French professor Alice Kaplan has taught about plague and crisis before. Now the chair of the French Department, she has taught some of France’s hallmark texts following the Great Recession and, now, teaches amid a global pandemic that has infected around two million people across the globe.

But the impacts of this crisis are markedly different, and her plans for the semester have shifted. The syllabus for her course “The Modern French Novel,” crafted well before the pandemic, includes Albert Camus’s The Plague — a 1947 novel about a virus that rips through a small French village in Algeria. She said she cannot teach the book like she has in the past.

“I could not use the same lecture I used before,” she said. Isolation is a key theme in the novel. But the coronavirus outbreak, she said, which has forced much of the world’s population inside of their homes, seems quite comparable. “We’re living through a more radical isolation.”



Even when Yale was briefly dismissed amid fears of a British invasion during the Revolutionary War — which eventually happened in 1779 — University leaders encouraged students to live and study with their tutors further inland. Some could later stay home and study from books, but they had to pass an exam to advance. Facing crises yet again in the 20th century, Yale took alternate measures — shipping its students-turned-soldiers abroad and shortening the time it took to receive a University degree. The Spanish Flu, which erupted in 1918, forced Yale to cancel all on-campus public meetings, forbid community members from interacting with New Haven residents and isolated students and professors. Only a handful of Yale students died from the virus, thanks in part to the military’s presence at the University after World War I and its strict regulations. And following World War II, Yale’s lecture halls surged with veterans armed with G.I. Bill benefits — according to a YaleNews article, some 8,000 students came to the University in 1945. Most were service members.

While this pandemic has caused one of Yale’s most drastic responses yet, not all of the changes are new. Yale professors have made brief dips into online learning through Massively Open Online Courses on websites like Coursera. Anyone with a stable internet connection can now, for a fee, be a Yale “student.” From “Introduction to Psychology” to “Roman Architecture” to “The Science of Well-Being,” enrollees can read, listen and learn from the University’s top professors — all without earning a degree.

Harvard professor David Malan sees the value in online learning. His computer science survey course “CS50” is almost entirely taught online — from the lectures to the problem sets. Aside from an all-night Hackathon and weekly section meetings, students can complete nearly the whole course from their computer. Yale has its own successful version of the program — which had nearly 230 enrollees last fall according to Yale’s Course Demand Statistics.

Malan told the News that the course’s use of technology is “additive, not subtractive” for most students.

“After all, it’s so common for all of us to miss or misunderstand some detail in class, particularly when classes are long, if not dense,” he wrote. “Even the simplest of features online, though, allow students to rewind, fast-forward, pause and look up related resources.”

Still, five senior Yale professors interviewed by the News by and large consider online classes as no substitute for a University environment, with its face-to-face interaction, dorm-room conversations and strolls through the Sterling stacks.

Kaplan and Blight are two of many professors across the University whose classes — and teaching styles — have drastically changed in light of the coronavirus outbreak. But this move has also brought unintended consequences. Students are less engaged, said Maurice Samuels, a French professor and Kaplan’s co-instructor. Reading attracts less focus. Attention spans thin, Samuels added.

“It’s not ideal. I would be very, very sad if we had to do this for more than these few weeks,” he said. “A lot is lost from not being there in person.”

A CLUNKIFICATION



Philosophy professor Shelly Kagan teaches some of Yale’s most popular introductory philosophy courses, including “Moral Skepticism” and “Introduction to Ethics.” His students call him Shelly. He sometimes starts his lectures sitting cross-legged on a wooden table in the front of the room. On a normal day — that is, when classes are in-person — he will walk from one end of the room to the other to connect different arguments to physical locations. Near the door, nihilism; moral noncognitivism in the center; another toward the windows. He maps arguments on the blackboard. And while he’s teaching, Kagan said he likes to see his students’ faces to see what clicked — and what needs more explaining.

Kagan can lecture in front of hundreds, even thousands, he said. But for the seasoned professor, Zoom conferences have proven challenging.