Not Throwing Away Our Shot

From the “lemons into lemonade” department …

Right now -- and I have to stipulate that this is in pencil and circumstances keep changing -- we’re planning to try something we’ve never done before for the fall semester return to campus.

Every office will be open during normal hours, Monday through Friday. But not every person will be in every office during all those hours. We’re working on having offices stagger folks’ schedules, with a minimum expectation of 60 percent of the workweek spent on campus. (For full-time faculty, two courses will need to be on campus, which is 67 percent of the three that we usually require when someone is teaching online.) So in a four-person office, there might be two or three people physically present at any given time. The others will be responsible for getting work done remotely.

The rationale behind it is severalfold.

First, of course, we’ve learned quite a bit about remote work during the pandemic, and it would be a shame for all that hard-won knowledge to just vanish down the memory hole. A too-quick return to “normal” runs the risk of falling thoughtlessly into old patterns that aren’t necessarily optimal. We’ve found that certain tasks lend themselves better to remote work. And some meetings work much better on Zoom than in person, just because people don’t need to drive from one campus to another and back.

Second is social distancing. It’s easier to distance two or three people in an office than it is to distance four people. This may be superfluous by the time September rolls around, but it’s part of the calculation now.

Third, and related to the first two, is the possibility of new variants of COVID emerging that render existing vaccines ineffective. If we keep our remote infrastructure current, we’ll be able to pivot quickly if needed. I hope this is moot, but it’s nice to have in our back pocket.

Fourth, and my favorite, is that we’ve accidentally discovered that some of the expectations we place on working parents or caregivers are neither reasonable nor necessary. (This shouldn’t come as news to anyone who has been a working parent.) For example, sending parents home at 5:00 when kids get home from school at 2:30 creates real issues when the kids are in the elementary school years. But a parent who puts in 60 percent of the day in the office five days a week -- an option that exists -- could be home in time to meet the bus. Yes, they’d have to get more work done afterward, but we know that can happen. (Alternately, someone with a long commute might prefer to show up for three full days, thereby reducing their commute by two round trips per week.) It will still be hard, given only so many hours in the day, but it could allow parents to use technology to shift some work to when childcare needs subside.

I’m a fan of that last reason. Our culture makes it unreasonably difficult to be a working parent of young children. It doesn’t have to. Now that we’ve seen that much work is portable, it would be a shame not to use that technology to help shore up family lives.

This will be an experiment. I don’t yet know whether it will work. It could fall prey to internal conflicts over perceived inequities. It could lead to poor performance. It could prove a nightmare to coordinate. Those are all real possibilities, and they could sink the project. But if it works, everyone could benefit. People with young kids would have a new option for after-school care. People in other circumstances would have more autonomy with their time, which helps in a myriad of ways. The kinds of work that benefit from being done remotely could be done better, reserving office time for the work that needs to be done there.

Many years ago, when I started writing “Confessions,” I adopted the name “Dean Dad” because those were the two roles that occupied most of my waking hours. It was also a tip of the cap to feminism -- it wasn’t unusual at the time to see pseudonyms like “Professor Mom.” Drawing on feminist theory, I didn’t want to forget that I was a parent while doing my day job. I see this experiment as being in that spirit. We can choose to make jobs more compatible with parenthood; we have the technology. Nobody would have chosen a pandemic to create this opportunity, but it happened; now we can take the opportunity to make work more compatible with family life, or we can waste it. I’m proud to say that we’re not throwing away our shot.

Stay tuned …