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The 2020-21 academic year is likely to be the most challenging in higher education since 1970, the year of the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. Campus leaders will grapple with budget shortfalls and potentially deadly COVID-19 outbreaks; students and faculty will grapple with the intellectual and emotional limits of online learning and the constant fear of illness; staff will feel immense pressure from faculty, parents and students to fix problems that have no good resolution. Everyone will be whipsawed by unexpected developments. By the time we reach the November election, all of us are going to be weary, short-tempered and tense.
As we face this annus horribilis, my greatest hope for the higher education community is that we act toward one another with kindness and understanding. In the academy, even trivial disputes often become toxic. Our colleges and universities are stocked with highly independent thinkers who are trained in critical thinking, and we often turn on one another, attacking “opponents” whenever we perceive them to have blundered. We tend to view problems from the limited perspective of our particular constituency, and we defend our turf and our prerogatives with the sharpest rhetorical weapons we can muster.
The problem with that approach during a plague year is that blunders are going to be inevitable. Revenue projections will be inaccurate; students will not follow health protocols as expected; we will try out potentially hopeful solutions only to see them fail. In this atmosphere, there will be plenty of room for anger and recriminations, if we chose to go that route.
I hope, however, that we will model different behavior as we move through these stressful times. Right now, the country is coming apart at the seams. Those of us in the higher education community can follow that path, or we can serve as a beacon of kindness and rationality for other communities to follow. We all need to make a strong effort to transcend our own limited viewpoints and see problems from different perspectives. When we perceive our institutions or our peers to have made poor decisions, we need to respond with understanding and ideas, not just vituperative critiques, acknowledging that we are all in uncharted territory. We need to be calm, thoughtful and kind. If we can achieve that, we may come out of this challenge stronger and more unified. If we fail, our institutions will be weakened at the precise time when they face their greatest challenge in 50 years.
