If my campus closes down, my job could go with it (opinion)

Not out of concern for my own bodily health or even my pending graduation in May, but because I’m a student worker at Cal State Fullerton. As of now, CSUF has canceled in-person classes, not closed campuses completely. If our campus does eventually shut down, my job in the library, most likely goes away — and so do the jobs of many others like me. After I saw that tweet and in the hours and days that followed, I immediately started to worry about how I was going to keep my overpriced roof over my head.

My direct supervisor has assured us that as of right now, our schedules aren’t changing – but that’s the most security they can offer in such a rapidly developing situation, and doesn’t apply to all the other students in my position.

For student workers and staff living paycheck to paycheck, campuses closing doesn’t just mean you don’t have to go to the 8:30 a.m. English 100 class that you didn’t study for and weren’t attending anyway.

I work two jobs to supplement my living expenses and Cal Grant A, a scholarship that partially covers my tuition at a state school for up to four years – and this is my fourth year.

I know the world is facing a growing crisis and it’s clear schools are just trying to do what they can. Still, I’m frustrated and concerned — because it’s not that my school isn’t thinking about the future – it’s that they aren’t thinking about everyone who has to get there.

So who pays for this lack of preparation if I’m not able to finish in May?

In preparation for this potential move online, they installed new webcams in the classrooms for remote lecturing, and expanded the capacity of our online teaching platform.

In one of my classes this week, a professor actually reminded us all about the attendance policy – three or more absences, and your final grade will be impacted.

Exceptions are made only for medical absences supported by a doctor’s note, which for many students could only be obtained by visiting the on-campus health center, the very place we’ve been asked to avoid.

Our situation would be comical if it weren’t becoming so horrifically apparent that the school doesn’t understand its own position in our community.

There is no mention of student workers. Cerise Valenzuela Metzger, CSUF’s associate director of news media services, told CNN, “The university is still open. Employees are still working and will be paid.”

It could also address those who cooperatively live in its dorms, those who kindly eat in its dining hall, those who rely on the support of on-campus internet to complete their coursework. Most online teaching platforms can’t be used effectively with a smartphone, and for those who rely on public libraries for internet access when away from campus, how will that help if we are being told to avoid public places?

I want to know that those who are making these decisions are taking into account how deeply this disruption will be felt among some of their most vulnerable community members.

It’s hard to know if they even thought about how socioeconomic diversity will affect our educational access, especially when some of my fellow students didn’t even have that clarity.

When it didn’t happen, they took to social media to complain – not about their potential exposure to a viral pandemic, but on the lost potential for an easy pass.

I understand, we all work hard, and the idea of not having to physically attend classes seems like a relief from the grueling schedules a lot of students live by.

But all jokes and the fight for parking spaces aside, those tweets makes it very apparent that even my peers are failing to understand the impact closing down the university could have on the lives of their less well-off fellow students and faculty.

I’d like to think that as the situation on my campus develops, they’ll provide us alternatives. That there will be answers for all of my questions. But as of right now, the time when that stability is most sought out, there’s just webpages with vague plans for scenarios that aren’t happening.

I’m sitting at my meticulously disinfected desk watching on social media as students at colleges nationwide scramble in the wake of closure to put together housing, to understand their visa limitations, to figure out where they’re going to eat.

I realize that though it sometimes feels lonely, that I am not any kind of exception in my reliance on my educational institution.

Students are encouraged to trust the system they have bought into with tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives.

Too many of us have no answers, no guidance, and no way of knowing what happens next as more and more colleges close their campuses.

It’s almost as though we too are being washed from their hands.