Professors conflicted over return to in-person classes

It has been almost a year and a half since USC turned to online learning because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now USC is welcoming students back to in-person classes. 

When the pandemic first began, professors had to quickly adapt to online teaching. With in-person classes happening in the fall, professors are preparing to transition back to on-campus classrooms. 

The Daily Trojan spoke to several professors to get insight into how they are feeling about returning to in-person classes. While some professors are looking forward to getting back in the classroom, others are nervous about the rising Delta variant cases in Los Angeles County. 

Jill Kickul, Scott Wiltermuth & Patricia Mills, Marshall School of Business 

A professor for 30 years, with the last five at USC, Jill Kickul has always enjoyed interacting with students. But when the coronavirus pandemic began in Spring 2020, she had to quickly transition from in-person classes to online classes within a few days. Now, with USC opening up its doors for in-person classes, Kickul can’t wait to get back to teaching in person.

“I’m really excited to get back into the classroom — really excited to interact with our students in an in-person environment,” said Kickul, a professor of clinical entrepreneurship and research at the Marshall School of Business. “The ability to see their full reaction and the in-person interactions that take place is just priceless compared to Zoom.” 

Kickul said professors and students did a “remarkable job” with their quick transition to online learning and were resilient. Although Kickul missed having in-person interactions with her students, she said she learned many valuable benefits from teaching online such as incorporating a mix of in person and online office hours as well as the opportunity to be diverse and inclusive by using technology to open up classrooms to the world.

“We have the technology to be able to bring a Zoom type environment into the classroom,” Kickul said. “You could bring in guest lecturers, guest speakers, live cases from anywhere in the world basically and they can drop into your class and speak to the students in that type of format.”

However, other professors are concerned about returning to in-person classes. With the rising cases of the Delta variant in L.A. County, professors like Scott Wiltermuth, associate professor of management and organization at Marshall, said he feels ambivalent about returning.

“[I have] mixed feelings [about returning to in-person classes],” Wiltermuth said. “It’ll be nice to see people, but, at the same time, the Delta variant seems strong, and a large segment of the population has not vaccinated themselves and that’s worrisome.”

According to L.A. Public Health, L.A. coronavirus cases are up to 3,000 a day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged everyone to get vaccinated as the Delta variant has higher rates of transmission and causes more severe illness in unvaccinated people than previous strains. 

Wiltermuth said he believes there are ways to mitigate risk and encourages people to get vaccinated to ensure the safety of the USC community in the fall. Both Kickul and Wiltermuth said USC has done an efficient job at providing training and resources such as classroom technology and counselors to get professors back in the classroom. 

The Center for Excellence in Teaching focuses on defining, developing, evaluating and rewarding teaching excellence at USC. CET provides support to faculty members in developing evidence-based teaching practices and evaluates teaching quality through peer-reviewed processes. 

“[CET] have really provided a plethora of resources for faculty to help them get back into the classroom,” Kickul said. “They were also excellent during the pandemic, providing us [with] resources on how to teach online and how to engage our students in an online environment.”

Within Marshall, Kickul said Patricia Mills, Vice Dean for Teaching and Innovation was supportive of professors in their transition back to in-person classes. 

“Last year that meant instructional designers worked closely with professors to develop compelling course content to be delivered online,” Mills said in an email to the Daily Trojan. Mills said this year USC is “taking what it learned during the pandemic, building on trends in education that were accelerated by COVID and welcoming students back to inclusive, innovative and inspiring in-person classes, regardless of any challenges that this semester may bring.”

Ronald McCurdy, Thornton School of Music 

At the Thornton School of Music, Professor Ronald McCurdy looks forward to returning to the classroom. McCurdy said he is excited to have his students perform together on stage instead of being separted from each other on Zoom. 

“We are accustomed to doing a communal event. When you do music you do it together you don’t do it in isolation,” said McCurdy, assistant dean and director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. “Granted, you compose in isolation, you practice in isolation, but all of that is a means to an end, which means you come together as a unit to create art and music.”

However, McCurdy said he is apprehensive about the fallout of the Delta variant. Fully vaccinated, McCurdy plans to be careful being back on campus and looks to implement precautionary measures, such as a classroom policy that has students asking all their questions from their seats, instead of coming up to his desk after class, to keep social distance. 

McCurdy said he is pleased with USC’s transparency and appreciates being kept informed and updated about the latest coronavirus related decisions. 

“I think USC has been very good about letting us know where things are and giving us a system to be nimble because we don’t want to deal with a bunch of unknowns,” McCurdy said. “We don’t know how that’s gonna play out. Are we going to get back to a true sense of normalcy, or will there be yet another variant emerging? We don’t know. I do appreciate USC being very transparent in letting us know where we are. The protocol is to open the campus back up and keep everybody safe.”

Although adjusting to an online environment was challenging, there have been many positive aspects of the pandemic, McCurdy said, including bringing in American folk-jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin as a guest speaker during his online classes which wouldn’t have happened in-person. 

“I’m very proud of our students and my colleagues, because it’s been a very difficult year and a half, teaching online but out of it there were some silver linings in terms of learning new ways to dispense information,” McCurdy said. “My new role as Assistant Dean of JEDI means the whole idea of looking at what we teach, how we teach, diversifying our curriculum to decolonize our curriculum to really be more inclusive, about what we teach and how we teach it. I think that that’s going to change, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m very excited about getting started.”

Marc Ballon, Viterbi School of Engineering

Marc Ballon, part-time lecturer of engineering writing at Viterbi School of Engineering, is eager to teach in person again. Ballon thinks that he and his students will get more out of in-person classes because they are more interactive. 

