CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

Posted on March 11, 2020, this landmark tweet was the first official notice from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State of New York that the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY) would be transitioning to remote learning formats in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. While somewhat innocuous in an era marked by the merging of political proclamations and social media, readers should place themselves in the position of a member of the CUNY and SUNY community and imagine one's reaction to receiving notice of a life-changing decision in the form of an unceremonious Tweet.

This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology.