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It was March 11, 2020, that Brookdale announced it was going remote.
It happened in the middle of the day. I remember that because I had a meeting about faculty promotions scheduled for 2:00, and four of us stuck around and had the meeting. At the time it felt daring and transgressive.
There had been an inkling that a closing might happen. Two days earlier, I had sent the faculty this email:
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As you know, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has been identified in New Jersey. The College is closely monitoring developments as they happen. We don’t want to place anyone in harm’s way, but we also don’t want to be unduly alarmist. It’s a fine line to walk, and the line moves as news changes.
If you teach a class or classes, please prepare a written plan for what you will do if the campus is unavailable for more than a few days. The plan may be a sentence or a page, depending on the class, and it may include some “if/then” scenarios. For example, if science labs aren’t available for three weeks, what’s the plan?
The TLC has established a Canvas “shell” for every credit class at the College, and the TLC staff stand ready to help anyone who needs help. They can also help with developing non-online alternatives. The key element here is forethought. Whatever else happens, or not, we need to keep the students in mind.
To be clear, at this point, we have no intention of closing. This is simply precautionary. Any closing may be abrupt; better to be prepared in advance. Even if this turns out to be a false alarm, we may learn some valuable insights about how we can be better prepared for the next emergency.
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In retrospect, that message was both on-target and wildly off. The part about “Any closing may be abrupt” was spot-on; the message went out on Monday, and we closed halfway through Wednesday. The part about “three weeks” is, well, a bit optimistic in retrospect.
Whatever else one might say about it, it reflects what we knew at the time. It’s almost charmingly tentative, given what we know now, but we didn’t know that then. There was no precedent in anyone’s lifetime for what we were facing, so we didn’t know how it would play out. Anyone who had predicted confidently at that point that we’d still be mostly remote a year later would have been considered alarmist. Yet, here we are.
For more context, this happened the week before spring break. That turned out to be a blessing, as spring break offered a very short window during which faculty were able to work on converting what they could to remote delivery. I remain utterly impressed at the work that everyone put in on such short notice, including faculty, staff and the unsung heroes at the Teaching and Learning Center, who had to offer crash courses in Zoom pedagogy to hundreds of people on a moment’s notice.
On Wednesday at 12:23 p.m., this message went out to the entire campus:
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Out of an abundance of caution and concern, due to COVID-19 effective 2 p.m. on March 11, 2020, on-site, in-person classes are canceled through Sunday, March 15, 2020. An email sent to your Brookdale account with further information will be forthcoming.
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Reading it now, I’m struck by the presumed brevity of the cancellation. The following week was spring break, so what looks like a few days was actually going to be a week and a half. At the time, that seemed ample. I remember a conversation with a colleague who just couldn’t process what we were doing until I suggested that she think of it as a series of snow days. That’s how unpracticed we were at handling pandemics.
A year later, I can say that nobody predicted where we’d be. The great news -- knock wood -- has been that the precautions we’ve taken have apparently been very effective, and that it’s looking like mass vaccination will allow a robust return in the fall.
Although our ignorance of what was to come is obvious, I’m proud of the transparency and honesty of the messaging. Both the tone -- a blend of urgency and uncertainty -- and the content were honest representations of what we knew, and could know, at the time. And whatever else we knew or didn’t know, we knew that “we need to keep the students in mind.”
Tactics can be taught, adapted and tweaked. But you either have the values right or you don’t. I’m glad that when things got weird, we got the values right.
