Plague Journal, Day 61: CoronaWorld oral history, higher ed expert

In my continuing series of CoronaWorld oral histories, I interview Cathy Davidson, a distinguished professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Among other things, she’s a scholar of the history of technology and has written books on the future of university education. I edited our 45-minute talk for clarity.

Me: What were your duties this semester before CoronaWorld? 

Cathy Davidson: I have two positions this year. One, I’m the founder and co-director of The Futures Initiative, located at the Graduate Center and extending throughout CUNY, which is designed to build innovation and equity into the university. We do many things, including running a peer mentorship and leadership program for CUNY undergraduates. We also support graduate students in becoming better teachers and mentors for undergraduates. We also research and develop new pedagogical models to push higher education in new directions, with equity as our bedrock principle. As part of that this semester, I’m co-teaching one class. 

Two, I’m a senior fellow in residence at the Andrew Mellon Foundation — whatever “in residence” means at this moment. I’m working, in part, on a new pedagogical project related to reform of doctoral education in the humanities. 

Me: How has the advent of CoronaWorld affected your semester? 

Davidson: The course I’m co-teaching is a perfect fit for this moment. It’s a graduate seminar of 13 students, an introduction to transformative learning and teaching in the humanities and social sciences. I’m co-teaching it with a LaGuarida Community College professor, Eduardo Vianna — he’s a psychology and social justice teacher whose work with underserved communities and students is just remarkable. 

All the classes I teach have elements that are student-led. For this class, by mid-semester we turned the teaching over to the students, who together came up with course goals, topics, projects, and assessments. One of our only rules is that the lessons can’t be just talking heads — no lectures. Now the students are taking those classes online. 

Normally our class met two hours a week. We asked the students: Do you want to have no synchronous classes? Because many students can’t meet easily at specific times due to a range of the kinds of personal dislocations of work and home that are disrupting everyone sheltering at home. But they were adamant: they wanted one hour a week of contact with each other. 

Among the topics they’re addressing are forms of learning we know are crucially important to human beings but aren’t recognized in the academy. The first class we had after everything moved online was on meditation — that class included a meditation exercise. 

Another was on food. We created a collaborative Google document in which everyone contributed one recipe that was important to them; everyone else had to comment on it. This was in the context of an essay we read on how it took 40 years for the Japanese to convince Westerners about the concept of umami — that it wasn’t a made-up thing but an actual, distinguishable sense. And then when we got together online, the conversation became about what taste is, what a sense is. Because one of the symptoms of Covid-19 is that food often has no taste or smell. Which raises the question: What’s a recipe, what’s eating, if food has no taste or smell? 

Whatever the topic, it’s always an interesting conversation: part intellectual, part pedagogical, part experiential. 

At the moment, in part because of my connection with the Mellon Foundation, I’m also serving as a sort of consultant to the nation for how to make online learning more relevant — how to make this Zoom experience into something that creates community, and also how to make equity the first thing we talk about as part of the digital experience. My experience in online education makes me a little more relevant than I can handle right now, frankly. 

And then our staff at the Futures Initiative has been hit hard. Everyone’s jobs have become much harder. Everyone is working incredibly hard, under the most stressed conditions and inopportune circumstances.

Me: How has the the online experience affected your graduate seminar? 

Davidson: Because we had some students with health issues, we actually went online three weeks before anyone else in the CUNY system. We decided to use the WebEx videoconferencing platform, for privacy and security reasons. So our class was already set up when the rest of CUNY went on a break, and we just kept going in that direction. 

The nature of the class makes it much more psychologically attuned than many courses. It’s been almost like a life raft. We always did an inventory exercise at the beginning of class: write for 90 seconds about how you are faring; we then talk about that briefly. We’ve continued to do that online. One thing that’s changed is who participates, and how much. I’ve always used methods to prevent a few people from dominating class discussion. But we’ve all noticed: it’s more equitable online. 

Me: Why is that? 

Davidson: The very structure of the videoconference means you’re intensely aware of your peers. When one person is speaking, they become a big face — that visually demonstrates who is and who isn’t dominating. And everyone knows that we’ve only got one hour, and they shouldn’t dominate. And then everyone wants to share and listen and exchange. It’s changed the dynamics. 

Overall, the online part of the course has been a fantastic experience. The students enjoy the hour we spend together. It’s been a life-saver for all of us. They all voted to meet during the Spring Break — they didn’t want to go a week without meeting. 

Just this morning we created a Google document for students to make suggestions for the topic of our last class. We got four suggestions. And then someone wrote: We’re all learning to be brave and daring in our pedagogical work; but what are the costs if your institution doesn’t support that, doesn’t want you to be brave? How do we negotiate that? And the four students who’d made suggestions said, We want to talk about that, too. 

Me: This is a massive question, but you’re unusually well suited to address it: How is the Covid-19 epidemic likely to affect the future of education in the academy? 

Davidson: I’ll make three main points. 

First, I’m deeply suspicious of the technocrats. We saw this in the era of MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses], when people said we should all be online, and the people most likely to profit were not the students, not the faculty, not the institutions, but the technologists. 

