C
ollege students could reasonably
be forgiven for being wary of
the
future
of
remote
work.
After nearly a year of dancing between
hybrid classes and fully online ones
— the uncertainty often coupled with
an increased workload and isolation —
remote work might seem like a tough sell.
But even after the population reaches herd
immunity, many companies are planning
to offer more work-from-home options for
their employees.
Salesforce recently announced that it
will allow employees to choose if they ever
return to the office. Facebook and Twitter
also announced similar policies. Other
companies are targeting a fall return to
the office, but remain tentative and don’t
expect a sudden, full-time return. The
lack of haste to return to the working place
in any capacity speaks to the fact that
overall, productivity has not decreased. If
anything, it’s up.
The benefits of working from home
are numerous. Fully remote work or
hybrid work that allows for less frequent
travel means people can live further from
expensive urban centers or closer to loved
ones. It means commute time can be
repurposed into time for family, exercise
or rest. It means less traffic and more
flexibility.
We’ve been seeing all of that for almost
a year, but have been unable to fully reap
the rewards. A sentiment I often see is
that we aren’t working from home: We
are working through a crisis. Work is the
afterthought, the last item on the to-do
list after the job of surviving. It would feel
a whole lot different if you could choose
to do work in a coffee shop one day, for
example, or catch up with friends over
dinner after work.
I am excited for the possibility of
greater work-from-home opportunities.
For one thing, it improves accessibility
for everyone. Disability advocates have
been asking for greater work-from-
home accommodations for years. Even
for companies that don’t decide to let
the majority of their employees remain
remote, the productivity and benefits of
remote work will make it harder to deny
reasonable accommodations.
It is hard to believe how often we
went to school or meetings while ill
prior to the pandemic. Before a cough
represented a potentially deadly virus, it
still represented illness, yet the messaging
I always received was that a hard-working
student would show up anyway. I haven’t
even gotten a cold since last March (knock
on wood), whereas I feel like I used to be
a little bit sick from October to April of
every year prior. From now on, if I’m lucky
enough to have a job that I can do from
home, I’ll stay home with the sniffles and
not feel guilty about it.
Not every job is going to be conducive to
remote work, but many likely will, perhaps
even entry-level jobs that University of
Michigan grads could expect to take. It
is, however, going to require a shift of
mindset.
Pandemic-era
college
students,
I
predict, are going to come out of college
with an obliterated sense of work
boundaries. Most of us don’t have the
luxury of even separating our workspace
from our sleep space the way working
adults might. After a day of classes and
office hours, many of us have meetings
until well past dinner. In the before time,
we could pretend those meetings were
social, at least a little. Maybe someone
would bring food, play music or make
small talk before the beginning of the
meeting. Now? It’s all work, Zooming past
9:30 p.m.
We’ll likely be in this remote or
hybrid setting for the foreseeable future,
and I wonder if we, as students, can
help restructure some of those virtual
boundaries
for
ourselves.
We
can’t
magically give ourselves home offices or
less work, but maybe we can send less of
those late-night homework texts? Those
club meetings from the “great before,” do
they all need to be Zoom calls?
As many of us prepare to enter the
remote workforce, I want to talk more
seriously about how we can make it
sustainable after the unavoidable mess
that has been online school. For me, that
means making myself less available after
8 p.m., using my perennial proximity to
the kitchen to eat a lot of small meals and
occasionally giving up for an hour and
lying on my bed. But I seriously can’t wait
my room.
B
EEP! BEEP! BEEP! It’s 9:15 a.m. I
get up, hop in the shower and then
get dressed. Moving semi-quickly,
I usually prefer to go anti-“Zoom casual.” I
don’t roll out of bed. I try to get dressed as if
I were going to school in person, along with
brushing my teeth; this routine helps me get
into “school mode.”
It’s 10 a.m. and my history class is starting.
As I join Zoom, I select “Join with Video” and
prepare to see the faces of my classmates too.
However, I am mistaken. The cameras are
off, including the cameras of both professors
— I am suddenly the only face to the learning
process. Embarrassed, I swiftly turn mine off
as well and for the remaining 79 minutes, I
stare at black boxes or the names of my illusive
peers.
What the heck is going on? The first
semester, I estimated, was an anomaly. As
students, we were all getting used to Zoom
and maybe we preferred to go unseen in our
non-traditional learning states. So be it. Now,
in the second semester, I’m confused. Almost
a year into this whole “virtual learning”
situation, are we still breaking the ice?
