Should Colleges Reopen?

This piece is part of The Great Reopening Debate.

Mission Possible

Statements of purpose are there for a reason.

By Barry Glassner

I’ll get to should in a minute. First, a prediction about what will happen.

A person or a small group will determine whether the college opens, often on idiosyncratic grounds. Typically, the board chair or a subset of trustees holds that power. In other places, it’s the president. In some, particular faculty have enough clout, whether by virtue of election, connection, or being top grant-getters. At some institutions, the decision will be the state governor’s.

These decision makers will be guided in part by questions of safety and feasibility, but their fears and self-interest will play a role as well. Presidents want to keep their job or leave a legacy. Faculty want to keep their labs open or ensure that teaching loads don’t increase.

Those in power may or may not take seriously what emergency task forces on campus recommend, but they’ll listen closely to people they depend on. Governors will pay heed to aides and pollsters, board chairs and presidents to big donors, faculty to prominent colleagues.

Personal experiences over the last few months will influence them as well. Someone who has been quarantined with a prickly adolescent may be particularly amenable to getting students back on campus.

How should these decisions be made? I suggest they be based on two documents. The first, Anthony Fauci’s interview with The Chronicle, provides general parameters to follow regardless of campus sentiment or political pressures. For some colleges, those guidelines alone can resolve the question. Financially strapped universities that lack resources to open safely need to stay closed. So do wealthier colleges located in communities with high infection rates.

Everywhere else requires additional guidelines.

As luck would have it, not only do those guidelines exist, no constituency can rightfully object to them, and they’re conveniently located in a document posted on the college website: the mission statement.

I sampled several dozen from disparate institutions across the country. Most included at least a couple of these directives: Ensure student success; enroll students from all backgrounds; engage beyond the classroom; innovate; provide knowledge to meet societal needs; and enable students to lead principled lives.

How great it would be if decision makers relied on their mission statements for direction. A college committed to enrolling students from diverse backgrounds might canvass first-generation students and delay reopening if many can’t return for financial or family reasons.

Conversely, a college might open if its mission emphasizes student engagement beyond the classroom in activities the institution can’t effectively move online.

A college whose mission statement stresses innovation would ask whether it's better prepared to come up with groundbreaking ways to operate that allow it to open, or with pioneering approaches to online education.

If ever there’s a time to be mission driven, it is amid fear and uncertainty.

Barry Glassner is a former president of Lewis & Clark College and the author of The Culture of Fear.