Gayle Rogers
There are already more reflections out there on “the humanities in the time of COVID-19” than one could read in two lifetimes. There are some amazing columns, from the humorous to the grave, on the experiences of Zoom teaching. And I’m certain that books like Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year have received more attention in the past few months than they did in the entire previous century. Many of you English alums in the world have surely used your training as humanists to think capaciously and critically about what this pandemic means as much, if not more, than what we might understand it to be—which we’re still grasping.
Things are dramatically different, but things are also remarkably the same in some surprising ways for us on what we might call the "Virtual Fifth Floor." As we completed spring 2020 remotely, the teachers who constitute our department found means to connect to students who, in many cases, had signed up for their classes precisely because of the very familiarity and personal attention that English courses offer. That was no simple task. When we poll our students, year after year, on what they like best about our department, we see the same responses: English professors learn my name, they work with me individually on my writing, they take time to listen to what I’m trying to communicate and express. We teach small classes—not anonymous 300-person lectures—and our office hours sometimes feature lines that snake down the hallways of the Cathedral of Learning.
What happens when all of that is suddenly disallowed—even dangerous? That’s a real challenge for us. First, it took a herculean effort on the part of our office staff, our directors of undergraduate study, and our four program directors to gather and help tailor what were called “continuity syllabi” (those that covered the remainder of the term, in its remote form). They worked with everyone who was teaching for us this past spring, no matter their status or rank, to ensure that they had the basic equipment, structure, and know-how to finish the term. We couldn’t get too fancy—not in a pinch like this—but, rather, the goal was to complete the term with the closest approximation of “continuity” that we could create. Students' responses, on this count, indicate that we did so exceedingly well: their only gripe, in fact, was about losing the human contact with their English professors and peers.
Second, it took some long-range rethinking about what this means in the bigger picture, including what the coming fall will look like at Pitt (which will be announced very soon). We have been taking inventory of what worked, such as the relative efficiency of virtual office hours for some classes and of technologies like Panopto for certain demonstrations in our curriculum. English professors are stereotyped as luddites, but as you alums know, the ones in our department are also at the cutting edge of digital composition, film production, multimodal creative writing, audio storytelling, and much more. I was hardly surprised, then, to see some impressive adaptations across the board—ones that will persist into the future, no matter the shape of our future classrooms, I’d be willing to bet.
Finally, this pandemic was traumatic for a number of our students, for reasons too numerous to list but easily imaginable. (And that is not to diminish its traumatic and disruptive effects on our faculty, grad students, and staff.) I’m now in the process of writing annual reviews of our full-time faculty—a process that swells me with pride in our faculty every day. The provost allowed faculty to choose whether or not they included their student evaluations in their dossiers this term since it wouldn’t be fair to judge a professor on teaching a course that was suddenly forced to switch to remote learning halfway through the term. A good number of our faculty have chosen to submit their evaluations in their dossiers because they are proud of their own work through this massive change, and as I read the student comments, I hear the same chorus. Almost none of them liked the shift to remote education—of course—and especially not for their English courses. But one student wrote, “My whole world fell apart, but Prof. X was there for me.” Another added, “I felt like Prof. Y was the only thing good in my life this spring.” And again, “If every professor was like Prof. Z then this whole thing wouldn’t have been so terrible.” I couldn’t agree more.
—Gayle Rogers