CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

As a central higher education hub for the population of New York City, City University of New York (CUNY) schools were unable to prevent COVID-19 exposures. One of the first cases of infection occurred at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. With this tweet, dated March 11, 2020, we see some of the community's reactions to that event. Note that the focus on the limited closure time instead of the threat of exposure reflected a general concern for CUNY's response. Such tweets reveal how the pandemic came to catalyze longstanding points of tension between the broader community and CUNY's administration.

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.