The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College. Steve Volk
PRELUDE
On March 11, 2020, at 8:12 p.m., as the State of Indiana began to perceive the magnitude of COVID-19, the members of the DePauw University community (like so many others) received an email announcing the suspension of in-class instruction. Over the next four days, the deadline for students to leave campus—with all of their belongings—was pushed forward several times, eventually landing on March 16, at 5:00 p.m. At that point, any student who had not been granted eligibility to remain on campus (235 students) had to be gone. As the news settled in, students scrambled to spend time with one another. Pop-up ensembles claimed the halls of the performing arts center. The local inn faced such a swarm of students that the owners stopped serving alcohol. Seniors were hit full in the face with the realization that their college experience, as they had known it up to this point, had just ended. All of those memory-making, pregraduation rituals they’d been dreaming about since freshman year were now gone.
Seven and a half hours before the email came, I (Beth) was teaching Waiting for Godot in my existential literature course. Wanting to breathe new energy into the class and give us a chance to inhabit and perform scenes from the play, we had relocated for the week to an auditorium in the oldest building on campus. The auditorium, which had formerly served as a chapel, had vaulted ceilings arching over wooden pews and a defunct pipe organ that was lofted in the corner. Now it housed more mundane events—lectures, the occasional faculty meeting, student recitals—and the walls were hung with portraits of DePauw’s presidents and (in a less-than-subtle jab at the patriarchal legacy of the place) a relatively recent series of portrait-sized photos by a faculty artist that represented women from various contingents of the DePauw community (though there were no students). Most of the class sat sprawled in a circle on the stage. The high-backed leather chairs reserved for esteemed visitors had been pushed aside. A handful of students, a buzzing lethargy in their collective and individual poses, had claimed seats in the window sills or on the stairs leading up to the stage.
The irony that we were slated that day to process Beckett’s absurdist classic was deafening: students had been alerted earlier that this email was coming, and that they would know by 3:00 p.m. whether or not face-to-face classes were going to be cancelled for the remainder of the semester. Now we were, literally, just waiting. In another class I had taught earlier that day, there was no less irony: that morning we were making our way through The Trial. None of us could escape the fact that the concept of “indefinite postponement,” one of three possible outcomes for the accused Joseph K., had just taken on real-life contours that were too surreal, even for Kafka. What else was there to talk about other than the ways the college’s imminent announcement stood to change everyone’s reality? Time was already carved into a “before” and “after,” though none of us knew what that “after” would look like.
The next few days were a blur. Some faculty cancelled the remaining two days of classes. Some doubled down on expectations, insisting scheduled exams be taken on those days rather than postponed until a less anxious time. Some just tried to stay the course, using the final two days as an opportunity to bring some semblance of closure to the chapter of in-person learning that, until that moment, we had all taken for granted. “Business as usual” vied with “panic” as the plan for the rest of the semester started to take shape. Faculty, the vast majority of whom had no experience whatsoever with “virtual,” “remote,” or “distance” learning, were being asked to quickly adapt their classes to an online platform, playing out in microcosm the same scenario that had become the subject of countless articles, chat rooms, special issues of academic journals, Facebook groups, and blogs. Those discussions—about contingency plan learning, makeshift learning, making-the-best-of-it-learning—grew no less virulently than the virus itself. It was “panic-gogy,” as Sean Michael Morris, director of the Digital Pedagogy Lab and senior instructor in Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado, Boulder, put it.
Toward the end of the last day of face-to-face classes at DePauw, a senior music student, who was working with me on their (this student’s preferred pronoun) honors thesis, came to my office, pulling with them a nearly empty suitcase that had been filled with their extraordinary signature handmade hats. They’d been giving the hats out to lucky recipients all day, a much-needed gesture of whimsy. They described the unexpected sweetness and vulnerability of the liminal space in which we’d all found ourselves. How suddenly it seemed we now stopped and listened when we asked others, “How are you?” How the myriad impromptu jam sessions that students formed reminded them of what they were most passionate about—being and playing and creating together. In this liminal space, this student told me, “we rediscovered our priorities … and going to class wasn’t one of them.”
“I’m just afraid it will all go back to the way it was before,” they said, “the way we’re spending time together now is so much more authentic, so much more real.”
There was also a palpable antagonism in the air. That antagonism had generally been latent in the structure of top-down classroom dynamics, but now it was magnified and laid bare by the stress the structure was under. This dynamic led to a kind of standoff. The perceived defiance of these shifting (or crystallizing) student priorities was met by the draconian measures of some faculty members, an insistence that the students’ priorities should remain centered on the classroom, and in some cases, on course material entirely disconnected from the frightening and ever-shifting reality that was changing by the hour. Students described a refrain that they kept hearing in the plans that were evolving for their “online” learning: a need to devise strategies that would keep them from cheating. The default assumption from faculty seemed to be that students would resort to academic dishonesty. It was a stark either-or assumption writ large: either we (the faculty) keep them (the students) in line and focused on the task at hand, or everything will fall apart and the course material will go unlearned.
We include these idiosyncratic details to suggest that, in the small liberal arts colleges that the two of us call home, everything was already in the mix even before the semester was brought to a screeching halt by the coronavirus pandemic. The vestiges of tradition stubbornly asserted themselves on that chapel wall, in the pushback against that stubborn tradition in the form of the newer portraits, in the absence of student faces from the portrait collection of institutional representatives, in the expectations that students would cheat, in the students’ explicit naming of the fact that classes weren’t a priority, and in the profound ambivalence that something sweet and beautiful could happen even in the midst of the antagonism that always, always seemed to be humming in the background. Rebecca Barrett Fox’s blog post, “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online,” is a time-capsule-worthy artifact in this regard. Her post, and its intentionally provocative title (one angry reader called it “clickbait”), set off a slew of responses. The majority of readers found her advice to be a relief, practical and compassionate, but a vocal minority was clearly incensed by her charge to lower expectations and resist change. The post’s comment section is, unfortunately, a study in the lack of civility, full of accusatory, demeaning inflections and the zero-sum language and either-or thinking that too often mark the way faculty members talk to one another and to students, pandemic or not. It also points to how empty the term “student-centered” has become. Virtually every comment includes some version of the term, but these versions are often radically at odds with one another. This is a perfect example of the way that even though higher education may have come screeching to a halt, the nature of the conversations we were having in this “halted” moment mimicked the ones we had been having all along. And, along with the student of the extraordinary hats, both Steve and I share the fear that everything will go back to “the way it was before” once this is all over. This is not a place we want to go back to.
Adventures in Virtual Learning
The series of emails leading up to the closure of DePauw’s campus tell a story of tempered caution, a warding off of the seemingly not-terribly-present-danger of being blindsided by a pandemic. On January 24, the college’s office of communications sent a message to the entire community on “coronavirus awareness and prevention,” providing “key resources” and CDC recommendations (primarily with regard to “avoiding non-essential travel to Wuhan, China”).