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Saturday, May 8, 2021

COVID Chronicles XVII: Surviving COVID and Lack of Leadership.

 

COVID on Campus, Post COVID Morale, College Finances and COVID decision making, COVID and the liberal arts, COVID and Education, a psychoanalytic perspective.





I Survived!  I turned in my grades yesterday and the (first?) year of COVID is over.  After better than a year of teaching first from isolation and then in a classroom of masked students who migrated to the zoom screen that was also in the room, I survived without (I don’t think) having gotten infected (one of my peers did return from China with a severe cold that I caught shortly before the shutdown.  I was absolutely drained of energy for four or five days.  Was it COVID?  Who knows…).  I am now vaccinated and preparing to teach a summer class.

I was anxious about being in the classroom.  Earlier, I wrote, snidely, about the Catholic Educators stance that we should empathize with the Catholic administrators who would be sending their teachers to their deaths in the classroom and would be feeling guilty about that in a year.  We didn’t die.  Or at least I didn’t.  And there is a tendency, then, to doubt that my anxiety was real.  See, the thing you feared didn’t occur so the feeling that you had that it would wasn’t a fear of an actual thing, so your anxiety wasn’t valid.  That’s the crazy making aftermath (to this point… We ain’t out of the woods yet).

And yet my anxiety was valid.  It was risky to be in the classroom.  And it was risky to invite students from all over the country to come to campus and live together in close quarters and to come to class which I was mandated to teach in person – though the students ultimately were able to choose whether or not to come to class.

How did we get to that point?  The Jesuits whose order is responsible for our school have a number of watchwords to describe their educational mission.  Cura Personalis is a cornerstone of the approach.  This translates from the Latin into care for the person, and the personal touch is something that we are encouraged to engage in with all of our students.  We should see them as individuals and care for their needs.

A less well publicized aspect of the Jesuit mission is Cura Apostolica: care for the institution.  Last summer these two values – care for the individual students (and faculty and staff members) was in conflict with the care for the institution.  We rely on income from room and board to meet our operating expenses – not just paying the mortgage on the dorms and buying the food we serve in the cafeteria, but the “profit” from this helps to pay teachers’ salaries.  This situation arose because we have steeply discounted our very high price tag tuition – by offering scholarships that allow us to compete with other schools.

To save the institution, the leadership of the institution decided to bring all students onto campus to live and learn together.  Having made this financial decision, the President and his executive committee tasked the middle managers of the institution with making the experience safe for students, faculty and staff.

Our President is ending his tenure this year.  He has been President for twenty years.  Like all leaders, he has strengths that prepare him for his task and he has liabilities that he brings to it.  He was a highly sought after teacher when he was a member of the faculty, something that he did for years before he became President.  This means that he has retained a sense of what it means to educate a student, not just run a University.  He is a Jesuit Priest, so he knows the order and is connected to it.  Not only that, but as a Jesuit, he does not answer to the local bishop, but to the order, and so he was able to assert some autonomy from dictates that the Church might impose on the University.  He is also a very charismatic speaker, something that he retained from his days as a teacher.  He has a rhythm and a cadence to his speech that is directly related to the functioning of his mind, and you can literally hear him (apparently confidently) thinking as he speaks.

But he is also an uncertain man who has been charged with caring for a very large institution.  He is a history professor who is not so certain about how to make his way around a balance sheet.  He is, despite his seeming confidence, quite anxious about the responsibility he has been entrusted with.  And this translates into his blowing in the wind.  Agreeing with whomever is in the room with him at the moment, but when that room changes, so does he.  And in this crisis, he decided to manage his anxiety about running the institution by erring on the side of fiscal conservation – valuing Cura Apostolica over Cura Personalis.

Fortunately, when he tasked the “middle managers” – the Deans and Associate Deans and the Building and Grounds managers and the Directors of the Health and Wellness offices on campus – with keeping us safe, they rose to the occasion.  They procured the needed equipment to be able to broadcast from classrooms so that we could teach virtually and in person simultaneously, so that the number of people in a room would not exceed CDC guidelines.  They made sure that there was a mask policy on campus that was enforced – not with penalties, but with cultural pressure.  And they set up a reporting system of sorts to track those who became ill and those who had been exposed to those who were ill.

