An Open Letter to College Administrators

During the 2008 recession, student associations came under attack, and many of them did not survive. As higher education institutions and state legislatures looked for budget items to cut, the country's student governments and statewide student associations were one of the first things to go.

Now, jumping forward to 2020, only a handful of statewide student groups are left in the country, and the entire higher education community is worse off because of it. The COVID-19 pandemic has all higher education institutions scrambling to get student input about their reopening plans, communication strategy and various other COVID-19 related topics.

If you related to that last sentence, this letter is for you. The reason you are finding it difficult to get student input, and why students are reacting poorly to the decisions you are making for them, is exactly that -- you are making decisions for them, not with them. Student organizations are suffering because you did not stick up for them in 2008, and you allowed them to collapse.

You cannot let this happen again. You must work now to empower and recreate the infrastructure for student-led advocacy.

I want to recognize that being a college administrator has never been an easy job, and now it is certainly more difficult than ever before. This letter is not to call anyone out. Rather, it's to call you into a conversation that has been left on the back burner for too long.

For a moment, I would like you to reflect on your experience since the start of this pandemic. When did you first know that COVID-19 was going to impact your campus? When did you first realize your campus was going to need to shut down? When did you first recognize that you would need to make significant budget cuts? How did you communicate these changes to students, and how did they respond?

Now, I want you to think about how many students you talked to before making those decisions. How many students were actively involved in making them?

If your answer to those questions is anything other than, "I involved and empowered students during every major decision process," then you messed up. Students are experts in what students need, how students are going to respond, and what realistic expectations are from students. Administrators are not students and can never fully understand the current student experience. No one is expecting you to do that, either. What you are expected to do is to bring in these experts, and if you are not doing that, you have failed.

I want to be clear that when I talk about empowering and involving students, I do not mean that you should create another committee that does not have real decision-making power. You should not create tokenizing student positions, you should not ask a singular student to serve on every committee, and you should not expect students to do this labor for free.

You should give students the resources necessary to create their own independent organizations that have the freedom to advocate for what they see fit. You should take it upon yourself to make sure that those organizations are fully funded and staffed. And when I say staffed, I do not mean staff it with administrators who must answer to the institution. No, I mean provide staff members who must only answer to students.

Then, you should contact these organizations and their leaders before making major decisions, and if they object to your plans, you need to reevaluate what you are doing. You need to empower student-led organizations to be a part of the process of developing new plans, as well. Last, you cannot let the current financial crisis finish off student organizations around the country like you almost let happen 2008.

I understand that this is a difficult topic to discuss, and that you may be thinking something like "I can't just let students have the final say in reopening our campus -- there's a pandemic!" I agree, health experts should make decisions like that. But at the same time, you need to consult students on how and when those decisions are made. If students are constantly blasting your institution on Twitter, it is because you made a decision for them, not with them.

You may also be thinking: "My university is in a financial crisis. Why in the world would I spend money on this right now?" My answer is this: students do advocacy better than you. Student-led advocacy is the only way we are going to get the federal government to shell out massive amounts of cash to colleges and universities. Each institution alone isn't going to convince the federal government to bail out the entire higher education system, but if student advocates had even a portion of the funding some government relations teams receive, they'd organize thousands of students to contact their representatives and champion higher education funding. The future of higher education is at stake, and by not using all of the resources available to us, we will never fully recover.

It is clear that whatever we are doing right now is not working. No higher education institution in the country can rightfully claim that they handled this pandemic perfectly, and few can claim that they have handled it well. If we do not start acting as if students and administrators are on the same team, and in doing so, level the inequitable distribution of power on campuses, nothing will change. It's about time we rethink the mistakes that were made in the past and start allowing students to create a vision for the future.