BY JEFFREY ISAAC

Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He posted these thoughts about reopening IU on his personal blog, and we are reposting them with his permission.

On May 27, the three-month U.S. death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 100,000.

The death toll in the state of Indiana exceeded 2000.

And Michael McRobbie, the President of Indiana University, sent out a letter to all faculty, staff, and students that began thus:

“I am very pleased to write to you to inform you of our plans for resuming instruction and education on all Indiana University campuses this fall. We plan to welcome students back to all our campuses, where instruction will be a blend of in-person and online. It will make extensive use of technology while preserving as far as possible the most important elements of the in-person experience.”

Most people in Indiana, like people everywhere, are very concerned and afraid about the present and the future. We are living amidst a health crisis—a highly contagious and deadly pandemic– and an economic crisis. And in the face of this, the IU President begins his address to the public by . . .  telling us that he is “pleased to inform us.” “Pleased?” The words chosen say a lot about the spirit of seriousness with which he has chosen to make a monumentally important decision that will affect hundreds of thousands of people throughout the state and has the potential to bring medical disaster to campuses like the Bloomington campus on which I teach, which crowds over 48,000 students in a small city only twice that size.

On May 26, I published a piece about the very real pressure Indiana University leadership faced given the highly-publicized decisions of the state’s two other major universities, Purdue and Notre Dame, to reopen their campuses in the Fall. I pointed out that our university leadership was pinioned between one university President (Mitch Daniels) who has long been an apostle of market-based economics, and another (John Jenkins) who fancies himself a tribune of moral rectitude. Somewhat hopefully, I called upon IU leadership to resist the pressure to conform, and to lead, by making the brave but right decision to exercise appropriate caution and to refuse to turn Bloomington and other locales into hot spots for the super-spreading of the virus.

If IU’s decision represents “leadership,” it is a peculiar kind of leadership, exercised from behind, and justified with the blandness to which many here have too long become accustomed. Without even genuflecting towards educational or civic values, the President’s announcement immediately turns to his technocratic plans and the technologies that will support the plans.  While Purdue is led by a market ideologue and Notre Dame by a Thomist ideologue, IU is led by a computer scientist.

In his brief justification of his decision, the President invoked the authority of the “Indiana University Restart Committee Recommendations Report” that he had commissioned, explaining that “The committee recommends that the fall semester involve a blend of in-person and online instruction, provided extensive public health measures are taken.” But, as I have pointed out, this Report contains no social scientific evidence whatsoever for the notion that the “public health measures” can be plausibly implemented and enforced on campuses. Indeed, the Report envisions nothing short of a veritable moral transformation of tens of thousands of young undergraduates. It invites us to take leave of our common sense and our knowledge of the way social institutions work, and to imagine that “the IU experience” will overnight be transformed into a place of sobriety, care for others, and moral responsibility.

The Report itself, and the President’s embrace of it, is a perfect example of the technocratic logic that has overtaken many universities. At a time of real crisis, it is deaf, dumb, and blind to the sociology of young people, the social organization of campus life, and the need for a leadership that is moral and civic, and attends to the profound human challenges of the situation.

Fortunately, at IU the President is not an absolute monarch. The Provost of the Bloomington campus, Lauren Robel, is a very different kind of leader. Having earned her Law Degree here in 1983, she has been on the faculty ever since, rising through the ranks to her current position, and always attempting to speak as an administrator who is also a colleague.

On May 27, she also shared a public message. It began very differently than the President’s message:

“Dear Colleagues,

We took our campus apart in March. Now we begin to put it back together. Can we do so in a way that honors the academic values of Indiana University: honest debate, transparent discussion, critical thought, ethical behavior, and a belief in the power of education? In a pandemic that has become dishearteningly partisan, can we develop a vocabulary to discuss what is at stake and consider the actual alternatives we have?

We must.”

What followed was an honest acknowledgment of the “range of reasonable disagreement” about the campus reopening, and an elaborate and serious discussion of why she supports the reopening and of the decision-making process, including faculty and staff deliberation, that she envisions moving forward.

This is a serious and sincere statement. It centers on the teaching and research mission of the university, and on the values of education and enlightenment that animate the university. It engages the issues, and all readers, with the seriousness that is warranted.

While it expresses a perhaps too-fulsome praise of the “Restart” Report, the Provost’s message is not technocratic. It is civic. It hinges on a vision of faculty and student engagement, and imagines that the current crisis can cause all to rise to the occasion, access their “better angels,” and dedicate themselves to an extraordinary form of education that is also an extraordinary performance of social responsibility.

It is a noble vision. But, if the President’s statement is stark, cold, and perhaps even cynical, the Provost’s is not realistic, and in the end, it amounts to a noble form of moral exhortation.

