After an eventful winter break where the start of in person classes and events was delayed two weeks, Stevens has announced they will switch to an hour by hour decision process for in-person activities. For all the throwing of socket, allen, and monkey wrenches into housing and club plans the delayed return caused, they believe it best to keep up with the ever changing landscape of the pandemic on campus. Under this plan, an email will go to everyone’s junk folder every hour informing them if in-person activity will continue for the next hour or not. If not, everyone has to go back home and wait for the next email to see if they can go back to finish their lab that requires taking data every five minutes.
“This plan will allow us to quickly respond to the fast-changing environment on campus and minimize the risk to our students,” one administrator told us. We asked why the emails are only being sent to junk folders, to which he replied, “That’s where everyone looks for emails from administration.”
Off The Press wanted to get a first hand look at how this would affect students and our operations, so we set up a bot to send us emails every hour similar to the ones we expected to receive. During preparation for this article, we had to close our offices and suspend access to our typewriters six times, although admittedly only three of those were due to simulated notices that the next hour’s in-person activities were cancelled. The rest were due to our copies of the solutions to every exam this semester going missing temporarily, and we had to make sure that they did not cross our doors or windows without a substantial bribe coming the other way. It’s inspired by the procedure hospitals use when a baby goes missing. We determined that it would be a big inconvenience to deal with these emails, but could not deny the value of responding quickly to a rapidly changing situation.
After intercepting some administrative emails, we were relieved to find out Stevens would be providing assistance for when students need to rapidly leave class all of a sudden. Waterslides will be set up on all the hills out of campus to help ensure a smooth departure. We want to take this time to thank the unfortunate student who broke a bone skateboarding down 9th street, which is the reason that the original skateboard plan was discarded. Waterslides are much more fun. Also, the closest thing any of our writers have done to skateboarding is those little scooters from elementary school gym class.
We wanted to get some input from students and faculty on the upcoming policy. One student we talked to said, “That’s dumb,” and a professor whose class we interrupted to interview them said, “Get out of my class!” Certainly not the intellectual exchange of ideas we were hoping for. In any event, the impact of routinely cancelling and restarting classes multiple times a day is yet to be seen, and no one can really say for sure if it will be good or bad.
Off The Press is a satirical Opinion column written and organized by Off Center, often used to joke about current Stevens issues and campus news. It is currently organized by Off Center President, Matthew Brantl.
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