Pandemic U
What's
the price of opening campuses in the fall?
Posted Jun 03, 2020
College administrators are in the unenviable
position of determining what the campus experience will look like come fall.
Most are waiting for more information and gauging what other institutions are
doing. Some have already declared that they will be delivering face-to-face
instruction in the fall.
Declarations that classes will be face-to-face
are not maverick moves but rather slapdash attempts to lure students and
parents who are understandably desperate for some semblance of normalcy and are
prey to the promise of what they’ve long hungered and planned for — to have the
quintessential campus experience.
The problem is it can’t happen. What’s needed
to make a campus safe right now is completely at odds with the iconic
experience that people crave.
When the demand by administrators is to charge
ahead with “acceptable risk,” this is about politics, profit, and arrogance; it’s as though they
think they can outsmart the virus and science. Shouldn’t institutions of
higher education be modeling for students the importance
of ethical, careful decision-making based on scientific
inquiry rather than on magical thinking?
The thing about college is it’s intimate and
messy. There are the emotional, intellectual, political, creative, and sexual
messes. I’ve lived the better part of my life on college campuses — first as a
student and later as a professor for almost a quarter of a century. The most exhilarating,
memorable moments have been the grittiest ones.
I remember as a student at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison sitting shoulder to shoulder at the union listening to
music; or the time I, and other students, covered up art with black cloth all
over campus as part of “A Day Without Art” to commemorate World AIDS Day; or
piling on beds with friends to drink and hang out; or attending numerous
protests and campus lectures; or having sex for the first time; or studying with my friend
Laura in the tiniest room until all hours of the morning, sharing food and
giggling; or my boyfriend making the most amazing homemade spaghetti as we both
licked the ladle to taste it in my apartment, where he spent nearly every day.
As an educator, I remember the first class I
taught, to which I invited a homeless person who sold the newspaper Spare
Change in Boston, and we literally and figuratively broke bread with
him — sharing dinner, demystifying stereotypes and conveying our deepest hopes
and fears. I’ll also never forget the Take Back the Night rallies with the
heart-wrenching stories of sexual assault, or getting on the filthy floor to
meditate and do yoga in my Sociology of the Body class. Then there was the time
I hugged and consoled a student who had just lost her father to a heart attack
and her friend to suicide, and wiped away her tears with my bare hand.
These memories reveal one
thing above all: Transformational teaching and learning happens in messy
community, amid spontaneity and risk-taking. A hyper-engineered college environment that
tries to be no-touch by requiring people to wear masks and to walk hallways spaced
apart at timed intervals in one direction only, by confining
students to small cohorts to move through their classes so they are not meeting
more people, and by limiting gatherings hardly sounds like college to
me. Instead it sounds like a recipe for exacerbating the loneliness, anxiety, and depression that are already all too common on
campuses.
I tell my students that so much of their
learning happens outside the classroom — at campus events, on the field, in
residence halls, at the gym, in cafeterias, and at parties. It’s in those
settings that they learn even more about decision-making, risk-taking, collaboration, competition, boundaries, an ethic of care for their
peers, peer mentoring, leadership, love, self-care and the world beyond
themselves.
Some campus administrators insist we count on
students to uphold the myriad and necessary precautions and police their peers
to do the same. It’s not just that I think that is totally unrealistic; it’s
also that it’s not even necessarily desirable. College is the time for
the intimacy of community, hedonism, experimentation,
risk-taking, some measure of defiance, and even failure. I don’t want those
things taken away from students. Developmentally, they need all that to grow.
In the meantime, we have not heard from
administrators about how their proclamations can actually be fully
operationalized in the fall. In reviewing communications sent out by numerous
institutions, as well as scouring college websites for this information, it is
clear that certain patterns are emerging: First, too many colleges and
universities are either approaching the fall guided by the principle of
acceptable risk or declaring an intention to open with no real promises, yet in
both cases the announcements are accompanied with nothing very substantive.
Second, institutions are overemphasizing personal responsibility as the
solution so as to avoid liability. And third, when related to the classroom,
administrations are implicitly relying on faculty policing without attention to faculty safety or choice.
