Reflections on the Fall Semester of Online Classes, and Thoughts for the Future
We are about to enter the ninth month of our COVID world. In many regards, time feels like it is standing still. Every day has a monotony like the one before. Yet, these past nine months have been a time of radical growth and transformation in ways that we really do not appreciate. Things that I thought were really important turned out to be unimportant. Things that I thought were impossible turned out to be quite easy. And things I thought I could never do have become old habit.
Perhaps my most profound lesson during this entire time is to never doubt the human capacity to evolve to meet new challenges. And I think this lesson has extended to higher education. At the outset of the pandemic, I was quite pessimistic about the ability of universities in general, and law schools in general, to cope with the pandemic. This skepticism was borne of my observations over the past decade: legal academia is a conservative (lowercase c) institution that evolves at a glacial pace. I did not think administrations and professors could move with enough agility to adapt to constantly-changing circumstances. I looked to elite institutions like Harvard Law School, which shut down entirely, as the canary in the kale mine: if HLS thinks it is too dangerous to stay open, how will less-prestigious schools stay open. And I also expected state and local governments to impose new draconian lockdown measures to shut down campuses.
I was wrong. Some universities preemptively shut down. In hindsight, those decisions may have been too rash. Other universities
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