So not only did I survive, but, for the most part, at least as far as I know, we survived.  We were all given a pay cut.  We wore masks and, when we met individually with students, we met by zoom.  We kept the reported levels of illness down despite the high numbers in the community around us. 

The President ordered staff who could work from home onto campus to do their jobs to enhance the esprit de corps – something that made no sense to me.  Endangering people’s lives does not increase their motivation to work.  The Provost, a woman who has not been in a classroom in a very long time, derided us as incompetent teachers for complaining about the complications involved in teaching to a classroom that was split between in person and online – all while wearing a mask.

Was this the best move for the institution?  Fiscally, yes.  Towards the end of both semesters this year it was apparent that students were fried.  Faculty morale is very hard to judge.  There are very few opportunities to congregate – and virtual congregation does not lead to the kind of private discussions that allow us to read each other’s experiences.  The students have been isolated.  Classrooms that have served as connecting points – places where people would talk before and after class and gather in the parking lot to continue a discussion – have two or maybe three students in them – the rest on zoom with the majority having their cameras off. 

I don’t have a good read on how students experienced dorm and apartment living this year.  My guess is that it was strained and odd.  We had a graduation gathering yesterday to celebrate our graduate students’ achievements.  It was by zoom.  You’d think that would mean that all of the students could attend, but we actually had fewer there than when we have an in person event and especially our Doctoral graduates have had to fly back from other parts of the country.

We will have a new president starting in July.  The first woman and first non-Jesuit president of our University, she will be assuming the reins of an institution that will need to rebuild its culture.  She comes from having been a president at an institution that was struggling financially.  She slashed and burned there – firing employees, selling off artwork, and reducing the tuition to attract more students.  She also dismantled the liberal arts core that has been at the center of the teaching at our University and Jesuit Institutions generally.  Essentially, she repackaged her former institution as a vocationally focused institution rather than one of higher learning.  Our board, in hiring her, seems intent on continuing a movement away from the liberal arts based curriculum that has been our hallmark for close to 200 years.  Could she do that here?  Do we have the cultural will to prevent her from doing that?  Especially in the wake of a year of disconnection and undermining our motivation in a variety of ways, I think we are vulnerable to a leader who could, if she chooses, whip us into submission.

So, one of the questions that the pandemic poses is what impact does social isolation and chronic anxiety have on a culture.  Nationally, I hear Joe Biden saying to parking lots full of cars that are honking horns that he is excited about the opportunities that present themselves at this moment.  It is hard for me to see him as a vibrant man comfortably radiating the enthusiasm that he maintains he is projecting.  I am more likely to see a tired man in front of a tired nation proposing an agenda that I’m not sure we are emotionally prepared to buy into, and I fear that if his enthusiasm is not met, naysayers – those who would simply dismantle what has served us so well for so long – will get the upper hand again.  So I want to weakly cheer Joe on – but is my heart in it?  Are others?

If the faculty decides to fight for what at least some of us value, will we have the vigor to pursue that fight?  At least Joe Biden – for another 3 and ½ years – controls the levers of power (though some of those levers may slip from his hands in a year and a half).  Locally, we may be confronting a president who more effectively controls the levers of power (she will answer only to a board that is largely made up of successful business people who have been big donors and have more interest in the bottom line than in the education of our students).  Can we make a case for what we believe in?

I suppose I feel this both as a psychoanalyst in a culture that wants quick fixes, as a faculty member in a department of psychology that is, like virtually all departments of psychology, convinced that a science of humanity is more dependent on numbers than empathic connection, and as a citizen who is concerned that we are shortsightedly amassing wealth while destroying the planet.  I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson, and the idea that “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”  Finding those shared truths involves much more convincing and energy and verve than self-evidence would suggest – of course for his group it meant going to war.  Will we do that to achieve our ends?

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  For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

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