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. 

