Let’s say you work at a university. The student population is primarily commuter, and you live in an area of the country that apparently has some sort of selective amnesia about the fact that it snows every freaking winter, and thus there is not adequate snow removal and the people, they don’t know how to drive in the snow. Oh, and it’s hilly. And the roads are curvy. It’s awesome.
But so anyway, even more awesome than that is when the weather people predict a major storm for days. And when first thing in the morning, pretty much every school is closing, even though the storm hadn’t really started yet, anticipating the Massive Motherfucking Snowstorm that would hit during the day. But my institution, oh no, it does not believe in “predictions” about weather. Clearly these “meteorologists” are not scientists but rather some sort of voodoo astrologers or something. Instead, my institution likes to open up and then send everybody home from campus when the weather begins to deteriorate and the roads become dangerous. They also don’t like to let you know about the decision to close campus in the middle of the day with any reasonable amount of notice.
So. I took myself to campus to teach today, in spite of my better judgment, because I knew my students would likely have dragged themselves in, and I felt obligated to go. I mean, sure, I could have made the call to cancel because of weather myself, but what if a student of mine didn’t check his or her email or look at Blackboard? What if I decided to cancel too late and the students were already on their way in to campus? And also, what if not all their other classes are canceled, so my cancellation either encourages them to make the decision to miss all of their other classes, even though those classes are meeting? Or, conversely, what if they go in for their other classes which are meeting, and me canceling means they are wasting this huge chunk of time in their day? The university frowns upon faculty canceling class because of weather, but yet, it procrastinates about making the call.
This is not the first time this has happened.
This storm was not a surprise. We all watched it heading here for days. So here’s a tip, president of my university: call the motherfucking snow day before people get in their cars to commute to campus. Understand that not doing so puts every university worker and every student at risk. And it puts your faculty in a ridiculous position of either violating university policy to protect students or of following university policy and putting students at risk. It is, in a word, asinine.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Sounds exactly like my institution behavior, including geographical location (but not the type of students). Today, they cancelled classes at 1:00 pm. Last storm, they cancelled classes at 10:00 am. None of those days I had to teach, so I had already decided to stay home, but for those that had to go, well, it wasn’t funny. Last time, later that day, I ran into somebody who is the director of a program (but he has an administrative, not a faculty position). He was furious, saying he had wasted 3 hours in the morning since they forced him to go until 10, and that he would had been much more productive if he had stayed home, drank his coffee, and then start working from home.
Wait! You work on my campus too? We opened at noon, when first classes are at 2:30. That, we figured, was because we always have to have chapel offered (even if few go) at 1 PM.
I’ve never actually been at an institution that believed in cancelling anything due to weather. There was one day in grad school classes were cancelled because the electricity was out on campus–that was fun! I hope you were able to enjoy your snow day once you made it back home.
Let’s just say this sounds . . . familiar. Really, really familiar. And I’ve been in your snow-covered shoes, struggling to get to campus only to have them send everyone home.
Hey, that sounds like my campus, too! And not only is our campus a nightmare because of the roads, hills, and commuter students, but the local schools are always closed, so students and faculty are left either having to stay home or bring their kids to school, to sit in class, in our office, and of course on the dangerous roads. So it’s a no-win situation.
Why, yes, that all sounds terribly familiar. An added bonus here in KC is the schools will stay closed for days because they say it’s too cold for the kiddies to wait at the bus stop (to which I respond that surely if kids in say, Fargo, can handle going to school in the winter, you’d think we’d be able to figure something out). As you might imagine, the uni does not close for cold, thus screwing over the parents once again. Sigh….
Years ago I worked on revising a Personnel manual when the institution I worked for — in your neck of the woods — merged with a campus in Vermont. The funniest discussion took place when it came to snow days. It turned out that mid-American, where it snowed every year but the city had too few plows, called snow days. Vermont did not. So the people from Vermont said, “Why do you need snow days?”….
[…] Some other snow day thoughts from Reassigned Times (almost all my students did their homework assignment, by the way, if you were wondering). […]
Your campus sounds like New Orleans facing Katrina.