We shouldn’t be. In fact, keeping cameras
on compensates for the lack of informal
social interactions that can occur outside of
a pandemic. In a breakout room for another
class, I noticed a poster for Drake’s Nothing
Was the Same album on the wall of my
peer’s room. Coincidentally, he happens
to be my favorite artist and NWTS is my
favorite album, so a natural conversation
transpired. If my friend had her camera off or
we were in a classroom, chances are I would
have never known she liked Drake too. In a
pandemic setting, where creating informal
social interactions is incredibly difficult,
these candid on-camera moments are a social
lifeline.
Forbes notes that not only are face-to-face
video calls encouraged, but they are becoming
the norm. Gene Marks, business columnist
and founder of The Marks Group consulting
firm, believes that turning the camera on has
helped him “close more deals and connect to
our customers better.” Seeing is, quite literally,
believing; people are more trusting in others
when they can view them.
The Stanford Daily ran a survey of 46
students across the country about leaving
their videos off during class. Two-thirds of
respondents said they’ve been in a situation
that is uncomfortable during class and
preferred to not use their camera. Don’t worry,
I get it — I’ve been there too. We all have. A
brief period without visuals is warranted at
times, certainly.
However, as students, the number one thing
we crave from our professors is transparency.
It’s a two-way road. How can we expect it from
our professors if they aren’t receiving it from
us? Let’s be honest: you’re probably not paying
attention with your camera off. I receive daily
Snapchats of other people’s computer screens
in a gallery view. Moreover, how does anyone
capture the “Zoom fails” I watch on YouTube?
While these moments are clearly mortifying,
they are relatively preventable if you pay
close attention to what is in view in your
background and warn your housemates and
family members that you are on a call.
Additionally, don’t we want to see other
people while we learn? We feel reassured
when assimilating with others’ confused
looks in math class, curiosity when we catch
someone daydreaming and solidarity in
rolling our eyes at the one kid who always
talks. Quite simply, face-to-face interaction is
essential to our educational experience.
I hate to be this guy, but there is a
possibility that Zoom becomes our future. The
convenience of clicking on a link and joining
a meeting via mobile device is exponentially
greater than the trouble of organizing
in-person meetings. For example, say you’re a
businessperson and have a 10 a.m. meeting. Do
you want to wake up at 8 a.m., have to put on a
suit and tie and wait in traffic? Or would you
rather wake up at 9 a.m., take a shower (which
could even be optional) and only have to focus
on your top half looking sharp?
Turning our cameras off, especially just
because we feel like it, is yet another bad
tendency of ours exposed by Zoom: laziness.
For many of us, we often welcome the path of
least resistance within our respective day-to-
day grinds. Thus, we have to make a conscious
effort to salvage the positives of our day we had
grown accustomed to before this pandemic:
seeing each other.
I’m not saying that you have to show us
your roommate picking their nose in the
background and I don’t necessarily need to see
an empty chair if you go to the bathroom. All I
ask is that for the sake of our collective sanity,
it would be nice to enjoy each other’s company
the way Zoom, FaceTime and all other video
conferencing platforms are intended.
Until then, I’ll be sure to wear my best
slippers and robe. See you in class!
T
rump is gone. After four long years
and a particularly tumultuous last
two weeks, former President Donald
Trump has left office and President Joe Biden
and Vice President Kamala Harris have been
sworn in. While it’s natural to want to take
some time to celebrate the inauguration of an
at least slightly less terrible administration, it
is important to discuss what the new Biden
administration plans to do with its mandate
and narrow congressional majority. While
writers for The Daily have already discussed
what policies the new administration should
and should not pursue, it is important to
consider what foreign policies they are
actually pursuing. To quote Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, D-Mass., “personnel is policy,” so
it’s worth asking who Biden’s foreign policy
personnel are.
The answers are not inspiring. Biden’s
principal foreign policy staffers highlight his
adherence to the bipartisan foreign policy
status quo: one of endless war, devastating
sanctions and pursuance of defense industry
profits over rational decision-making.
One of Biden’s picks that best exemplifies
these issues is Avril Haines, the Director of
National Intelligence, who is in charge of
coordinating intelligence relating to national
security issues and briefing the president
on it. Over the summer, Haines’s addition
to the Biden campaign’s foreign policy team
generated a great deal of controversy, both
from generally left-wing detractors and those
who were flabbergasted that those detractors
existed. The latter category, consisting largely
of former Obama administration officials,
pointed to her creation in 2013 of guidelines
for when drone strikes should be used.
