Friday: I interview a friend, a dean at a top-ranked private university in the northeast, about how CoronaWorld has altered his semester. I edited our 40-minute talk for clarity.
Me: Describe your job under normal circumstances.
Dean: As dean of one of the university’s residential colleges my job is, in short, to make sure students graduate. I see my role as the captain of a 900-passenger cruise ship: we’re taking a four-year journey, making fascinating excursions, visiting interesting ports, facing difficult decisions; some may not come back, but I want to make sure none fall overboard, that as many as possible finish the journey happy and well educated. I deal with all parts of their lives, from plumbing problems to creating an interdisciplinary major. Any given day can see all sorts of thing pop up. It’s never boring.
Me: Describe this semester and the problems that came with the advent of CoronaWorld.
Dean: The hardest part was the first week [in mid-March]. Students were finishing midterms and heading for spring break. We had to say: You have to pack, leave campus and plan to not come back. Students said, Are you out of your minds? Why are you doing this to us? We had to explain social distancing, that this virus would have serious consequences down the road, that if we do this now we’ll have prevented people in two months from dying in hospital hallways. It was a hard sell. We had students crying in the halls, in parking lots.
The whole idea of a residential college is asking students to leave their families and join a community of people whom they learn to trust and enjoy. For us to say, You have 72 hours to go away — it undermined the sense of community and trust that we spend years trying to build.
And it created so much stress and trauma. Some students didn’t have anyplace to go. Some students had situations that were worse at home than on campus. And we had to figure out how to support them. The hardest part was convincing them: This is a health crisis. You really have to do this; there’s no option.
Me: Of the 900 students in your college, how many have stayed on campus?
Dean: It’s changed over time. For some, their only place to go was to an older relative or someone immunocompromised. They didn’t want to risk bringing Covid-19 home, so they isolated on campus for two weeks, then went home. Others had no place to go. We have students who are essentially orphans. Some international students couldn’t go home. We have students from Wuhan, China.
The numbers on campus from my college have been steadily dwindling, from several hundred down to a few dozen. For the entire university, it’s from the thousands into the low hundreds.
Me: Does that make some parts of your job easier? You must have fewer plumbing problems.
Dean: Our college building used to be a hotel, so we have a lot of rooms with their own bathrooms. At first we needed those rooms for students who were self-quarantining. Anybody else had to move out. Then, when the numbers of sick people in our state started to get really grim, we thought the state might need to to use it as a field hospital, or for health-care workers who didn’t want to go home after hospital shifts. So we moved all the students out. Now the college is empty and ready to serve another purpose if necessary.
So, no, we don’t have infrastructure problems. We’re fortunate that we can keep all our staff on salary and benefits right now, but that’s not sustainable. The university is working with a skeleton crew. We have one dining hall open, serving boxed meals three times a day to students who have to stand 6 feet apart, then take them back to their rooms to eat. There’s no gym, no library, no labs, no dance or art or music studios. It’s not a lot of fun being on campus. It’s very weird.
Sasha Rudensky, for The New York Times
Me: How has your office maintained communication with your 900 students?
Dean: Our operations are open and running. We have college advisors who live with students in their halls, and they’ve kept in touch on a regular basis, via Zoom and phone calls. A lot happens by email. Many students have no or limited wi-fi, or limited privacy. Email is the most flexible in terms of privacy and time. If you’re talking to someone exhausted because their family member has been furloughed or fired and they’re working at a grocery store to make ends meet and trying to keep up with classes — they can’t always explain that by videoconference. In some cases, those who have to work are in a better place emotionally than those stuck at home, also with family members sick or who’ve lost jobs, and all they have to do is worry. At least those working feel like they’re doing something productive.
Me: How are students handling the change to their education?
Dean: I’d like to have a more comprehensive view of that situation; I’m mostly doing triage. For the students I’m most concerned about, it’s more that they’ve been sick, or someone in their family is sick, and we’re trying to help them to be resilient, to encourage them to make up the work they’ve missed the past two weeks, to turn in the paper that’s not as good as they want, not to be discouraged and overwhelmed.
