Let me first open this post with a disclaimer: while I am indeed a Teaching Assistant, my views in no way represent the Department that employs me or any other entity on campus. Here, I only claim to speak for myself: as someone who has pursued both bachelor's and master's degrees here, and has generally loved my experience.

Now, I understand that UMBC has a reputation for typically being one of the more reluctant schools to close. And I understand that this tendency stems from a reputation established fairly early on in our life as a University. For good or ill, we do have a campus operations culture that's not as inclined to close as, say, UMD's might be. And I get that- as a historian, I'm not going to dispute that these sorts of mentalities are well rooted and hard to displace.

But what I take issue with is the condescending, imperious, and frankly arrogant reply given by Vice President for Administration and Finance Lynne Schaefer. For those of you who may not have seen this, I invite you to check your inboxes: it was titled the "Community Message on Inclement Weather Closings"

While I do give her credit for acknowledging that faculty, staff, and students have "expressed concerns" relating to the timing of today's closure announcement, I fear that this is all I can give her credit for. The rest of her message was, in essence, a non-answer that repeated things we already knew, and failed to seriously address the question. Worthy of inclusion in Pravda or Izvestia, maybe, but not something that satisfies the actual concerns expressed.

Consider the first paragraph in which she repeats a vague claim to the "safety of the UMBC community" being the first priority. Is this actually true? To be honest, I don't know. In my nearly six years here, I have noticed that, more often than not, UMBC has opened after inclement whether with either a) walks that remain utterly treacherous, b) parking lots that have not been cleared, or c) some combination of the two, plus steps that are essentially iced over. I am quite honestly surprised that the university has not been slapped with several lawsuits as a result- I have seen many people who have fallen, and can only imagine that there are others who have fallen and substantially injured themselves.

But I won’t dwell too much on this. Her second paragraph is then a repetition of something we already knew: lo and behold, a large organization such as UMBC has a detailed closing policy that follows best practices and involves multiple stakeholders.

Well, DUH. Forgive me for asking this, but does the good Vice President believe that we are daft enough to think that the decision to open or close the campus rests in the hands of only one person? Faculty or student, graduate or undergraduate, I think we are all intelligent enough to understand that this is a process involving multiple people. Pointing the complexity of this process does nothing to address any of the questions asked, and indeed suggests that she does think us capable of making reasonable assumptions about the practice.

But let’s look at the substance of the third paragraph, in which she notes that UMBC waits until “as much information is available as possible about emerging weather conditions before making final decisions about closures”.

I shall now provide a brief list of institutions that, to my recollection, had announced they were closing prior to midnight Thursday. I welcome others to add to this as they might recall:

-The United States Naval Academy

-Nearly all public school districts in central Maryland

-The University of Maryland

-Federal government offices in Washington DC

-The city government of the District of Columbia

-State government offices (if not closed outright, then liberal leave was announced)

-Certain municipal governments

-Fort Meade

-Fort Detrick

And the list goes on. Why did these institutions decide to close? Because the forecast had remained consistent throughout the day, and snow had begun in central Maryland not long after sunset. There was every indication that the storm was developing as anticipated, and there was no reason to believe that, in the midst of the worst bands, it would somehow dissipate and die over the central part of the state. We all knew what was coming- we were all watching the weather intently.

But what does Vice-President Schaefer have to say about this? Nothing, apparently. She invites us to read the University’s closing policy, but again, this does not answer the central question raised by so many of us:

Why did UMBC not announce that it was closing until 5 AM, when most other institutions had made this decision the night before?

Nowhere does she address this. Are we to assume that those responsible for closing were waiting for more information when there was no reason to do so? What information could UMBC’s responsible persons have possibly found that was not available to the same decision makers at county schools and the University of Maryland? This answer is simply insufficient.

Now, some of you may wish to take this as the rant of an angry graduate student who was irritated that he had to wake up early to see if he had to dig himself out to drive over. That’s partially true, but my concern is more about what the tone and content of this message says about the administration’s attitude towards students, faculty, and staff.

Like it or not, UMBC is a commuter campus. The vast majority of our students do indeed commute from elsewhere, and many from a significant distance. The same is true of our faculty and staff- many, if not most, must commute some distance to the campus. Why was it that UMBC felt it could not make a decision in the timely way that so many other institutions had? 

I’m not asking for the imposition of a liberal closing policy that will shutter the campus at the sign of a few flakes. I don’t think any of us are. Rather, I would just wish to see a closing policy that was more in tune with both the weather and aware of the decisions made by other institutions. It simply should not take until 5 AM to make the same call that others had made ten hours earlier (in the particular case of UMD- where, I stress, the storm was not as bad as it was near Baltimore.)

And I also believe that students, faculty, and staff deserve a better explanation than a repetition of existing policy that refuses to answer the real concerns raised. Even if the real answer is as simple as “hey, sorry we screwed up”, we would rather have a real answer than an unconvincing excuse.