May, 2020
Lincoln – If I were a college administrator once again, I'd be working urgently to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Consider local and regional geography and the likelihood that students will want to enroll closer to home. Update and aggressively expand articulation agreements with area institutions so as to offer multiple pathways to 2- and 4-year degrees that provide affordable and flexible options. Offer more credits for work experience in high-risk jobs to reward service and to get the benefit of those experiences into classrooms.
• For faculty employment, create the equivalent of credit articulation agreements, so that faculty surpluses and shortages can be coordinated over several institutions in a regional employment area. (Adjuncts do it all the time; it may now be necessary for full-time faculty as well.) Allow and encourage cross-institution enrollment in Zoom classrooms. Protect faculty and student health through creative scheduling of classes and labs to minimize virus exposures, such as cohort models.
• Revise curricula to include majors and minors in Pandemic Studies. This generation of students has been negatively impacted as has no other in decades, to which the response of many will be altruistic. Offer new courses in pandemic math and statistics, law, history, biology, politics, pharmacology, engineering, logistics, psychology, and economics to prepare a new generation to deal with what may be many years of struggle against viral diseases.* This will help with recruiting and, in the case of public institutions, with justifying tax support. Coordinate it with new offerings in Climate Studies as well.
• Reduce costs by eliminating curricular areas that are not essential to the mission and future of the institution. At the top of the elimination list will be areas that have grown up around particular industries that rely on university research and training to advance self-interest more than the general public good (sometimes even at the expense of the public good, which has now become more apparent under stress).** Limit across-the-board cuts that do not make such distinctions. Offer affected faculty buy-outs or assistance with regional teaching opportunities, including retraining in virtual teaching methods.
• Work with state and federal officials to preserve institutional and student funding but also to improve government performance where it is lacking, such as funding distribution and student financial-aid programs. Demand that elected representatives clean up the student-loan mess at the U.S. Department of Education, because many potential students will not attend college if they have no confidence in the administration of student-loans.
College administrators who aspire only to get back to a pre-pandemic normal will see their institutions wither and perhaps not survive. Two ways to success are to think regionally and to re-shape curricula.
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* A model for a major in Pandemic Studies is the International Rescue and Relief program at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska. It makes the most of the altruism of the students while offering a crucial public service to the nation and the world. It is the only one of its kind.
** "If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values." – Marilynne Robinson, "What Kind of Country Do We Want," New York Review of Books (June 11, 2020)
