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I do not particularly want to write a “pandemic, one year later” post, because like a lot of people, I’m sick of the pandemic, but I am big fan of reflection as a tool for learning, so I thought it may be instructive to look back and see what I had to say, how it holds up, what I’d revise, extend or even retract.
My first thought, published March 12, 2020, was “We Could Really Use Our Institutions Right Now,” and it was rooted in a similar thought I had at the election of Donald Trump as president, that when an unpredictable and potentially chaotic force emerges, people will do better if there are sound institutions rooted in mission that can keep our worst human impulses at bay and rally us to the best collective approach.
March 16, I declared, “If it Doesn’t Make Sense … Refuse,” in which I emphasized the fact that we were in an emergency and that rules around regulations and procedure which did not seem relevant to student well-being could be relaxed or ignored. My hope was that we would discover that some number of these things are not as vital as they are made out to be, leading to productive reform. Rachel Cohen wrote about this phenomenon writ large in The New York Times this week, noting that policies like suspending evictions, increasing car-free zones so people could congregate safely outside and upping jobless benefits all had significant positive societal impacts. A pandemic has a way of revealing what matters. We should not rush to reinstall things that don’t matter.
March 19, I argued that “Public Higher Ed Is Going to Need a Bailout,” which was not a difficult prediction. Hopefully the recently passed legislation, which provides funding to states, finds its way to our public higher education institutions.
April and May saw me pivoting to concerns about the fall, including some principles on “Figuring out How to Teach From a Distance,” which will apply post-pandemic as well, and my contention, come fall that that the enemy of learning was disruption, when I pretended I was a college president. I’m going to give myself an A on the enemy of learning is disruption thing, because we saw this happen over and over come fall. Schools that had a plan they could actually execute did OK. Others, not so much. June 28, I worried about the inevitable breakdowns and disasters.
Avoiding disruption is why I think most institutions should be aiming for an in-person fall and preparing for whatever complications may ensue, as opposed to waiting to make a decision. If we are mostly vaccinated, we need to figure out how to live with whatever virus lingers.
May 21 I sounded my first alarm about the influx of intrusive spy technology in distance instruction. This is still a problem, a problem that should be solved by altering pedagogy rather than getting in a digital arms race.
August through October saw me obsessed with how institutions were being managed through the crisis -- not well for the most part -- though in hindsight, much of this is rooted the stories that get attention. There were many quiet successes happening elsewhere. It’s necessary to acknowledge this along with the fact that there were many very bad failures of institutional leadership.
By November, I’d pivoted to what I think needs to happen to move forward, a recognition that if public higher education is going to be saved, it must be a priority of conservatives as well as liberals.
I think student loan debt should be canceled and the research university is not sustainable as it is currently structured and funded (by student tuition).
Come February, I was still worried about using surveillance technology on students, rather than considering what people need to do their best learning.
There is an impulse to identify “what we’ve learned” from our year under the specter of a deadly disease, but I am reluctant to say that we’ve learned -- in the sense that what we’ve experienced has changed our behavior -- anything.
That the dominant discussion around higher education is still how to pursue revenue, as opposed to opening ourselves up to the possibility of actually restructuring the enterprise around its mission as a public good is pretty depressing. When I wrote Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education, I was convinced that the consequences of the virus made it apparent that the trajectory that public higher education has found itself on for nigh these 40 years was clearly unsustainable, but I see too much evidence of the same mistakes being made.
We have plenty of evidence that change is necessary, but is change going to come?
