Blog: What Are We Going to Do This Year? Will Things Be Different?

Blog: What Are We Going to Do This Year? Will Things Be Different?

6/23/20

All my readers and I have to be focused on the same overriding preoccupation: what are we going to do this fall when our students “return?”

Yes, and no. When I ask myself that question, yes I am thinking about how we restructure and plan for live instruction cum social distancing and hopefully widespread masking and handwashing. I am also wondering like everyone I listen and talk to whether or not we will be able to “make it” through an abbreviated fall term before we have to revert to our spring 2020 rush to go virtual? These are hugely consequential questions.

 But, I am not only thinking about our plans for combining the college experience with Covid 19. What I find myself most interested in is what plans are we making at both the institutional level and the level of our own individual sphere of influence over interaction with our students about how are we going to engage with our students about what has been going on in our country since March and what will surely be transpiring this fall, a US presidential election season like no other.

Our students will be finally returning to most of our campuses not only after lockdown but after the murder of Mr. George Floyd, massive social protest and demonstrations, initial but still largely failed attempts to modify US practices towards policing, and further polarization within our population around all the issues that divide us. Hey, I am a recovering former student of the 1960’s campus protest era. I remember what that was like! I was personally engaged in the Vietnam era military experience and then when I was a free man, honorably discharged upon completing my service, involved in nascent civil rights activism in a small southern city which got me fired from my first full-time academic job. I remember vividly and how proudly our college students were in effecting significant social and political change in our country. What power they exercised! They secured changes in all sorts of campus policies and practices. And we have never been the same since. How do we think we got all these students serving on our committees? Because they rightfully demanded and were granted seats at our tables.

But during our current period of activism up til now the students were not in session “on campus” in the traditional sense of that connotation. But they are coming back. Surely, they will be participatory in what is transpiring to seize the opportunities this moment of crisis presents to secure meaningful change. The outcomes of the choices we make today as a nation will have far greater effect on our students than it will on many of us who teach, advise, mentor, support them.

I have long resigned myself to the observation that most students will put up with just about anything we dish out. They have been afraid to flex their muscles because they were understandably concerned about their ultimate employability. Or they were too busy working to notice and care about how the system really wasn’t working for them. Those days are gone. We are not going to go back to that. This cultural shift is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle.

So how are we/you going to engage with students around what is going on?

What are you going to allow, encourage, require, to be discussed in your classes?

What are you going to ask them to read?

What news sources are you going to ask them to follow?

Will you meet and talk with them outside of class?

How will the realities of the external society affect your conversations with them in your advising and career planning sessions?

How can you help provide them with a safe place to test out ideas, questions, that many will not be able to float at home?

What kind of student organizations/activities would you be willing to serve as an official “advisor” for?

What kind of examples are we going to set for being college educated engaged citizens?

How involved are we willing to become?

How can we most appropriately and ethically exercise our great professional freedom as academics through the gift of academic freedom?

For those of us with power, especially us tenured, full professors, how are we going to responsibly use our power to advance the unfinished civil rights movement for all of our students who have far less power, means, security, maturity, freedom than we do? This is our moment too.

The students are going to expect this fall to be different. They are going to be watching us so see what kind of examples we set. They are going to be seeking us out for thought leadership.

So I maintain this is a new opportunity for many of us to make contributions to a new kind of “student success.” One in which our students are more likely to participate in the preservation and strengthening of our democracy that is now under such great internal threats. This is the kind of “student success” I am most interested in this fall.

There is so much work started by my generation in the 60’s but definitely left unfinished.  Until now.

So what are you going to do differently this fall?