Purdue and Notre Dame Are Going to Open for In-Person Instruction – Inside Higher Ed
How the leaders of these schools signal their intentions speak volumes, through their silences as much as their words.
In recent individual op-eds, Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, and Father John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, both declared they’re going to open their campuses for in-person instruction in the fall.
Daniels believes opening is the “best option from both a scientific and stewardship standpoint, at least for our particular institution.”
A failure to provide in-person instruction would be, in Daniels’s words, equivalent to telling students, “Sorry, we are too incompetent or fearful to figure out how to protect your elders, so you have to disrupt your education.”
Father Jenkins says his decision comes from a “moral” standpoint, believing that science cannot answer how to weigh the competing risks of continuing distance learning versus returning to face-to-face instruction.
Daniels frames his duty as being to the students of Purdue, who, he says, have signaled a desire to have in-person instruction by their deposits on enrollment.