” People expect from the social sciences—anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science—the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future. They want the power to predict, not the preordained unfolding of events, which does not exist, but what will happen if society selects one course of action over another. Political life and the economy are already pivoted upon the presumed existence of such a predictive capacity. The social sciences are striving to achieve it, and to do so largely without linkage to the natural sciences. How well are they doing on their own? Not very well, considering their track record in comparison with the resources placed at their command.”

So there may be many subjects that can be taught outside the face-to-face classroom environment.

To the extent that this is true, that doesn’t mean that “we all should be on the same frontlines, in the same foxholes, enduring the same bombardments.” In a war environment, different people are called to endure different sacrifices, dangers, and risks. During World War II in the United States, while able-bodied white men were expected to volunteer for the foxhole part, everyone else was expected to make different sacrifices. They would give up rubber and gasoline and nylon, collect scrap metal, buy “war bonds,” limit certain foodstuffs, divert their work to war-related purposes, volunteer to support the military through the USO and similar organizations, conduct blackout drills, accept constrained housing arrangements, and the like.

Some of us are called to fight this war on the front lines, while others are called to fight by staying off the front lines: by staying home, accepting constraints on our preferences in order to limit the victims that The Enemy can claim, donating to food banks, overtipping delivery personnel. (Addressing the structural problems with the economy that have been exposed by this crisis is a separate conversation.)

I will gladly agree that the notion of genuine shared sacrifice has disappeared — nay, been aggressively erased — from our national rhetoric. None of the “wars” in my lifetime — in Vietnam, on poverty, on drugs, on terrorism — have called for shared sacrifice. Indeed, the opposite has been true. The first Iraq War was the exception that demonstrated the so-called rule: it took several months to amass overwhelming military and diplomatic might, and then the actual war was won in about 15 minutes, with little disruption to life on the home front. In effect, we have consistently been promised that all wars will look like that: while there are inevitably some people who bear more risks than others, the overarching argument has been that we can win each of these wars with little pain to the rest of us.

And so now that the “war” on Covid-19 is stretching into its — gasp — third month, our elected officials lack the interest or ability to call for genuine shared sacrifice, and our own habits of shared obligation to each other have been eroded to the point that many of us see stay-at-home measures as just another example of The Man Holding Us Down.

The fact that you and I have the privilege of working from home doesn’t mean that we should give it up. It means that we should use that privilege to help the people who don’t have it.

This is an important observation–and a real reason for further hesitation. At a deeper level, though, this is where covid-19 is only a kind of diagnostic tracing fluid showing how deeply diseased our underlying political economy has become, and how much what we do individually or collectively to manage the pandemic is inadequate to addressing this more foundational problem.

In very rough terms, Swarthmore’s endowment is enough to run the university for about a decade with no income whatsoever. Why is an institution that strong even thinking about layoffs and furloughs? This is the rainy day for which there is a fund.

What your students need/want/deserve is an important question, but it can and should be considered separately from whether or not Swarthmore’s employees are worried about their jobs. Leadership should have been thinking along these lines since at least late March.

I’m glad that I don’t have to make the big calls about safety, and I am sorry that local institutional leaders have to make those decisions against a backdrop of abject national failure (in contrast to peer countries), but Swarthmore and its peers are wealthy and solid enough to be showing some leadership for its stakeholders.