What will the pandemic do to higher education?

I can’t be arsed to analyze, much less summarize, the many statements in this Chronicle of Higher Education article in which faculty, administrators, and staff were asked how they thought the pandemic would change the way colleges and universities operate. (Click on the screenshot).

There are 23 statements, some optimistic, some pessimistic, and some off the topic.

That latter class is one of the reasons this series irritates me. For more than a few people use the question to advance their own social-justice agendas, pretending that the virus will help enact their personal ideologies—which of course pre-date the pandemic. In other words, they don’t answer the question, but rather blather on about oppression. But what else can we expect when you ask a cross section of liberal academics a question like this? Here are a few examples:

This crisis should finally force higher education to confront its deep social inequity. As the pandemic spread, elite colleges closed quickly, sending their mostly wealthy students home to secure environments with plenty of food and computer access. Other institutions serving large numbers of low-income students faced difficult choices about how to keep some lights on, so that students could still get essential services.

This crisis demands that colleges step back from self-absorption and focus on how we can better serve our neighborhoods and the larger community. Let’s reclaim our moral purpose as sources of knowledge, service, and even hope. By serving the needs of those in crisis, we will better secure our own futures.

But should the purpose of college be to serve neighborhoods and the larger community? I thought it was to learn. And what the pandemic should do was not the question; the question is what it will do.

or

We must care for our students in ways that recognize that they are more than students, and that their capacities to be students are interconnected to insecurities — of housing, food, and access to health services — and vulnerabilities — racialized, gendered, class-based — the structures of which we must study critically and aim to dismantle as we adapt to our new world.

We are in a position to think of our pedagogy as a form of mutual aid. We can learn together to push past our fear and isolation and inspire deep reflections on the power and fragility of our human and ecological interdependence. We can think through concrete strategies for surviving — and for living better.

Yes, of course you have to make sure your students have food, healthcare, and shelter, but note the call for dismantling “racialized, gendered, and class-based” aspects of society. Well, that’s all well and good, but has nothing to do with the pandemic. Here the authors are just saying what they normally say, but using the question as a springboard to do so. In fact, this is not an effect that I believe will come from the pandemic. The dispelling of inequities, inequities that many argue are exposed by the pandemic, will come from other wellsprings. What we have is not a prediction, but wishful thinking.

or (from someone characterized as an “anthropologist, custodian, and labor-and-community organizer”:

While labor leadership around the state put the screws on Governor Inslee to issue a shelter-in-place order, we organized a phone blitz on Ana Mari Cauce, UW’s [the University of Washington] president, to demand hazard pay, stronger personal protective gear, and/or quarantine leave with pay. This is just the beginning. I’ve been asthmatic since I was 8 years old, and I’m terrified of a bronchial death fever, but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m sure as hell not afraid of the bosses anymore.

Fine; that’s a change in a person, but not a change in higher education.

Another thing that strikes me is how poorly these academics write, and how shallow and unoriginal is their thinking about the future. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t answer the question. An example of shallow thinking and poor writing comes from one of the three college presidents who answer: Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, who seems to specialize in the anodyne and the obvious:

But as with most disruptive events, this one brings opportunity. The institutions that will thrive in the future will be the ones that embrace online platforms, not just a hastily assembled, short-term replacement for classes, but long-term expansions of classroom instruction, campus life, and off-campus learning.

. . . Some students and their parents will justifiably want a full residential experience for at least part of the time. And a university of the future might offer three options: entirely residential, entirely online, or a hybrid of the two. All three options would keep students engaged with people and cultures around the world, making a global education more attainable and affordable for all.

Universities will remain vibrant, dynamic, diverse places. But bricks and mortar don’t propel these exchanges. The institutions that thrive postpandemic will be those that understand how humans cross the boundaries between the physical and digital — and back again.

Umm. . . what’s new here? Well, I am worried, as I’ve said before, that universities will use this period, and its lame “successes” (i.e., the university survived) to erode the brick-and-mortar structure that gives one a real college experience. I don’t think a purely virtual university can in any way come close to, much less exceed, the experience of face-to-face learning by interacting not just with faculty, but with your fellow students. What about the small seminars, the late-night bull sessions, the one-on-one interactions between mentor and student? Gone.

Finally, I note that of 23 people who gave statements, not a single one was in the sciences. There are two social scientists and an economist, but the only person characterized as an “assistant professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech,” is in fact not a scientist, but someone who studies the effect of science and technology on society, and who has degrees in philosophy, history, and policy. It’s a big flaw to omit those working in biology, physics, chemistry, and other STEM fields from answering, because they’d have something to say about the effect of remote learning on education in the sciences.

I’d hoped for more from this long piece, but having read it, I realize that I wasted my time. My thinking wasn’t stimulated, I didn’t learn anything, and have forgotten most of it already.