No doubt this is the most difficult time of leadership you have ever faced. Because you are a business as well as a school you must open your campus in order to sell what you “do.” All the spreadsheets say as much. Yet it is no less clear that to open campus means logistics and complexities and fears you cannot anticipate or manage. With reports Corona is surging in most states, your anxiety, like that in the country, grows by the moment.
This summer many colleges like yours began to send letters out about their plans for returning to school. In them, you can see a kind of common wisdom coming into shape, a solidifying belief that fifty percent of the student body on campus in the fall can work. Cut class size. Put kids in singles. Prepare a dorm to house any who should get sick. You know the outline, it is the one that feels safe because a peer institution is doing it.
Do something–do anything–other than follow that plan.
At most you should open with ten or twenty percent of your community on campus, ideally with only those who will be safer with you then wherever they may be now. And then you should entirely reimagine your mission for the upcoming year.
Given what you face economically this must sound like telling you to drill a hole in the bottom of a sinking boat. Already you wonder how to keep a noble institution afloat and take care of those you serve. All who work for you worry about the future, their fear and anxiety transmitted to you daily, your desperation to keep them safe on the one hand, save their jobs on the other now contradictory demands. With the countless logistics involved and the endless meetings of which you have been a part, you know better than anyone next year will be a long way from the academic, cultural, and social experience promised in the brochure or on the website. And not to be selfish, but this was hardly how you hoped your career would progress. You were supposed to build buildings, initiate programs, shepherd an institution you love to its next era. Now you may go down with the ship.
For all those reasons and many more, there is understandable safety in following the lead of peer institutions, going ahead with the wisdom that settled in of late.
Don’t.
My argument is as follows
Even under the best of scenario, you are going to have a terrible year
The long term impact of opening with a half-full campus may be catastrophic
You can pivot for a year if you think of yourself as a community organizer
College needs to change anyway, you might as well get ahead of the curve
Under the best of scenario . . .
If no one gets sick in the next academic year, if everything goes according to the plan as you and your leadership team have dutifully hammered it out, next year will still be, to use an unfortunate phrase, “a killer.” The relief you feel each day you merely survive–no one sick yet?–will last only until the next day begins, anxiety on this front a constant that will grind everyone down, yourself most of all. Every time you see kids too close or hear of their surreptitious parties or see campus visitors alarm bells will go off. You will make eye contact with a student or faculty member or staff person and recognize that you see each other in the same shared thought: “still alive.” The tension we have all felt rushing through the grocery store, or when a jogger passes us or when someone nearby coughs will be amplified in the crucible of campus life.
How does one learn and colloquialize and follow the brave trail of intellectual curiosity under these conditions? Is it really worth trying?
And of course, the premise of no one getting ill is iffy at best. Someone will catch the virus. A student, a faculty member, a member of staff. And if one gets sick, dozens will, perhaps hundreds. You can’t just put them on busses or planes to send them back home, as you know, that’s why you made those contingencies for turning one of your dorms into a defacto isolation ward from which the infected will be sent to the hospital. What if someone dies there? In that beautiful new dormitory, your favorite donor just built? Because however grim it may be, some who get sick will get very sick and some who get very sick will die, maybe not on your campus exactly, but on your watch.
“Any word on Tracy? On David? Are they still on a ventilator?” How’s that for the Buzz, buzz on campus? And with a funeral or two? When the semester becomes about who died? Does the business of how students move towards completing requirements for their degree matter at that point? Indeed, the nightmare you may not recover from is if someone comes to blame you or the institution for a death.
I hardly need to rehearse for you how a few members of your faculty never fail to argue for, dare I say pontificate about, administrative overreach and respecting “process.” And you know better than anyone just how adolescent adolescents can be when it comes time to fill the quad in protest over some imagined outrage. Given months of quarantine, you may be sentimental for the caricature of your community I offer here, the frumped-up battles in a faculty meeting, students playing at revolution. Those were the days. But now, in a time of actual life and death, and as protests concerning racial unrest and police brutality suggest something closer to true (and long overdue) revolution, the standard ignition points of college life blast off from an entirely combustible environment.