The big difference is, if they’re on campus and a class is hard, they have other people to talk to in a more natural setting. What’s this like for you? How’d you figure this out? When you have to go through text or email or video — it’s not casual talk. It’s hard to get a sense of what’s normal and what isn’t.
For many, the major concern is: Will this continue in the fall? Will they need to make alternative plans? But we don’t know what guidance will come from the state or the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. We’re just now shifting from, What can we do to get everyone to the end of the spring semester, to, How will this impact us in the fall? Will this change everything we do?
Me: What do you mean by that?
Dean: The federal government isn’t doing much to help us create a plan. If federal leadership continues to play this game of magical thinking, they’re not properly planning how to reopen the country. And then I don’t know how we can reopen campus.
A key part of what our office does is helping people live in a residential setting with those of different backgrounds, helping them meet the challenges of learning to live together. None of that is part of the online teaching environment. So how do we validate what we believe is important about so much of our work? How do we do that work if none of those essential components are part of the student experience? I don’t know. It’s not sleight of hand, but it’ll take creativity to make it work.
Then a central part of my job is the academic piece. And so much of that is uncertain. I think we have to focus on building something, rather than clinging to ideas of how we get back to normal. Who knows if there’ll ever be a normal? So how do we build something that reflects what’s most important to our institution’s values?
Me: What else is changing about your job description?
Dean: We’re still making sure people graduate. Ironically, we used to have to do a hard thing: If students wanted to transfer credits from a course they took online, the answer was always a flat No. This summer we’re saying, Yes, you can take online courses and transfer the credits. Now, we’re ignorant of what sort of online courses are out there. And this summer, what will be available will have completely changed. How we assess those courses, what will work for transfer credit: that will be a new and interesting project.
Normally at this point we’d be all hands on deck for graduation and reunions, and none of that is happening. We canceled graduation — we’ll have a virtual graduation, and a year from now we’ll do a ceremony for the Class of 2020 a few days ahead of the Class of 2021.
Me: Graduating students must be so disappointed.
Dean: It truly is a grieving process. The things they planned on, the things they knew — that’s been ripped from them. For some, completing their work is impossible. If they were working in a lab, that’s not there anymore. A lot of students planned to go somewhere over spring break to collect data for their theses. A lot had job interviews. All that’s gone.
What I’m seeing is that many are adopting a coping strategy. People have the bandwidth to deal only with what’s essential; if it’s not essential to their lives right now, they’re not dealing with it.
The university’s mental health workers are busier than ever. Students already connected with those resources need them more. For others, the trauma is forcing them to deal with long-term issues they may have buried. There’s a certain level of PTSD. Then for others, going away to college means the ability to re-invent yourself, to set yourself up in a new environment. To all of a sudden have to go back to what they knew before: it can be tough. And for a lot of them the lack of certainty is overwhelming.
Me: Is there anything about this transition that’s made your job more enjoyable?
Dean: It’s satisfying to help people. The fact that we all have to be more flexible is a great thing. Playing a role to convince students there are more important things than grades is a wonderful thing.
But it’s hard having to help people facing overwhelmingly difficult situations. That’s always hard, but more of them are facing harder things now. What can you say about the importance of finishing a paper when they have a loved one in the hospital, or who’s lost their job?
The triage has been interesting, but now we’re shifting gears. We have to plan for a university where we may not continue in a residential setting. I have to see that as an interesting creative project and not as just depressing. There are so many reasons to be depressed. I’m trying to focus on the possibilities. Let’s give up our attachment to normalcy and work to create something even better. This catastrophe has been so wide ranging and deep, I can’t imagine it won’t open possibilities of doing things in new and different ways, even if we can’t see what that looks like. If I focus on that, that can help me from getting frustrated and overwhelmed.
(New York state numbers on Friday: 271,590 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 3.1 percent; 422 dead, to a total of 15,740, up 2.7 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,971, to a total of 46,101, up 4.7 percent.)
No comments:
Post a Comment