I am seeing people respond to the number of higher education institutions that are mandating their students leave their residences and head home in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The decisions that our higher education institutions make have been impacts on their students, members of our communities; but in some cases, the decisions are not always up to the institutions themselves, and in all cases, there are many people and external forces to consider.
My response on March 11th to the idea of forcing students off campus was deep concern: What about international students (as a study abroad advisor managing incoming exchange students, this was my first thought)? What about students who are otherwise homeless, who don’t have family they can turn to?
That was March 11th. Fast forward about four or five days (it was fast, felt like a lifetime in between), and my opinion changed significantly.
It’s not that I don’t care about these groups of students. I’m the kind of person who would open up my own home to as many students as allowed/was healthy/would fit, if I were in charge of my home and didn’t live five minutes away from my grandparents. (Goes without saying, I want to be healthy if they need help from me – and it’s my mom’s house.) We almost hosted one of my sister’s friends who fell into this situation, but she needed to be in the same area as her school due to health insurance restrictions.
As individuals, we are all faced with an unprecedented situation, and the same applies to the leaders who run higher education institutions. This is not the time for judging some of these decisions, as they are so complex and at times there are bigger bodies making decisions that will impact an HEI’s set of decisions. This is the time to react and gather in support for those who need the help: the students.
Here is a breakdown of what needs to be considered when we assess the decisions made right now by HEIs in response to COVID-19:
First, it’s going to be different for every institution. Every institution will respond differently depending on who their students are and where they are located. Based on this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, some institutions have dismissed students and are now deciding to offer up the space for sick patients overcrowding hospitals – it is entirely possible that this was an ask from local governments of these institutions (the article names Tufts University, NYU, and Middlebury College). If NYU, Tufts, or Middlebury – or any institution – chose to ask its students to leave, it was a hard decision. In some cases, institutions will give refunds. At others, to do so could mean the institution will go under. That’s not a small decision to grapple with in these cases, especially.
Second, the government has a role to play. The federal government was slow to respond at the get-go, and now it is trying to figure out where to put its emergency funding. An article published yesterday morning in Inside Higher Ed points directly at one of the areas where the federal government was slow to make moves at first (re: institutional eligibility to receive federal aid when suddenly moving all classes online), in a rapidly changing situation, to provide flexibility. It mentions briefly another issue, which one body of the government (the Student Exchange and Visitor Program) was quick to respond to, while another body of government, the USCIS, was not – the visa allowances for international students.
I think that all institutional leadership is considering the ramifications of its choices for its students who don’t have a home to return to, or who cannot easily get home. But they have other people to consider as well – such as faculty and all staff – and many logistical concerns. Students who remain on campus have to be fed, which means dining halls need to remain open, which means that (as long as shelter in place is in effect), meals need to be delivered in to-go boxes, and what happens if they start running out of the supplies to hold the food? That’s one element. In dorms, there may be three students living in one room with the whole hall sharing a bathroom.
What I appreciate in those situations – from what I’ve seen – is the community coming together to help those students, and most universities doing their best to help their students as best as they can in what has been a whirlwind couple of weeks. For us in California, March 9th – 16th was awful. I’m saying that and I wasn’t making any of the big decisions. For some institutions, that’s this week.
If there’d been more time, I think more measures would have been taken, such as surveying to find out who would struggle in displacement so as to determine which dorm might serve as a place where those students could stay. But there was not time. What made sense the morning of March 11th no longer made sense in the evening after the travel ban on Europe was called. What seemed like a good idea on a Friday for international students changed on Monday. It’s difficult to think holistically and strategically during a whirlwind like that – your daily routine turns into triage and your decisions become reactionary.
I’m writing all of this because there is already a negative perception of higher education in the United States, which is difficult enough to battle when the problem is that our government has not invested enough in it for several decades. Higher ed institutions are really roughing it, it is going to be a rough time ahead, and that’s only going to make it more difficult for the students. Students’ voices are extremely important – I have always, always been a proponent of that – and there are people in higher ed who are listening and doing the best they can do. It’s the system – wrapped up in governmental policy and procedure, law, and a corporate-driven, business-run society – that leaves us all in a bind.
These are unprecedented, trying times, even for higher ed leaders.
Below is a comment I made on a Facebook post recently (A few days ago? A week ago? Who knows anymore?):
“As someone who works for a higher ed institution (HEI) as a staff member, I think it’s too difficult and early to tell the “right way” for HEIs to handle this, it has spiraled extremely quickly. (I actually don’t think there is a single right way.) HEIs are responsible not only to their students, but their faculty and staff as well. I don’t know what the right answer is, every institution is handling it differently, but there is SO much to consider, especially the legality of everything and the way higher ed is caught up in that legality (some decisions are difficult to make because the government has been slow to respond, and even private institutions need to adhere to various federal laws), international students, students who will otherwise be homeless – it’s a mess, it’s true, but in some ways – health concerns of large populations of young people living together in closer quarters, two to a room, sometimes three – I see why NYU and other HEIs are sending their students home or otherwise trying to find accommodations for them. In some cases, maybe that doesn’t make any sense. In other cases, what made sense 5 days ago no longer makes sense today. We have to approach these things with kindness.”
I know there are people struggling significantly through all of this, and in some cases even a little kindness may need to wait for those with bigger concerns right now. But where we can, when we can, a little bit of kindness is extremely, extremely important.