Tweet: City College Bathrooms Under Repair Amid COVID-19 Outbreak

As with most public institutions, during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the City University of New York (CUNY) struggled with acquiring sufficient funding to meet the infrastructural needs of its physical facilities. With this tweet, referencing this NBC article and posted on March 11, 2020, we saw how the difficulty in maintaining functional, hygienic restrooms failed to satisfy the necessary conditions for student wellbeing amid the rise of COVID-19 in NYC. In expressing exasperation at the inaccessible state of City College's bathroom facilities, this tweet captured the locally situated impact of austerity and mismanagement of funding for maintenance and emergency preparedness of CUNY's physical infrastructure amid the public health crisis of the pandemic. 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.

Embrey, Jenna Clark

CUNY Distance Learning Archive

Twitter

March 11, 2020

Obtained from Contributor - Copyright Unknown

English

https://twitter.com/JennaCEmbrey/status/1237731099469627393

City College hasn't canceled in-person classes, but also half of the bathrooms in the main academic building are “closed for repairs,” so no one can wash their hands. This is...very unwise. #CUNY #COVID19