It's exactly this attitude that I hate. Guy in a wheelchair can't get to class because the elevator is out? Swap rooms with another class on the ground floor or get a few strong guys together and carry 'em up the stairs or have someone hold a phone and livestream the lecture or have someone take notes and give them to him after class.
Cancelling every single class without even trying just says that what the university is doing isn't important. It begins to look like the only thing that matters is providing the appearance of an education. If things get a little difficult, as long as someone else can be blamed, no harm done by skipping some material, you weren't going to use it in real life anyhow.
> It's exactly this attitude that I hate. Guy in a wheelchair can't get to class because the elevator is out? Swap rooms with another class on the ground floor or get a few strong guys together and carry 'em up the stairs or have someone hold a phone and livestream the lecture or have someone take notes and give them to him after class.
My father (RIP) has been in Venice twice. Once, he was healthy, and he even shot a picture (before my time, back in early 70s) which won a price (he had his own dark room where he produced the picture as well).
The second time he was in Venice, he was with his family (I was ~10). He was sitting in a wheelchair, was legally blind, physically weak, had MS, ... I have no idea how Venice is these days but back than (90s) it was not wheelchair-friendly as there where bridges with stairs everywhere. I will never forget how two man carried him, in his wheelchair, over every bridge. And there was a lot of them! Because of that we were able to do some sight-seeing as a family, and were able to see Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco. We also managed to get him (on our own risk) into a gondola, reliving his first experience in Venice (the picture he won a price with was of a gondolier).
As for your post, I'd like to agree (dislike defeatist approach), but we depend more and more on the Internet these days. Without power, no Internet. I don't know exactly how UC depends on it. What I'd prefer, though, is trying to work around it, but apparently for one reason or another UC did not want to, and I am curious why not. It turns out their defeatist approach was wrong anyway.
A few years ago the power was out here for multiple hours, and I was happy to have my e-reader charged. I also sometimes have something similar with battery devices plus thunderstorm (I tend to disconnect my laptops and smartphones during thunderstorm).
> or get a few strong guys together and carry 'em up the stairs
And if one of them suffers an injury, then the school gets sued for millions. Healthcare costs a lot, and everyone will take the opportunity to recoup costs from whomever they can find liable.
I can give some potential reasons why things are a little more complicated than they might look from the outside, or (I presume) might have looked in earlier decades:
- Safety is an issue (stairwell lighting, etc.) especially in buildings with research labs (ventilation and such). Police will kick you out. And you can't even go back in immediately after power comes back on; you have to let the air get cleaned out and such.
- Many courses have exams around this time. This means that the ones that are usually taken concurrently actually coordinate their exam times and such with each other, not just for room allocation (which is its own issue) but also to avoid (say) having simultaneous exams, or to avoid (when possible) having long back-to-back exams for a ton of students. If a random set of classes try to keep their times and a random set postpone and a random set skip... I can imagine it'd be even more of a logistical mess than I'm sure it already is.
- Fairness can be a concern more than it may have been in the past. For example, if some students have power at home and can study, whereas some students can't, that's going to bias the test scores. This may seem insignificant, but for an impacted major like CS where getting a poor exam score can mean you might not even get into the major due to not meeting the GPA cutoff, it's a bigger concern than it might be for others.z
- I'm not sure they could've just gotten "a few strong guys" together just like that. They didn't exactly have much advance notice about the outages.
- Classes are huge, and rooms are not exactly plentiful. Large lecture halls don't get much natural lighting (if any), and a lot of smaller rooms are also indoors without lighting. You'd have to figure out which rooms are still well-lit, and coordinate and reallocate rooms for everybody that still wants to hold class university-wide, on very short notice. That sounds almost impractically hard in a lot of cases, at least to me. (I suppose if they had software and data prepared precisely for this particular purpose, it might kind of work? but this hasn't really been a common occurrence.)
- I'm confused how you think they could "livestream the lecture" during a power outage?
- Lots more practical issues that I haven't thought of or listed... and this doesn't include some of the things other people mentioned (legal/liability etc.) which are probably sufficient on their own to justify some of this.
Now I'm sure there's a fair bit of inefficiency in the system, and perhaps some small classes could've still been held just fine, perhaps improvising in some ways like what you mention, but with the short notice they had, I don't think they had a lot of options here, and for lots of students the outcome would've likely been the same anyway. Had they had more advanced notice and time to prepare, they might've probably done better, and hired some "strong guys" to help out, and gotten powerful flashlights and such... I don't know.
Cancelling every single class without even trying just says that what the university is doing isn't important. It begins to look like the only thing that matters is providing the appearance of an education. If things get a little difficult, as long as someone else can be blamed, no harm done by skipping some material, you weren't going to use it in real life anyhow.