IC News

When Ithaca College faculty members launched a virtual salon on the coronavirus crisis in April, they were surprised that more than 100 students, alumni, faculty, staff, researchers from other universities, and business owners logged onto Zoom to listen to a wide-ranging discussion on the pandemic.

In what was styled as a CNN-style town hall meeting, the global audience heard varying perspectives on COVID-19 that Friday morning, from its impact on widening inequalities in society to the long-held expectation among public health leaders that a deadly virus would overwhelm the world.

The salon featured a group of three faculty members who each presented a brief talk on a specific aspect of the pandemic and then answered questions from the audience. After attracting such a large audience, organizers decided to hold the event every Friday at 11 a.m. through the end of May. The fourth salon, which focused on crisis, elections, and politics, was held May 1 and featured Tom Shevory, professor of politics; Rodrigo Brandão '01, director of communications at The Intercept; and Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of politics.

“This event sort of took on a life of its own,” said Stewart Auyash, associate professor of public health and chair of the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education, who spoke at the first salon. “We were going to do it once, and then another one and another one, until it became something we were doing every week.”

The Honors Program Rapid Response Salon on COVID-19 was organized by the Ithaca College Honors Steering Committee, which wanted to offer a program that would present new ways of thinking about the pandemic. The sessions were designed to be interactive, with panelists, which included several alumni, speaking for up to seven minutes and then spending most of the hour answering questions from the audience.

“These are the intellectuals at Ithaca College who have something to contribute to a wider national dialogue and do something that the news doesn’t do,” said Patricia Zimmermann, professor of screen studies at IC who led the effort to create the salon. “What we can do — which colleges and professors are good at — is take our enormous training and our vast research and be part of a national and international conversation.”

At the inaugural salon on April 10, Auyash talked about why the emergence of a pandemic was not unexpected by public health leaders. He noted that in 1995, he used Laurie Garrett’s, The Coming Plague, in class and 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk in which he predicted that a highly infectious virus could kill more than 10 million people in the next few decades.

Auyash said he personally lived through another epidemic when he and his wife were working in Singapore in late 2002, just after SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) had emerged in China. Although SARS is related to COVID-19, it was not as contagious and eventually killed 774 people worldwide.

“We were aware of how dangerous it could be and how debilitating it could be to the economy,” Auyash said. “But the world has not learned the lessons from the warnings that we have gotten over the years, and we are unfortunately paying the price.”

COVID-19 is related to other pandemics in history not only because of its biological makeup but also because it has led to similar social reactions, including anti-scientific thinking and scapegoating countries and ethnic, racial, and national groups, said Jonathan Ablard, an associate professor of history who also spoke at the first salon.

“We have these tendencies to resort to magical or anti-scientific thinking or denial during pandemics,” Ablard said. “It’s probably a function of the fact that pandemics reveal social and economic fractures and fissions. They produce fear, and fear makes people look for scapegoats and easy solutions.”

Analyzing coronavirus from another perspective, Joslyn Brenton, an assistant professor of sociology, asked at the second salon whether the pandemic would change the way people act within heterosexual families, specifically how men and women carry out the division of labor at home. With both parents working at home now, Brenton questioned whether women, who do about 75 percent of the cooking and housework, are still doing most of the household labor.