The most important of these guidelines
was a standard of certainty that a drone
strike target is actually the lawful target
that it is aimed for. The ex-Obama officials
in question cited these guidelines as a reason
that anti-war progressives should support
Haines’s addition. Samantha Power, former
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was
quoted as saying, “(Haines) sought to put a
lethal instrument of U.S. power into a legal
framework, to minimize the risk of civilian
casualties, and to give a program shrouded in
secrecy far more transparency.”
While it is impossible to tell how many
civilian lives this policy saved, there are
also plenty of problems. A 2016 report on
civilian casualties between 2009 and 2015,
which Haines, then-deputy national security
advisor, was almost certainly involved in
publishing, was considered by news outlets
such as The Guardian to be a massive
undercount of actual casualties. Additionally,
years after the guidance was issued, the
Obama administration bombed Doctors
Without Borders hospitals in Afghanistan
and funerals in Yemen, a violation of
international law. Essentially, at best, the
guidance report debatably decreased civilian
casualties and certainly did little to increase
transparency.
Haines’s issues don’t stop with the drone
program. As Deputy Director of the CIA, she
presided over the release of the Senate report
on the CIA’s torture program. Her particular
role was to classify as much of the report as
possible, keeping valuable information about
the crimes committed in the program away
from the public’s eyes. Haines’s consistent
stance against accountability for torturers
and perpetrators continued with her support
for the selection of Trump’s CIA Director
Gina Haspel, who oversaw waterboarding at
a CIA black site in Thailand.
Beyond the obvious abhorrence of
doing this in the first place, this shows an
unwillingness on Haines’s part to hold U.S.
government officials accountable for crimes
they commit during her tenure, an important
issue should anything like the CIA torture
program ever occur again.
Haines is not the only problematic figure
on Biden’s foreign policy team. While Biden’s
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spent
most of his career in the military, and thus
does not have a political policy-making record
to analyze, he was, until his confirmation as
Defense Secretary, a member of the Board
of Directors at military contractor Raytheon
Technologies. While he has pledged to recuse
himself from decisions regarding his former
employer, this still leaves an opening for
Austin to support military actions that would
help Raytheon’s bottom line, just as long as
he does not have a hand in negotiating the
contract.
Perhaps
most
importantly,
Antony
Blinken, Biden’s pick for Secretary of State,
has been behind just about every bad foreign
policy decision during his two decades in
government. As then-Sen. Biden’s chief
foreign policy advisor, he supported the 2003
invasion of Iraq, a particularly consequential
view given Biden’s position as Chair of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As
then-Vice President Biden’s National Security
Advisor, he supported the 2011 invasion of
Libya, which plunged the country into civil
war. Additionally, as then-President Obama’s
Deputy Secretary of State, he supported the
Saudi invasion of Yemen, which has created
what UNICEF has called the world’s worst
humanitarian crisis. Even now, during his
confirmation hearings for Secretary of State,
he declared his support for sanctions on Iran,
which have, among other things, crippled its
ability to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Defenders of Biden will likely respond
to all of this with something to the effect of
“well, at least Biden’s better than Trump.”
On issues such as climate change and
immigration, that is true. However, with the
exception of the war in Yemen, which Biden
has recently spoken against, every issue
mentioned here is a continuation of Trump-
era policies.
Trump took the Obama administration’s
already opaque, murderous drone program
and made it worse. As mentioned before,
Trump’s Haines-endorsed pick for Director
of the CIA oversaw torture personally and
Trump’s last confirmed Defense Secretary,
Mark Esper, was also a weapons contractor
lobbyist, like Austin. Every single war and
sanctions program that Blinken supported
was either started by Trump or continued
under him.
A real break from the Trump era requires
an adjustment in its foreign policy, and
with his initial picks for key foreign policy
positions, President Biden seems unwilling
to make the necessary changes.
Opinion
Wednesday, February 24, 2021 — 13
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
JESSIE MITCHELL | COLUMNIST
BRANDON COWIT | COLUMNIST
SAM WOITESHEK | COLUMNIST
Jessie Mitchell can be reached at
jessiemi@umich.edu
Brandon Cowit can be reached
cowitb@umich.edu.
Sam Woiteshek can be reached at
swoitesh@umich.edu.
Remote work is here to stay
Biden’s unpromising foreign policy team
Lights! Video camera! Better
communication!
Design by Man Lam Cheng
Design by Yassmine El-Rewini
CHRISTINA KIM
| CARTOONIST CAN BE CONTACTED AT CKIMC@UMICH.EDU.