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Schrödinger’s Online Class Has Arrived
To protect international students and prevent the spread of COVID, in-person classes will have to be secretly moved online
Yesterday, the United States agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced several new rules regarding the legal status of international students who are in the country under F-1 or M-1 visas. In essence, these rules state that if an international student is signed up for exclusively or primarily online classes in the Fall, they have no legal basis to remain in the United States, and will therefore face “removal proceedings” (read: potential deportation).
This policy change could not have come at a worse time. For months universities have been issuing confusing, often self-contradictory messages about whether in-person classes will be offered in the fall. They’ve moved around academic calendars and planned to end semesters early, so that traveling students can’t spread home-grown cases of COVID to their peers in the dorms. They’ve told faculty prepare to teach in all possible modalities: fully online, fully in-person, blended (with some days on campus and some days remote), and fully in-person but with digital live-streaming of course meetings, so that students who are in quarantine for possible COVID can still attend.