After all, your faculty are stressed–understandably stressed–by teaching in ways that do not square with their training or their scholarship. They know they are not serving the kids as well as they would like, feel the disappointment of not being able to do their job well. Your students smolder–they smolder understandably and with more grace than I would–not just about the value of doing everything online but what it means to have key years of their lives stolen from them by this disease. Yes, countless faculty, staff, and students have already shown you incredible acts of service, endurance, and generosity. And that will continue. But rather than being the captain who marshals this spirit and says: “All hands on deck. We shall make it through the rough waters together” opening makes you the weary fire chief who signs off on fireworks in the midst of a long, hot, dry summer. The environment could not be more incendiary, even the smallest spark might become an inferno, but, hey, the other chiefs say they will give it a go. So you may as well too.
What if your first few weeks go badly? You’ve never greeted students to campus this way and Corona is, itself, a kind of firestorm that dances and jumps quickly. What if it turns out you have an outbreak before you get to day two? Or what if the opening goes smoothly enough but then some contingency you could never have imagined (because running a campus that is also a hospital is something no one is really trained to do) and a month down the road you find yourself in a quagmire of sick people on campus? What if a beloved professor dies and becomes the rallying cry for faculty who say: What are we doing on campus? How about if it is not a professor but a janitor who is African American and a kid decides you are not protecting essential workers? And what if, in talking about this loss, you or someone in the administration–all of whom are operating under more stress than they ever thought possible–makes a gaffe. Six months ago a remark seen as racist or classist from you or the Provost would have led only (only!) to one of those charged faculty meetings, the kids chanting in the quad. Given the powder-keg conditions you will be working under in September an event of this kind could explode into a labor dispute or a protest that cracks the foundation of trust, an irreversible fracture in the community that burns down your school’s history, melts its future away.
Do I overstate it? No doubt you will be as prepared as any school can be in the fall. I know no one intends to slip up or do less than their best. And if Columbia and Berkely and Kent State survived the most historically significant campus divisiveness of the last fifty years you might survive the scenario I imagine too. But mine is but one of many such scenarios, the really frightening happenings those none of us can imagine exactly because this situation is totally new to all of us, an undiscovered country.
And you can pivot . . .
School matters. School is glorious. School is one of humankind’s most blessed inventions. A degree well earned remains a beautiful emblem of a curious mind having done work intended to civilize and advance the race. Yet none of that matters this year. Pivot to something new and use doing so as a call to your community to survive together–the captain who calls for all hands on deck–rather than marching through a fire.
Open as a camp with a few people who need to be there on campus and the rest online and open with a new mission.
Let’s call off school and see how well we can do camp.
In the first place, no one is going to be able to “do school” this year anyway. Not only will all the stress and the online environment guarantee everyone will waver between anxiety and feeling underwhelmed with what college has become, but an outbreak of Corona on campus will also scuttle any continuity normal academic progress needs. At its best, school will be constant stress built on a steady state of disappointment.
But camp? With no degrees and no expectations? Designed only to give faculty and students and staff something to do, to serve a community that needs to be occupied? Which justifies your existence as a band-aid? A kind of chronological oasis you enter into together to remind everyone you are all people who can help one another? Camp, unlike school, you could pull off exactly because you all know everyone is a beginner in the best sense.
Have a history professor and maintenance person host a yoga workshop together. Start the world’s greatest book reading group. Knit together on Tuesday and manufacture masks one by one on Wednesday. What would your professors most like to teach that has nothing to do with their Ph.D.? What would they most like to learn? What does your school look like if everyone in the world who has internet access also has access to your Zoom meetings? What if some meetings are one-offs, others meet a few times, and others meet every single day? Who wants to read one line of Hamlet each day (me!) or make maps of their souls or begin a portfolio of cartoons? Who wants to imagine new economic models or learn to code or talk about race with some experts in the room? Put up a new schedule each day or each week or each month. But transform the goal of your prestigious school into having the most fun and doing the most good that it and all those in your community possibly can. (Here’s a list of 101 activities to help you think about what that looks like.)
