Living Room Classrooms and Kitchen Offices

Popular Mechanics magazine cover from the 1970s with home office pictures

As universities across the country are making plans for whether, and if so how, to return to face-to-face instruction in the Fall semester, I wanted to send out a big thank you to the REL faculty and staff who, like so many others around the U.S. and the world, quickly turned their homes into their offices and their classrooms for the past two months. That means that private internet connections and home utility bills have quite literally kept the lights on and the information flowing for all of our schools and for all of our students.

While it may seem a small thing when judged on an individual basis — after all, I was going to pay that cable bill anyway… — it’s actually rather remarkable when you consider that, collectively, the day-to-day operations of the university have almost completely shifted to the homes of its faculty and staff. Add to this the families of their own that many of them have, let alone their own concerns for the situation that we’ve all found ourselves in (coz they too were scrambling to find homemade masks), and you arrive at a pretty remarkable past two months, in which they each became the University of Alabama.

So, as the Spring semester ends, and as we transition to a summer of online instruction, all the while working to put the proper conditions into place to have a safe and successful Fall, I just wanted to highlight what’s been going on behind-the-scenes for the past 8 weeks. While we’re very grateful for the staff who remained on campus — after all, many essential facilities workers have been busy on campus all this time — and for all of the students who each had to figure out their own adaptations to instruction going remote, the way that faculty and staff members’ living rooms and kitchens became lecture halls and offices, complete with all of those unscripted pet interruptions, also deserves our thanks.