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What sounds like one big decision entails a host of smaller ones.
We’ve had the high-level discussion about the possibility of moving classes to Canvas or otherwise adapting to remote delivery. Faculty have drawn up plans, and the instructional design staff is working feverishly to help professors do their best work. Some classes still have some questions to address, and the indeterminate length of the emergency makes it difficult to solidify certain things. But at least we know that if we decide to go the online route, we can.
That’s important, but it’s only the beginning of the discussion. The ripple effects are many and varied.
The campus food service company, which is an outside contractor, stands to take losses if most students stop showing up. It will want compensation, some of which (I hope) would find its way to its employees.
Some students don’t have reliable internet at home, or, at best, only have it on their phones. If delivery is moved largely online, they’ll need reliable computer and internet access. That quickly becomes an argument for keeping buildings open and staffing computer labs and the library.
Which raises equity issues among employees. Which employees need to come in, and which are allowed to work from home? That gets tricky when you move from the jobs themselves to the people doing those jobs. What if, say, only 30 percent of someone’s job can be done effectively at home? What if someone’s spouse has a medical condition making them uncommonly susceptible to infection? In a vacuum, any individual case may seem obvious, but you need to be able to answer questions about why Smith got a break that Jones didn’t get.
In the case of the virus, the emergency isn’t confined to the college. What about the student with two school-aged kids, both of whom are forced to stay home for a few weeks and take classes online? And the family only has one computer in the house?
What happens to students in allied health programs when their clinical settings start turning them away, either out of fear of contagion or just from being overwhelmed?
We’ve made strides over the last few years in addressing student basic needs on campus. Those needs don’t go away if the campus locks doors for a while. The folks who rely on the food pantry, or the social worker, still need what they need. Replicator technology (“Earl Grey, hot”) still isn’t to the point that there’s an app for food. When the pantry isn’t open, some students feel it directly.
Collective bargaining agreements are written with normal circumstances in mind. If we move everyone online, what do we do about class observations for annual evaluations? How do we define the contractually stipulated office hours? Those answers require discussion and agreement, both of which presume that the new circumstances will be sufficiently stable and understood to serve as the foundation for a new memorandum of agreement.
Students whose disability accommodations presume a traditional classroom setting may need different sorts of support now.
Of course, we also host public events. What about the people renting the arena for this event or that one? What about the college open house? What about the athletic teams, student clubs and gallery openings?
What about the effects on next fall’s enrollment? Down, because people are scared? Up, because they’re scared of going away? Luckily, we don’t have a track record of pandemics to provide guidance.
And all of this is at a college without dorms. Add dorms and the issues become exponentially more complicated.
If every emergency were the same, planning for them would be a lot easier. But they’re not. A pandemic that struck in, say, June, would be very different from one striking now. Weather events can be catastrophic -- Hurricane Sandy was brutal here -- but the events themselves (as distinguished from their effects) end quickly. In this case, we don’t know when it will end. The indeterminacy requires multiple layers of planning, some of which will turn out to be irrelevant.
We’ll get through this, serving students and the community with talent and pride. We just need to be prepared for more layers of doll than appeared at first glance.