Sure, this requires all sorts of new logistics and arrangements and you will hear plenty of complaints from Professor Huff&Puff that this is beneath them. 10% of the parents are going to claim you are shirking your essential duty. But guess what? These same characters were going to be first in line to complain about opening as a school too. And now, at least, whatever goes awry or whatever you bungle setting up “fun and service” time comes with lower stakes. However unpresentable the potluck your camp may appear by the gourmand standards of elite higher education, it starts at the baseline of relief rather than expectation. “My love,” says the professor to their partner, “I am teaching this yoga class online and while it is fantastically mediocre I am getting better at it.” Not, “My love, under these conditions, I just can’t deliver the material I have worked my whole life to understand.”
And maybe camp keeps people employed, eating.
Why would parents pay for this? Because you ask them to do so.
Dear Community,
As you know, we need all hands on deck. While it may sound odd that I address you as the head of a business rather than as an educator, I ask you to see that the fundamental mission of our school now, the thing that serves you and your families, is for us to be able to return to doing what we do best–educating young people–a year from now. To do that, though, we need to get through this year safely and together as a community and that includes doing our best to make sure everyone has a paycheck.
I am asking those who work for us who make over $50,000 a year to take a pay cut to that amount for this year. (I will earn $40,000.) I am asking families to pay all they can for a different kind of year knowing that they are supporting a business that is more than a business, one that employs people who are all committed to a better future. No one wants to see any business lose out to COVID, but keeping schools like ours around has a special cultural mandate I am sure you value even beyond the allegiance to this community.
The “year of camp” we propose will be fun and geared to serve the world as best we can, but not part of a normal academic program. An educational aberration, we will end this as soon as a vaccine is available or when we are more sure a mostly populated campus is safe.
In the meantime, we plan to open campus only to those who, for whatever reason, might be safer here. We aim to keep the total number of students on campus down to 10% of our usual number.
Families and donors who help us meet the minimal budget we need to make it through this year under these conditions will receive a voucher they can redeem for four full years of education for anyone they send our way once we return to school as normal.
But for the academic year of 2020, we are going to go from being a school to being a camp that has three goals: Survival, Service, and Fun. Below is a sheet on which you can offer the activities you would like to host or which or for which you can sign up.
Yours,
Captain of Camp (and Formerly College President)
You will need to improve the rhetoric and adjust the numbers of the above, but I trust you get the idea.
It’s worth pointing out too, that you can use your camp as a leap forward to the college you needed to become anyway. Let’s face it, tuitions and demographics and technology and a campus located in a country now run by a racist incompetent president means (and has meant) fewer families could afford you, a shrinking applicant pool overall, reasons to find an online alternative and less incentive to come to the USA and pay full load. With a little intention, your camp might teach you much about blended learning, what kids really want, how teaching can be made a happier endeavor, serving the community, equity and justice, and innovating generally. A year to experiment? With all the smart folks on your staff and all the creativity in your student body to lead you? There is no telling what you, the administration, the faculty, and the parents might learn.
A few weeks ago I wrote that the manner in which schools open is a matter for the extended community to decide, that your job is to operate with trust at a premium. With enough trust, I argued, you could open with a significant number of students on campus and win the day. But a few weeks on I think that was hopeful and opening with more than 10 percent, or at most 20 percent of your students on campus a dangerous mistake.
Why this change in my thinking? In part the news of late is terrifying. You cannot escape the brokenness of the country around you. But more importantly, as the common wisdom for opening plans was coming into shape, I did not speak with anyone in education at any level–board member, president, provost, teacher, parent or student–who actually believed it was going to work.
Your community can believe in you. They want to go to school or get their kids off to school more than they ever have before. But they can see it is not a realistic option. Not now. Don’t fight that, use it, and do what good you can in the process.
Good luck. Stay safe. Stay out of the fire.