A Teacher and an Administrator in the Time of Corona
This article is the reflection of a university president who was also teaching two classes when the pandemic forced him to move his institution to remote setting. His misadventures include a struggle with the community, and an even more difficult struggle
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On March 16th, we got the stay-at-home order from the Emperor of California. As President of Chapman University this threw my entire life into a spin: all of a sudden I had the responsibility to convert the university from, well, the usual way we run a university, to a remote operation. Classes and administrative systems went remote, students had to leave their residence halls, and finally parents, students, faculty started to call frantically. On top of that we had to plan for a financial shortfall that ended up being $13.5M just for the spring (and we are now facing a loss of $120M for this incoming academic year). And so, on that fateful day, I sent a message to the entire community (faculty, parents, students, trustees, news organizations, busybodies everywhere) and declared that Chapman was going remote. Not good. Not good at all. Until a few days before closing down, I had received thousands of emails from students and parents claiming that I was risking innocent lives (you have blood on your hands being the kindest of the comments I was reading). As soon as we went remote, those same people who had compared me to Rasputin switched into a different gear and we were now asking to give tuition back (if I wanted an online education I would have gone to the University of Phoenix the most common remark). Great! And then the immediate accusation of having waited too long, as well as the dual accusation of having rushed into the decision. To top it all off, I had my own two classes to deal with. I was teaching an honors class entitled Three Infinities in which I was working with my friend and colleague Marco Panza (professor of philosophy in Paris, but currently a Presidential Fellow at Chapman) to show our non-mathematical students how mathematicians deal with the idea of infinity, and to illustrate this process with three main examples: projective
Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/ 16618_2020_12) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. D. C. Struppa (*) The Donald Bren Presidential Chair in Mathematics, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_12
D. C. Struppa
geometry, calculus, and set theory. I was also teaching another, less philosophical, class on my own, on mathematical methods for the physical sciences: the usual, fairly traditional class, where juniors and seniors are exposed to a wealth of mathematical methods ranging from the Laplace Transform, to the basics of Calculus of Variations. The infinity class was the easiest one. . . we just went to zoom, and we managed to continue the conversation with our students. It wasn’t as much fun because my friend Marco and I love to fight in our joint classes. I am a mathematician, and he is a philosopher. I know math, he thinks he knows math (he actually does,
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