Just– almost– like old times.

We were nine. Everyone brought something. It was a beeuuuteeful day. We talked about our gardens and the challenges of on-line teaching and how we’d all been getting by and the eight of us from State learned that many Ole Miss students had not moved home and were still in Oxford.

It’s Oxford and Oxford is weird. A lot of Ole Miss alumni are quite well off. Rather than their kids living in dorms or apartments, they buy them a house, often in high-end neighborhoods. Then they rent out the rooms to other students. So you may have five to six college kids in one house. (Which we are told upsets the neighbors.) This sets up the question: If all of your classes are on-line, and you are living, with others, in Oxford and going to the stores and restaurants and bars in Oxford, why are all of your classes on-line?

There was considerable discussion of The University Bureaucracy, at both State and Ole Miss. Here are the teaching options for Fall. 1) In person, class sizes extremely limited, large lecture halls being commandeered by classes of 20 or so. 2) Hybrid, e.g., once-a-week meetings, the rest on-line (but keep reading). 3a) On-line synchronous, meaning real-time Zoom or whatever the higher up admin decides to go with in virtue of who’s going to get the $$. 3b) On-line asynchronous, meaning the prof puts it out there on Canvas or Blackboard or whatever and… . That’s all from the perspective of faculty. No word on what you do as a student who has a hodgepodge of classes.

So lots of shop talk which everyone enjoyed. Textbooks are a problem, too. In the Spring, there was an EMERGENCY and so copyright issues went out the window. Scan & post. Now? Think of the financial burden of buying and shipping texts if you cannot just go to the campus bookstore which subtracts the cost from your student loan balance.

Here’s another question that has come up at Ole Miss. If all of your teaching is on-line, why do you have to physically be in Oxford? No one from State had heard of this issue, but again, Ole Miss and Oxford are uniquely strange.

The most exciting thing that we talked about was The Farm Circle. Everyone is in agreement that it’s a fantastic idea. More on that later.

It was great to see people, which was the first word our first arriving guest shouted as soon as he saw us.