Learning From the Great Evacuation

I'm using the blog partially to think through observations of this crisis as they happen, in hopes of preserving lessons we can use when this is over. This one is about working from home.

For years, faculty have been the only full-time employees on campus with the option of regularly working from home. With schedules that required three or four days a week on campus, rather than five, they’ve had the option of doing class prep, grading and the like from wherever. And it works. In my faculty days, I always saw the control over my time as a perk of the job. My nonteaching day could be used for grading, or I could schedule dentist appointments and oil changes for those and grade on the weekends. As long as I got it done well and promptly, the location really didn’t matter.

Other than faculty, though, many (if not most) colleges historically have been weirdly skeptical of employees working from home. Over the years, I’ve been warned away from allowing even occasional work-from-home days on the grounds of setting a precedent. If some can do it, the argument went, then everyone will, and then where will we be?

As with many fear-based arguments, it overshoots. Anything can be abused, but if the last couple of months have taught us anything, it’s that “working from home” actually entails working. I’ve been impressed by the amount and caliber of work being done from home.

I’ve noticed since the Great Evacuation that meetings tend to start on time, or very close to it. That wasn’t true before. Attendance at College Forum has set records, and the discussions have been more thoughtful. I know I sometimes find it easier to read or prepare long reports or documents at home. (Admittedly, my kids are past elementary school age. For parents of kids under, say, 10, this may be exactly backward.)

In the next year or so, money will be even tighter than usual, and that’s saying something. The collapse of state sales tax revenues, for instance, has to be made up somewhere, and so far the federal government hasn’t shown that it understands, or is willing to understand, the scope of what we’re facing. In my darker moments, I suspect it may not want to. I’ve mentioned repeatedly over the last few years that part of the recent struggle of public higher education is that it’s designed to create a middle class for a country no longer wants one. I would have preferred not to be so spectacularly right, but here we are.

So as we return, it will be even harder to pay people what they should be paid. In light of that, I’m wondering if we could at least learn from the last few months and expand the availability of carefully defined work-from-home options.

There’s historical precedent for a move like that, though its lessons are somewhat ambiguous. During World War II, wages and prices were fixed, so companies that wanted to attract employees couldn’t really compete on pay. Instead, they found a loophole: they competed on benefits. That’s how the employer-based system of health insurance entrenched itself in the U.S. Unfortunately, its existence has since provided a sort of ammunition for the opponents of a single-payer system.

Tying health insurance to employment was a catastrophic mistake, as any international comparison quickly reveals. But I don’t think that, say, allowing people in certain roles to work from home one or two days a week would lead to the same issues. And if folks can’t have reasonable raises, some level of flexibility is at least something. It’s a sign of respect we could actually afford.

Until recently, I was told that too much work couldn’t be done remotely, and that people couldn’t be trusted. As we start to draw up plans for returning, I hope we don’t forget what we’ve learned while we were away. This has been a hell of a natural experiment; at the very least, we shouldn’t waste the results.