Its key passages are powerful, and worth quoting at length:

I have seen messages that bluntly state that it is naïve or foolish to believe that we can educate our students around this virus. Of course young people on a college campus want to congregate and test boundaries, and I have also seen some criticism of the behavior of students who rode out the spring in their Bloomington rental properties, and much criticism of college students on spring break at the very outset of the pandemic. I do not consider these examples dispositive. This is because the campus has been largely physically closed and IU and our faculty and staff have not yet had the opportunity to engage in a serious effort to mount a comprehensive educational campaign directed at students, much less one that makes clear to students that the way they behave will directly affect whether we can remain physically open at all. And I will be equally blunt: We have never attempted such an educational campaign, using the full power of the faculty and staff, around anything so pressing.  Some colleagues I respect deeply have already urged me to give up on residential education altogether without trying to mount such a campaign.

I will not do so. . .

We need to make clear that students’ access to the campus at all is something they will largely control through their behavior. We have had no reason yet, disassembled as we have been, to draw on students’ powerful feelings of care and empathy for each other, and for the faculty and staff of the campus.

We have an opportunity not only to teach students why we are approaching the issues in the way we are, but also to help them think more carefully and fully about responsibilities we owe to each other, in this and other situations; to put this crisis in the context of other crises that people their age have been asked to face and how those generations did so; and to solicit their questions and concerns about the extraordinarily confusing period they have been experiencing. We can call on their best selves, as teachers should always do. The educational possibilities of this moment are extraordinary. They are difficult, yes, but we teach students difficult concepts every single day. And we have access to all of the disciplines that could make this effort as effective as it is possible to make it. I am not ready to give up on our students and ourselves quite so quickly without enlisting the very best faculty and staff advice and knowledge we can muster.

I know and respect the Provost, and I believe that this vision is sincere. Indeed, as I said to her privately, I believe it is a wonderful vision of the civic responsibility of Indiana University, one worth pursuing. I believe that with proper planning, and serious faculty and staff buy-in, and the creation of incentives to support this buy-in, such a vision is realistic. But that is a long-term project, centered on a truly transformative vision. I am willing to perhaps even believe that the young people who might experience campus life and learning in this way would become very socially responsible, caring, and exceptionally ethical. But again, this would involve a pedagogical and a moral transformation.

The idea that such a transformation can be planned and effected in the next three months, in the face of a pandemic and a social and economic crisis, and that it can have an immediately transformative effect on campus life–this is simply utopian. It flies in the face of everything we know about the way students behave and the way faculty behave. Indeed, it flies in the face of the long-standing ethos of the institution at large, as it is shaped not simply by educational ideals but by the enormous power of college sports, the constraints of a stingy and conservative state legislature, the less-than-ideal pressures of well-placed alumni, and the culture of Greek life and partying.

I have taught at Indiana University for thirty-three years. I believe in the values that the Provost articulates, and I have worked, sometimes in collaboration with her, to promote these values. But these values, while important, and while precious to some of us, are secondary and even marginal to most things that actually go on at this campus and every campus.

The Provost’s vision appeals to me. As a response to the current Depression, or the racial crisis unfolding before our eyes, or the challenges of global warming, I could embrace this vision.

But it is now being invoked to justify the reopening of campus, and the welcoming of tens of thousands of young people, in the face of a deadly pandemic that has already taken over 100,000 lives in three months, and is still growing in most states in the country. It is one thing to appeal to our higher selves. It is another thing to imagine that such an appeal can generate the kinds of individual and public hygiene, social distancing, and rule-following that are needed to make it safe to teach and learn on campus.

Here the risk is enormous, and in the face of it, we have been presented with little more than imaginings and moral appeals. I admire the imagination and the appeals. But I do not believe we have been furnished with any reason to consider them credible or realistic in the face of the situation that confronts us.

At the same time, those of us who teach and work at Indiana University now have no choice but to deal with the decisions that have been taken for us.

I personally welcome the educational challenges presented by the COVID crisis. I had a great experience with my students in the Spring, employing distance learning methods. I embrace the chance to repeat this experience in the coming Fall. I am a 63 year old veteran faculty member who is a cancer and radiation treatment survivor, and I do not intend to set foot on campus in the Fall. But I worry for my colleagues, my students, and my neighbors. The Provost at least tells us that she seeks further faculty and staff consultation. Hopefully it will be possible to work constructively to mitigate the most serious dangers, to employ a “hybrid” approach that allows both students and teachers the choice of pursuing teaching and learning either on campus or off; encourages remote work for staff whenever feasible; and protects the economic situation of those—staff, graduate students, and some adjunct faculty—who are most economically vulnerable.

In short, there are many decisions yet to be made, and it seems worthwhile to participate constructively in those decisions to the best extent possible.

At the same time, it is important to be vigilant about the unfolding situation, and to be firm: the leaders of Indiana University have made a major decision with consequences for many, and their decision has turned the entire university into an enormous natural experiment in social responsibility in which we are the experimental (and political) subjects. I believe this experiment is bound to fail. I hope I am wrong, and if I am wrong, I will admit it publicly, and draw the proper consequences. But the decision here was made by a very small number of people. And they alone must bear responsibility for this decision. If things go well, they will deserve to be praised for their administrative brilliance. And if they don’t, and if the disease spreads here, and people become seriously ill and/or die—and we all know the question is not “if” but “how many?”– then these leaders will deserve to be condemned.

This is harsh. But the situation is harsh, and the danger all too real, and with the power to decide comes the burden of responsibility.