It strikes me as reprehensible for higher
education institutions to base decisions on mathematical modeling that
tolerates risk such that at a very large university, the tipping point from
acceptable to unacceptable risk could be a few thousand people. I am refreshed
by bold leaders like Dr. Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, who
wrote in The Atlantic, “We must ask ourselves: What would
make leaders gamble with human life this way? The answer is
twofold: fear and acquiescence — both of which, when left
unchecked, lead down a path to moral damnation … if a school’s
cost-benefit analysis leads to a conclusion that includes the term acceptable
number of casualties, it is time for a new model.”
For well over a decade, I worked with domestic violence offenders, some
of whom tried to kill their partners, yet nothing has scared me about a work
environment as much as this current situation. Simply put, you cannot do good
work, teach, and mentor if you are forced to operate from a position of fear,
threat, and silence.
Few if any realistic appraisals and concrete
plans have been set forth that anyone can bank on because the truth is that no
one really knows what will happen. Just two-and-a-half months ago, colleges
made promises that many of us knew they could never keep about resuming later
in spring 2020 or having commencement ceremonies in person. Given the failure
rate of those predictions, how confident can we be about how they are planning
for three to seven months from now? It seems entirely likely that the plans
will need to change again, and again.
At the same time, we hear that students across
campuses may get to choose the modality in which they take their classes. We
are also hearing that faculty members at some colleges can choose to not teach
face-to-face. This is just one of many fundamentally incompatible ideas
floating around right now. When we read between the lines, we see that
face-to-face instruction more likely means hybrid formats, but administrators
are not coming clean with students and parents about that for fear of losing
enrollment and money. Faculty and staff members, and their health and
well-being, are being used as pawns in a game played by the administration to
secure housing and dining money while purporting to be student-centered.
Colleges that are simply stating now that they will be online are being far
more honest and allowing families to plan accordingly.
It is profoundly revealing to see that, for
years, some of the same higher education institutions that have been pushing
the hardest for more students to go online to save or make money now want to
insist on face-to-face education in the midst of a health and humanitarian
crisis of epic proportions. In and of itself, this rich irony should cause us
to question motives. It is nothing short of institutional gaslighting.
Other questions need to be asked also.
University systems like mine are canceling fall break, assuming that will
minimize travel. In fact, the vast majority of students at impoverished
institutions use fall break to work extra hours and catch up on schoolwork. At
colleges with a high percentage of students who regularly commute, not to
mention those with many faculty and staff couples in long-distance
relationships and marriages, it is terribly unrealistic to suggest that people
curtail their travel.
If you’ve taught long enough, you’re also
aware there’s a time right around midterms that you might know as the week of
the dying grandparents, when numerous students all report fictitious deaths
that keep them from meeting deadlines. This fall, the tragedy might be that
reckless happenings on the campus will, after students return home and visit
older relatives, make such an excuse all too real.
The sage on the stage who became the guide on
the side now fixes her scene on the screen in the latest episode of the
emperor’s new clothes. In this land of make-believe, do professors fly in to
teach on magic carpets? Or do they Zoom in from their homes while televised
across big screens for students gathering in actual classrooms while calling
this face-to-face, since, well, the students can then be with each other and
see our faces?
But isn’t there something deceptive about that
linguistic shift that is more about marketing face-to-face to vulnerable students and
their families? In other schemes being considered, are faculty members, who
probably represent more vulnerability in greater proportion, really supposed to
endure triple the risk of students in the plans that suggest big classes be
split into smaller groups such that students come once a week for face-to-face
while professors come three times a week?
The most effective, meaningful, and memorable
teaching and learning is about removing the metaphorical masks, rolling up our
sleeves and getting our hands dirty, getting up close and personal, being
embodied, and coming to a place where we don’t fear the stranger in our midst.
What makes teaching the most magical is the act of tender, curious, and open
surrender — both by teacher and student. It’s from the chaos, the mess, and the
community that order, answers, and hope show up.
My ultimate wish for students is that they get
to do college in messy, beloved community so they can gain much-needed practice
for inhabiting the various communities of their future lives — but not until it
is truly safe to do so.