So I get cynical and negative when I see things like the Forbes Magazine article on the president of Southern New Hampshire University. If the goal is a for-profit model to gobble up existing institutions, or to make technology companies like Google or Amazon richer, then I’ll dig in and say: No way. 

Second, I myself have taken about 30 online classes. So I know experientially: some online classes work very well, and some do not. I took a coding class on Udacity created by a founder of Reddit; I got to Lesson 22, and I think I was the only person still in the class. And he said, “Why are you still going on? This is a terrible class!” So I quit but was pleased that the founder of Udacity was eager to have my feedback on what could make a class on Python better. Some courses are way too labor intensive. It’s easy to get exhausted using Zoom; it takes a different form of attention. But it is possible to design very good online programs. 

Third, everyone this semester is getting a crash course in putting classes online, and we’re going to learn a ton of lessons that will be really useful — including that some classroom experiences should never be online. 

My adage: If we can be replaced by computer screens, we should be. If you’re just lecturing, let the students watch that in their own time. Why come to campus to watch that? If we’re going to be meeting face-to-face, we should be doing something that makes it really worth it. 

Me: Are there guidelines for what makes either face-to-face or online experiences work? 

Davidson: I don’t know if there are hard-and-fast rules about either physical or online presences. A lot depends on the setup of the class and the physical constraints of the physical or online classroom. 

As we do it now, face-to-face instruction often has constraints that restrict learning: students are in fixed desks, not facing one another, with distant lecterns and blackboards. And then of course some institutions have ceilings falling in, no fresh air, terrible lighting.

But it’s possible to reimagine either physical or online classrooms. For one of my earlier classes at the Graduate Center, we told the students on the first day: We’ll be back in 45 minutes; design a class that’ll change all of our lives. And — you see this happen at CUNY — we had students from the Joffrey Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, all professional performers. And for their unit they brought in crepe and cardboard and scissors and music, and they redesigned the class to figure out a better way to interact. And then one of the dancers said, I can’t dance here. So they redesigned what they’d built and re-built it another way. 

Me: You’re interested in pedagogy that shifts the notion of classroom authority. Is that more likely in an online environment? 

Davidson: Not inherently. Online teaching can make the “teacher as authority” model even worse. I’ve taken master classes where famous people tell you how to be a famous person. I’m writing a science fiction novel, and I’ve taken a couple of classes in writing for suspense — James Patterson and Dan Smith talk about writing. And they absolutely follow the MOOC model that makes the teacher’s authority even greater. It takes talent and principles and passion to democratize either a physical or a virtual classroom. 

Me: Is the pandemic likely to increase the crisis in the economics of higher education? 

Davidson: First, it’s important to note that not a single state has returned higher ed funding to 2008 levels, before the last recession. CUNY is at significantly less per capita than it was in 2008, 20 percent less than in 2003. States have robbed their public higher ed systems year after year after year, some much worse than others. The University of Colorado now gets just 3 percent of its operating budget from state taxes. The system has already been terribly stressed. 

Second, the 2016 election made an enormous difference, and who wins the election in November will matter even more. The 2017 tax bill, especially the elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes, made a huge difference to the tax structure of New York state, as well as other northeastern states and California. That meant that even though Wall Street was booming, New York was taking in billions less in revenues. That’s had a direct effect on higher education budgets. 

Third, do Americans have the will to save higher education? I have no idea. I know the presidents of the Ivies think the rest of us should be grubbing it out, that we should go to a system that’s even more tipped toward the elite than we currently have. It’s hard to imagine how that’s even possible. But I’ve been at national meetings with administrators from wealthy institutions who think: There should be 15 institutions doing serious research; the rest should just be community colleges. That doesn’t leave me with a lot of faith. 

But we could use this as an opportunity to make really big changes, and I feel like there’s no aspect of higher education that shouldn’t be looked at. The principles of the American university were put in place in the 1800s based in part on the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor — he created the first school of business, at Dartmouth, and his idea was to bring principles of scientific labor management to higher education. So you have these arbitrary notions of seat hours, 180 hours a year of instructional time — weird regulations governed by the same principles later used to make Model Ts. Ideas of accreditation were based on those of Charles Eliot, who spent 40 years at Harvard and also invented the accreditation system. He also created the New England Council of Schools and Colleges, where he helped create a self-referential ranking system. 

Me: How will you feel if CUNY has to resume online-only instruction in the fall? 

Davidson: Oh, god. I think people will be a little better prepared, but I’m not sure preparation makes it better. Online learning requires a mental paradigm shift. CUNY students are amazing, and they’re willing to put up with a lot. But with this kind of crisis — both in public health and the economy — I don’t see how many of our students will be able to hang in there. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that question. 

(New York state numbers on Tuesday: 340,661 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.6 percent; 168 dead, to a total of 22,013, up 0.8 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,463, to a total of 76,198, up 2 percent.) 

I'm establishing an oral history of the pandemic: previous interviews include with a public college professor; a public middle school student; a private college dean; a public high school teacher; a public bilingual third-grade teacher; a public charter high school teacher; a couple putting AA meetings on videoconference; and a private college junior.