Over the next week, I plan to post three observations from my personal experiences teaching — and teaching in person — at a Catholic law school during the pandemic. In today’s post, I’ll address the question of health and safety for faculty and students in an in-person classroom environment, while a virulent disease rampages through our society. In the next post, I’ll discuss effectiveness of education given the constraints of a hybrid in-person/online format and social distancing with masks. In the third post, I’ll discuss the unprecedented challenges during the pandemic of fostering a sense of community, which is a central part of our mission as a Catholic law school.
The bottom-line to this first post on the health and safety concerns is that we appear to have succeeded without exception in keeping the virus at bay in the classroom.
Like other universities and law schools, we deferred to each professor’s (and student’s) judgment as to whether appearing in the classroom was safe. For the law school, we ended up (for first-year students) with more than 80 percent of our course sessions being offered in person, through the voluntary choices of teaching faculty, including myself. Our mostly in-person availability for first-year classes proved to be very popular with incoming students, several of whom told me that it influenced their final choice among schools, especially as the other two law schools in the Twin Cities had moved almost entirely online.
The University of St. Thomas, and the law school, devoted the months since the pandemic lock-down in March to plan for returning to in-person teaching in the fall. The dedication of the administration, information technology experts, and support staff cannot be praised enough. They made sure that we had the necessary technology to simultaneously provide in-person instruction and include students who had to remain online. They prepared each classroom for the necessary social distancing and essential sanitation.