“[With in person classes] they could see my gestures, I could see their gestures. We could have side conversations,” Ballon said. “On Zoom, it was like looking at the old TV show ‘The Hollywood Squares,’ where I just had a bunch of faces, impassively looking at me. Let me tell you, trying to keep 19 people who are on Zoom, and all over the world, in different time zones engaged, was really, really, really challenging.”

To transition back to in-person classes, USC has been holding courses on how to teach hybrid lessons. If a student, such as an international student, was not able to get a visa, professors have been taught how to incorporate them into the classroom through the use of technology. 

In terms of his own personal safety, Ballon is not too concerned because he is fully vaccinated and will be wearing a mask to class. However, he is worried about the possibility of faculty and staff not being honest about their vaccination status, potentially infecting other people and resulting in an outbreak. 

“Even if everybody is being honest [about their vaccination status], there could be a COVID outbreak,” Ballon said. “I’m not worried about getting sick and in the hospital, but I am worried about classes shutting down. My fear is that we’ll be in class for a few weeks and then we’ll be some sort of COVID outbreak and things will shut down again. That’s my biggest fear. I wanted to be in class all semester.”

However, despite being nervous about the prospect of shutting down classes due to potential outbreaks, Ballon said he is “really happy with the way the administration is requiring people to either get vaccinated or get tested. I think that’s so important, and I applaud USC for being on top of this. It is so important to keep campus open to keep people safe. So, they get an A for its COVID policies and test policies.”

John Walsh, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology

John Walsh is an associate professor of gerontology at Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and is excited about returning to in-person classes. However, the Delta variant concerns him because it is more infectious and aggressive than other coronavirus variants. Walsh’s wife has leukemia, and if she gets infected with coronavirus she could be in trouble.

“My concern [is] the death rate for people with her kind of leukemia was about 40%, whereas the death rate for the general population was about 2%,” Walsh said. 

The School of Gerontology has its own building and, as a result, has complete control over how to organize it. Classrooms will be wiped down each class and plexiglass barriers have been set up for teachers. HEPA filters, and air purifiers, have been ordered to protect both students and faculty in smaller classrooms. 

According to L.A. County rules, faculty and students will wear masks in the classroom. To make sure students can hear the professor, instructors at Leonard Davis have been given headsets that will wirelessly go into the sound system that exists in every classroom. 

At the school of gerontology, video capture rooms will support students who are not able to make it to in-person classes. The footage will be posted to a program called Mediasite. Students will have the option of being in-person but if they’re not comfortable, can choose to stay home. 

“[The coronavirus] is going to be with us for a while. Some people are predicting that instead of being a pandemic it’s going to be what’s called an endemic to society, meaning it’s never going to go away. So you have to adapt,” Walsh said. “Students, they need to just be responsible and look after themselves.”

Paul Urcioli, School of Dramatic Arts

Paul Urcioli is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Dramatic Arts. Urcioli teaches acting and had to adapt his courses when he transitioned to online classes. 

“I teach acting classes so I’ve been teaching acting over Zoom for 18 months, and as much as I was proud of all the things my students accomplished and things we were able to do over Zoom, it’s acting and there’s no substitute for being in the same physical space with the people you’re creating work with and working off with other human beings who are in the same room as you so it’s like I’ve been dying to get back into the classroom ever since they shut us down.”

Urcioli said that the first semester of teaching acting online was uncharted territory. However, by the Fall of 2020 Urcioli felt prepared for online teaching. The students he had in his classes were on camera acting so Urcioli completely redid some of the exercises and tried to suit it more towards working with Zoom and did self-tapes. 

“I don’t want to say I lowered the bar, but we did sort of have more realistic expectations of the kind of work we would be able to do,” Uricoli said. “Looking in our tiny computer screens and not having the whole physical space to work with each other but I have to say the ensemble I had in the fall of 2020 in my scene study class was tremendous. They did some of the best work I’ve had students do in all my time at USC.”

With USC starting in-person classes, Urcioli said he is not too concerned about the variants because of USC’s vaccine policy and the support he has gotten from the School of Dramatic Arts. However, Urcioli said that people will need to slowly readjust to the learning environment. 

“People have not been in the classroom together for a year and a half, and I think there’s gonna be a kind of let’s start slowly and tiptoe first and then walk and then you know, little by little, because I think it’s gonna be strange for us to be back in person.”

Lisa Krohn, Iovine and Young Academy

Lisa Krohn is an assistant professor of practice and design at Iovine and Young Academy. Krohn is looking forward to in-person relationships with students and colleagues. However, she said she is apprehensive about the Delta variant, even after being vaccinated. 

“I think the students were feeling a little bit more urgent to be in the classroom, maybe than I was but I respect that,” Krohn said. “I’m feeling that this will be a wonderful adventure because I started teaching in the fall of 2020 at USC. So, I have been online during my whole career so far.” 

Krohn starts teaching in the morning and finishes at 8:30 p.m. The idea of wearing a mask that long is overwhelming to her and is not something she has done yet. However, Krohn acknowledges that wearing a mask is the most effective way of controlling the spread of the coronavirus. 

“I’m a healthy person, and I feel like it’s my duty to be in the classroom,” Krohn said. “To the extent county health authorities are dictating, we’re all okay to be back in person. So, yes, you know there is a risk. I’m aware of it, it’s a calculated risk. And I consider it a risk I’m willing to take in the line of duty.”

The support Krohn is looking for is hand sanitizing stations in frequent locations. Krohn would also like to see efforts by the University to make things touchless such as door handles that require people to hold it. 

“I would hope that the university would do a kind of audit, where they look through and see what ways they can avoid the necessity of us touching surfaces frequently,” Krohn said. “There’s certain times that you’re forced to grab a faucet or a door handle, and those are the areas that I think create kind of low-level tension for all of us.”