Law Teaching During the Pandemic: Home Life and Access to Technology

As part of my (utterly unscientific) survey (described here), I asked law faculty to indicate whether several statements accurately described their situations. Of the 37 respondents, here are the percentages agreeing with each of the following statements:

I personally know someone who became sick from COVID-19.	60%
I faced increasing childcare or eldercare responsibilities.	45.7%
I faced food insecurity.	2.9%
I have a family member who is an essential worker.	20%
I have an immediate family member who has become unemployed or is worried about job security.	37.1%
I have more people living at home with me now than I usually do.	25.7%

The survey was administered from May 4 through May 11.  At different points in the pandemic, the results might vary. I had not asked my students the identical question when I surveyed them several weeks prior, so I cannot say how the faculty responses compare to student responses (see here). Anecdotally, though, it seems that faculty and students alike are facing many of the same concerns: increased family responsibilities and economic worries close to home.

Where faculty and student experience diverge seems to be on availability of home-based technology. I asked faculty respondents whether they had access to these items:

Reliable internet	97.3% yes
A reliable computing device (laptop, desktop, handheld device)	91.9% yes
A printer	78.4% yes
A quiet place at home for online teaching and course preparation	83.8% yes

Again anecdotally, because I did not pose the question to the students in the same way (I wasn't intending to do a comparative series of blog posts), many of my students this semester seemed to struggle with access to internet service, printers, and a quiet work space. What did surprise me in these survey results is the percentage of faculty (21.6%) without access to a printer. Based on the relative seniority of the faculty surveyed (see here) and my own stereotypes about students being more digitally intense than professors, I would have thought that more professors would have printers at home. It may be that professors are not as tied to paper as I thought, that they are tied to paper but do most of their printing at the office, or some other factor is at work.