams in the classrooms for remote lecturing, and expanded the capacity of our online teaching platform.
In the meantime, we as students were asked to stay home and wash our hands if we’re sick. We were left to sort out a terrifying - and in some cases, inconsistent - landscape of shifting information with enormous capacity to affect our abilities to live and plan for our futures.
In one of my classes this week, a professor actually reminded us all about the attendance policy - three or more absences, and your final grade will be impacted.
Exceptions are made only for medical absences supported by a doctor’s note, which for many students could only be obtained by visiting the on-campus health center, the very place we’ve been asked to avoid.
Our situation would be comical if it weren’t becoming so horrifically apparent that the school doesn’t understand its own position in our community.
As of the most recent mass update, the school is transitioning to fully online instruction until at least the 26th of April, with campus remaining open with students “welcome to utilize all on-campus amenities” (including the library), and all students are encouraged to continue displaying “cooperation, empathy, kindness, and support.”
There is no mention of student workers. Cerise Valenzuela Metzger, CSUF’s associate director of news media services, told CNN, “The university is still open. Employees are still working and will be paid.”
The school has also said the “campus will remain open during every phase of these precautionary efforts,” but with things changing as fast as they are, it’s hard not to imagine that our campus, as others have been in our state and elsewhere throughout the country, might be closed. Frankly, they can keep their empathy and send me an email that explains how I should prepare to pay my rent in case I end up without a job.
It could also address those who cooperatively live in its dorms, those who kindly eat in its dining hall, those who rely on the support of on-campus internet to complete their coursework. Most online teaching platforms can’t be used effectively with a smartphone, and for those who rely on public libraries for internet access when away from campus, how will that help if we are being told to avoid public places?
I want to know that those who are making these decisions are taking into account how deeply this disruption will be felt among some of their most vulnerable community members.
It’s hard to know if they even thought about how socioeconomic diversity will affect our educational access, especially when some of my fellow students didn’t even have that clarity.
My school was not one of the CSUs that went online in the first wave of closures, but the news of colleges and universities across the country moving to alternative educational methods to halt progress of the pandemic inspired many of my fellow Fullerton students to get excited about our campus closing down, too.
When it didn’t happen, they took to social media to complain - not about their potential exposure to a viral pandemic, but on the lost potential for an easy pass.
I understand, we all work hard, and the idea of not having to physically attend classes seems like a relief from the grueling schedules a lot of students live by.
But all jokes and the fight for parking spaces aside, those tweets makes it very apparent that even my peers are failing to understand the impact closing down the university could have on the lives of their less well-off fellow students and faculty.
I’d like to think that as the situation on my campus develops, they’ll provide us alternatives. That there will be answers for all of my questions. But as of right now, the time when that stability is most sought out, there’s just webpages with vague plans for scenarios that aren’t happening.
I’m sitting at my meticulously disinfected desk watching on social media as students at colleges nationwide scramble in the wake of closure to put together housing, to understand their visa limitations, to figure out where they’re going to eat.
I realize that though it sometimes feels lonely, that I am not any kind of exception in my reliance on my educational institution.
Students are encouraged to trust the system they have bought into with tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives.
Too many of us have no answers, no guidance, and no way of knowing what happens next as more and more colleges close their campuses.
It’s almost as though we too are being washed from their hands.