At the risk of being a little controversial myself:
It probably took, from conception to execution, about one minute to deliver such an ill-conceived and insensitive joke.
How many minutes, collectively, did the entire faculty spend in reacting to this? It's easy to imagine it was more than 1000. Furthermore, if indeed this professor can no longer contact his colleagues, it's his students who will ultimately suffer.
Whilst understandable in the circumstances, this seems to be an example of how not to react to this kind of thing.
While you're right about this in theory, we are deep down in the trenches right now in New York City. WE are the EPICENTER of the virus in the US, we have students with the virus who may not ever be coming back to our classes; everyone has family members who have the virus, some in quarantine alone so they won't infect their families. Within two weeks, it's expected that 50% will have the virus in the NY/NJ region. At the same time, we are working round the clock to keep the electronic class management tool BlackBoard from collapsing under the use; one night, the entire system went down because the UC (University of CA system, one of only two larger than ours) logged in. This morning at 4 AM, I discovered from a student that our class had been locked, made unavailable to students, like classes from years ago that had concluded. After five hours working to reverse this and then notify all my students, I STILL had not yet had a moment today to spend any actual time on or with students or their work--and then this joker froths from the pen with this appalling joke.
You know as a teacher the responsibility we feel to our students, so the combination of struggling to even remotely give what we want to be giving AND the colossal medical crisis going on in our very midst, in our classes and families, made it impossible for us as
human beings not to be outraged by this. People can only stretch so far in their devotion in stressful times before they snap. In a regular semester, only small numbers would be logged in at any given time, but right now, our very MO is to be online, and we're spending so many hours trying to make it work that we were literally all on--and just ripe for an explosive reaction. Of course, you're right that logically it doesn't help to react, but we're very stressed, very caring humans hearing a cavalier joke mocking the crisis we are in. I think this reaction would be universal in similar circumstances.
We all received this fine message, because there's a way to send it to the entire faculty and admin, so deans, vice-presidents, and even the president herself were among this responses creating the minutes-long series of alert-beeps that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Individuals would have to write his email address in the sequence I discovered to block his emails, so he undoubtedly he has some colleagues like his chair, friends, the president who can not block him. In any case, I don't feel any worry at all for his students regarding their professors' curtailed list of email colleagues; I'm much more concerned about how flippant his attitude is about the grave issues surrounding his students right now, both in and out of the virtual classroom.
