Not ‘Should We?’ But ‘How Do We?’

I am worried about how many of our higher education institutions appear to be approaching their response to the coronavirus crisis. I think we're screwing this up.

My worries about our institutions predate the crisis, and it is possible that I am allowing my past concerns to color my current attitude, but I gotta say, it doesn’t look good to me.

I am very far from the room where it happens[1] but reading reporting from those who are much closer confidants of “leaders” in higher education, such as this dispatch from Jeff Selingo, only amplifies my worry.

The major decision-making focus seems to be on the question of “Is it going to be safe to open for business (mostly) as usual in the fall?”

I don’t want to be too unkind here, but at this time, this is the wrong question. It is a terrible question because the answer is clearly, definitively no.

Worse, it is the wrong question even if events resolve in such a way that when fall comes around the answer is yes.

If institutions are putting the bulk of their efforts into predicting the future, they are already failing. Whatever predictions they make are going to be wrong.

Have we not yet learned this lesson from the pandemic?

I get why this is happening. We’re biased toward organizing narratives and events around cohesive arcs, but those arcs we perceive when we look retrospectively at historical events are not reflective of the experiences when they were happening. This hindsight coherence is not experienced during the events themselves. People trying to use the past to predict the future are ignoring the fact that we have to live through the present.

This may sound counterintuitive, but the only way to prepare for an unknown future is to focus on the present. This is particularly true when we are talking about institutions that were inherently precarious already. The pandemic has merely revealed fault lines that were already apparent to many and now simply can’t be ignored, fault lines that have been further ruptured, and which are not going to be repaired using the playbook (austerity/do more with less) that caused those fault lines in the first place.

The immediate challenge of operating under the threat of the virus is a blip compared to the long-term challenges higher ed is facing.

Here is a bottom line I believe institutions must embrace. Survival is going to depend on increased funding to higher ed at the federal level.[2] In order to secure that funding, institutions must appear, for lack of a better word, “deserving.” Right now, that’s not happening.

Part of the problem is that too many institutions have operated more like the cruise industry than a public good, focusing on how to protect important revenue streams like housing, dining, etc. … but I don’t know how to say this more strongly: if concerns about revenue streams are the sole focus of institutional efforts, they are going down, and they will deserve it.

Institutions must be pouring every ounce of effort into making themselves resilient and sustainable according to what is happening at this exact moment. This is the way to prepare for an unknown future while reclaiming the values of education as a public good that will pave the way to public support. You must support students in order to make those important revenue streams viable.

Doing this requires working from a values-based mission. If I was in charge of an institution right now, I would say that we are going to operate in the fall in ways that are maximally supportive of our goals of developing the intellectual, social and economic potential of our students while engaging with the needs of the broader local, state and national communities in which we operate.

I would then lay out what this looks like under different scenarios, illustrating how my institution is prepared to respond to any contingencies -- anticipated or not -- in ways that are consistent with our institutional values and mission. I would seek to prove that those things we can control are under our control and we can respond quickly to those things out of our control.

This requires tremendous coordination and cooperation, but I have seen enough good work under the much more trying circumstances of our midsemester shift to emergency distance learning to believe that a more planned approach makes this very possible.

This requires building from a pedagogical framework up, rather than an operational framework down. It is the opposite of how most institutions have been thinking about themselves, but we only need to look at the terrible trajectory of institutions prior to the pandemic to know that this reversal has long been in order. Making your institution as resilient as possible under these incredibly difficult conditions makes continued resilience even more likely when conditions improve.

Focusing on students and the question of helping them develop their intellectual, emotional and economic potentials will make it easier to ask the right questions. Rather than “Should we?” every leader should be starting with “How do we?”

“How do we?” unleashes the creative potential and energy of every individual inside the institution simultaneously, particularly if we give each individual their how portion of that problem to chew on. “Should we?” is a recipe for paralysis.

• How do we support students learning in asynchronous environments?
• How do we provide the kind of social contact we know students benefit from?
• How do we make sure that access to technology is not a barrier to learning?
• How do we help students stay connected to the institution?

And so on …

Is anyone else noticing how all of these questions apply even in nonpandemic times? What other "How do we?" questions could we be asking?

There are a couple of hopeful signs. Carol Quillen, president of Davidson College, demonstrates how effective leadership can properly frame the problem in this "Future U" podcast interview. I have heard on Twitter of some institutions reaching out directly to students to assess their current experiences and better understand their needs going forward, the kind of research I advocated for in an earlier post.

But over all, I see some patterns of behavior that look suspiciously stuck in heuristics for a bygone age. I am not hopeful. I vacillate between anger and despair over these events.

I dearly hope I’m wrong.