Tweet: Lehman President Explanation

This series of tweets from the president of Lehman College, Daniel Lemons, provided an official response to demands for CUNY's closure, explaining that the logistics facing CUNY's transition to distance learning were markedly different from other institutions of higher education given its status as a public institution. Amidst many claims of institutional indifference, this artifact provided an official rationale for the perceived latency in CUNY's response to the pandemic, raising issues of equity and public duty within debates about health and economics.

This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology.

Delgado, Fernando

CUNY Distance Learning Archive

Twitter

March 10, 2020

Obtained from Contributor - Copyright Unknown

English

https://twitter.com/LehmanPresident/status/1237455818645278720

@LehmanCollege considers the health of students, staff and faculty to be our utmost priority. We are preparing more of our classes to be delivered remotely, but I wanted to explain what other considerations we factor in as a public institution: https://t.co/kXSK5Vifng (1/3) We know it is an unsettling time but we do not take closure of the school lightly, considering that it is not as simple as merely transforming in-person classes to online delivery (2/3) Certainly not for the 4,000 students whose graduations may be impacted this term if we are directed to close by @CUNY and the NYC/NYS Departments of Health. (3/3)