BY AARON BARLOW

What does it mean to be a college in the contemporary milieu? Can we continue with expectations now decades out of date? Can we continue to carry the deadwood, both administrators who are mired in models of education only applicable to expanding economies and professors who have refused to update pedagogy to meet the needs of a new century—and who are both proving terribly wanting in our response to the coronavirus pandemic?

Or are we going to head the same way we have been until we hit the dead end that is now so clearly marked?

Until this crisis began, higher education was rich enough to afford administrators of no vision and professors who refuse to change, who both argue that what was good enough for colleges of the past and their own education is good enough today.

Administrators have long viewed the institutions through business lenses that make no sense when education remains necessary but expansive funding no longer is possible.

Education never should have been seen as a business selling a service. That attitude could only carry when the nation was relatively stable.

The fact that our colleges and universities have been dysfunctional or, at best, feckless was covered over for a generation by a generally booming economy.

Questions of how education should be funded were kicked down the road, most notably into the growing burden of student debt, a burden that was never sustainable, but no one was willing to do anything about. A burden that is now going to haunt is—and in more ways than one. Not only are graduates overburdened but it is not going to be possible, any longer, to saddle students with such debt—yet colleges have explored few alternatives.

In all areas of higher ed, we have been self-satisfied and self-congratulatory for far too long. This needs to stop, but all I am seeing from both some faculty and too many administrators (for the most part—there are significant exceptions) is continued self-promotion. The faculty tell each other how well they are doing in this transition and administrators are patting themselves on the back for their deft responses to the crisis.

Nonsense, in both cases. Acceptable nonsense on top of the padding of a robust economy but useless and even harmful when someone has let the air out of the mattress.

By claiming success, both faculty and administrators are making it impossible for us to seriously consider how we have failed in this crisis—and fail we have done.

We need to stop the self-congratulatory silliness and to start seriously considering the roots of our inability to serve our students adequately in a crisis of a sort that many have seen coming for decades. Not only do we need to recognize our failure to prepare for a widespread economic downturn (even though we were warned just twelve years ago) but we need to be addressing our inability to adjust to changed educational needs and possibilities.

The few things we had done before March 2020 are being shown to be inconsequential Band-Aids that COVID-19 has ripped away. We, as the whole of higher education, have failed.

And now we are facing the consequences.

Yet, as institutions, we are retaining the same old leadership even though, as a group, our leaders have shown themselves to be incompetent—as they proved during the run-up to closure, when many faculty were begging them to prepare while the administrators went on as usual, forcing themselves into last-minute decisions that have, at best, papered over the tears of a lost semester, one that would not have been lost with even a week of planning in concert with faculty.

Administrators need to admit that their reactions have been inadequate and belated if they are to claim legitimacy in their roles moving forward. If not, they will likely continue to fail in the face of a crisis that is going to grow over the next year, not lessen.

They have failed. But we on the faculty have done little better. And we need to admit that, too.

We faculty are finding, through the coronavirus crisis, what we should have long known and acted on, that we cannot continue as we have been and should long ago been changing our ways. Like administrators, whose assumptions on things so simple as the structures of campuses and the configurations of buildings are way out of date, we teachers have been looking back, not forward. Just as the classroom of the past does not meet current needs, nor does the student union, nor the dormitory—nor the way most of us teach.

Our world has become a great deal more uncertain and it will continue to be so: COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic and the current shutdown will not be the last we experience. We have had the opportunity for restructuring our facilities for more than two decades but have done none of what is necessary—and not just to fight pandemics. Just so, we have had the opportunity to incorporate a great deal of flexibility into our pedagogy thanks to new digital tools but, for the most part, have failed to do so.

Even without the current crisis, we members of the American academic faculty should have been agitating for change in the physical facilities of our profession (though faced with recalcitrant administrations more interested in budgets than education, we would likely have failed) while also preparing ourselves for utilization of new academic toolkits that can be used to meet changing needs and changing students.

Long before 2020, we all should have possessed the skills necessary for moving our classes online, not as preparation for responding to a pandemic but because those skills should, by now, be part of all course preparation and should be utilized in all course execution. These are not primarily skills for taking classes online but for teaching in this digital century. We should long ago have recognized this and should have moved our colleagues toward their acquisition, not simply in mastering the technology but in revised pedagogy.

It should be considered fundamental that any college teacher in 2020 has mastered such basic digital tools as those surrounding online educational platforms and be conversant in the details of online research. Possessing the appropriate hardware and access from home should be as expected as having a telephone was for a teacher fifty years ago. That we do not demand these things from ourselves is our own failing. We have victimized ourselves and our students as a result—as these past weeks have shown.

But that doesn’t mean we should give up.

Though we have not the clout for instituting the physical changes our campuses should have been seeing over the past two decades, there is a great deal we faculty can move ahead on while we agitate for other improvements.

A simple start would be for departments to make utilization of digital tools required parts of the curricula for their courses. They should do so, requiring course aspects necessitating mastery of digital tools by faculty.

Though the process of coming up to date with these tools should not be the responsibility of the institutions at this late date, our departments could make concerted efforts to assist in this, even to the extent of finding means of funding the training for part-time teachers. Participation in Professional Development programs should be mandatory (and paid) for all faculty, no matter their type of employment. Too few of us have had real training in either technology or pedagogy; all of us can make use of constant updating in both areas.

At the very least, we must stop assuming that what we have done in the past is adequate for the future. This is but one simple step for moving ahead. We should be also exploring others.

Higher education is going to change a great deal over the next few years. The rich schools will probably find ways of getting through without much alteration. The rest are going to find themselves scrambling to survive in a shifting environment both of funding and access to courses, among other things. Many of the small private colleges, including my own alma mater, will face the possibility of closure—and that saddens me, for I believe they provide the best undergraduate education America offers. The vast panoply of public higher education will likely survive, its student population even growing, but it, too, will take a substantial economic hit as state funding sources dry up.

Faculty at all but the very richest institutions need to start insisting on involvement in designing their institutions for the post-coronavirus world. We have been lax for years, allowing administrators to take over more and more responsibility for the shapes of our institutions right down to instruction itself, letting the concept of shared governance dry up and start to float away.

As we are the ones who know best how to prepare our students, we are going to have to start proving it, showing our institutions what can be done by doing it. Yes, what each of us does may be small but, together, it will add up.

We can start by making sure that all of us are up to the task before us and by re-evaluating and revising our own methodologies before change is forced on us by forces with little experience of actual interaction with students—or even with faculty.

We can do this, but only if we start now.

Otherwise, we are soon going to hit that dead end.