Editor’s note: This commentary is by Héctor J. Vila, who is an associate professor of Writing & Rhetoric at Middlebury College.
The pandemic has brought to light the epic battle between management and labor: staff, non-tenured faculty and adjuncts, tenured faculty awakening to their less than salutary place behind the hallowed ivy are facing furloughs, salary reductions, a freezing of retirement benefits and reductions in health care.
Who owns my body, the body of professors and staff asked to return to a compromised space that could be deadly? What about students’ bodies — who owns them?
The “Pandemic University” brought me to W. Edwards Deming, the engineer, statistician, and professor, because approaches to campus re-entry suggest we’re merely trying to put out a fire — the loss of revenue — rather than using this opportunity to assess why we’re in this spot and what we need to do about it. “Normal” before Covid-19 meant accepting administration bloat, capital projects for recreational campuses, and faculty and staff became increasingly invisible, as did students. Instead, Deming would ask, Is this a system that learns? Is this system expansive enough to allow learning about itself to be in place and ongoing?
So, what do we need to gain a better understanding of how to rebuild an educational system that is more resilient and responsive to society?
— Administrators and faculty, as unemployment nears Depression-era numbers, have to openly admit that we are extraordinarily privileged, particularly tenured faculty — even when facing austerity measures.
— Endowments have to be used to stave off furloughs, layoffs and reductions in pay, and the termination of contracts. Investing in the people on whose backs the university is built is actually the most profound way to ensure a future for universities and the communities in which schools reside.
— Universities must assemble and adequately compensate new, creative teams to study conditions prior to the pandemic that set us off in such chaotic fashion. These teams must be networked across a campus with staff and students, and across the country, sharing and collaborating in building a fount of data that would enable us to tell the story of how we got to this point, not least of which would be the examination as to why, since technology has been ubiquitous, educators failed to capture its potential. What happened? Technology has always asked educators to hybridize and individualize teaching and learning to address a wide and changing demographic. Why didn’t we do that?
— We must change our siloed approach to teaching and learning, which compels academic repositories of knowledge to compete with one another. By examining the system, not individuals, and assessing long term and short term processes and goals, keeping track of where things are coming from and where they are going, we will therefore engage in the ongoing construction of data that can connect campuses across the country; we can see what each other is doing, collaborate, lower costs, inject areas that are struggling with new-found potential.
— Competition must end, collaboration as a central strategy needs to begin. Last year, three colleges closed in Vermont: Green Mountain College, Southern Vermont College, and the College of St. Joseph. No one blinked. The Vermont State Colleges also contemplated closing three campuses, but retreated after massive protest. What if colleges such as Middlebury, and others in the Northeast where we find a wealth of small, elite (meaning large endowments) colleges came together and created robust online programs, for a fraction of current tuition, expanding access and opportunity for students — and other colleges: a consortium of programs existing alongside fund raising for more robust financial aid, also shared and for students in the consortium? Elite schools have a huge responsibility to change the way things are.
— Today’s problems require that different disciplines sit at the table, science and technology with the humanities; this will allow us to create engaging, hybrid programs that, using technology, can be adaptable to a single individual. This is the future, anything else will return us to where we are today.
In 1996, in “University in Ruins,” the late Bill Readings said that the university “is no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture. The process of economic globalization brings with it the relative decline of the nation-state as the prime instance of reproduction of capital around the world.” We’ve lost our way.
The university is more focused on the idea of excellence, an accounting term aligned with “total quality management,” rather than the more nebulous ground of teaching and learning with its ups and downs, critical questions, and essential ambiguity. “The University no longer participates in the historical project of humanity,” says Readings.
If we take this moment to build a new, more responsible university to address the daunting challenges we face, together and with humility, respect, and cooperation, we can return to the historical project of humanity, this time describing it creatively and critically by populating the journey with our stories, which will help us lean towards a better future.
