Chapter 6. Pandemic Ponderings & Reflections

Beginning in the middle of February 2020, many of us from various leadership teams across UVA attended countless meetings on what COVID would bring our way. How bad was it? How bad could it get? What did we need to do? A brief few weeks later, it became clear to me that we would do what other colleges and universities were starting to—we would send our students home for what was initially four weeks, then six weeks, then until the end of the term, then the end of summer, and eventually until the end of the summer 2021 term. We were in a global pandemic and we lacked leadership at the national level. While initially we all were sure we would be back by April 15, or May 1, 2020, at the latest, the return to in-person work (at least for a few days each week) did not occur until August 2021. I, like many others, was unsure what the “new normal” would be. And none of us can really know what the long-term impacts of social isolation and online learning will be.

Much of this chapter was written at the height of the pandemic and then revised. I therefore made the decision to switch to the past tense for most of this chapter as it was awkward to flip back and forth between past and present tense. Despite the use of the past tense, most of the first part of this chapter was written at the height of the pandemic.

The Beginning of the Pandemic

In my administrative office of approximately 28 assistant deans, lecturers, and staff, people began asking me:

We are not really closing down, right?

How will we do our jobs?

Will we keep our jobs? Take a pay cut?

What does this mean for us?

Our technical support person sent me an urgent message, saying, “It would be a good idea to ensure everybody’s laptop is VPN (Virtual Private Network) ready, and I need to get everyone set up on Teams and Zoom.” Teams and Zoom were not complete mysteries to me; I had attended several Zoom meetings recently for non-COVID related reasons, but I was not a regular user. I was familiar with Teams, but again, not a frequent user. Soon, our work lives (and most of our personal lives) would exist entirely via Teams, Zoom, FaceTime, email, phone, and text. On March 9, 2020, everyone in my office packed up their most-needed books and papers, as well as their plants and other personal items, and headed home. We assumed we would return to our offices in four to six weeks.

Like many people, I thought it would be nice to work from home for a few weeks. I thought I could sneak in a few house-related tasks and chores early in the morning or between meetings. No one knew yet how bad things would become. I was among those fortunate enough to head home to a nice, safe living space with reliable internet. I recognize how lucky I was (and am). Though I am an extrovert and love being with family and friends more than anything, I have never feared being alone. I can always find things to do. In addition, I was so busy for those three semesters, that I never felt lonely. I never thought that I would work from home for three semesters and then be in only a few days a week for the next two terms.

My foolish idea of getting anything done, including grabbing a cup of coffee or food from my kitchen on some days, never happened. Life became a series of endless days of back-to-back meetings on Zoom and Teams as emails poured in, Teams dinged with chats, and texts came in continuously. However, I did remind myself daily (especially as things got harder) that I was healthy and would hope to stay that way, that my children were healthy, that I had a nice home, food, and a job. I could even see my children a bit as they were both within driving distance. I would eventually develop a routine of getting groceries, filling my car with gas, and completely quarantining for 14 days (except for walks with a friend, outside and masked) so I could visit my children for one day. I would drive straight to their home, visit, and drive straight back. Again, I knew I was very lucky. I also met friends outside, six feet apart, through much of the pandemic.

As a College Academic Dean and Professor who works daily with college-age students, I could not help but think back to my college years and wonder how different my college experience would have been if I had been forced out of my dorm room and back into my parents’ house. I would have been scared, miserable, and horribly stressed. I would have felt completely isolated except for a landline phone. At that time, there was no internet, no smart phones, no Zoom, limited TV channels, no recording technology—just one land line phone to connect me to my friends. I would not have been able to swim, which has always kept me sane and balanced. I assume the semester would have been canceled as there would have been no technology to allow for distance learning or online classes. I would likely have had to work for my father when his business reopened, and I do not know if I would ever have been able to escape that life and get back to college. Even worse, his salons would have closed for some period of time, which would have increased his level of anxiety, anger, and his fits of rage. Home would have been difficult for me as I know it was for others, especially so many women and children trapped in abusive situations. My life would have been so different. So, I reminded myself daily that, while Zoom fatigue was real, meeting with my office on Teams was not the same as in person, and “Zoom wine” was not the same as an in-person happy hour, I was incredibly grateful because I was able to work, and to work safely, from my home.

Our lives were (and will continue to be) permanently changed because of the COVID pandemic, but we will not know how for years. Will young children be able to catch up in school? Will their socialization skills lag or will they be okay? Will middle-school aged children be okay? While students in high school and college are better suited to do many things online, what about hands-on classes like science labs, music, dance, theater, and art? And what about their social connections? I have friends whose children were thriving because they are introverted and loved learning at home away from daily social pressures and bullying. I also have friends whose children were slowly “drowning,” so to speak, because of the social isolation.

Some people gained more quality family time; for others the abuse at home escalated. My own children, recently married, spent quality time with their newborn sons, while they jokingly worried that their children might only “bark” or “meow” or that they would talk to people the way they talk to Alexa, shouting commands like “Alexa, shut the door!” or “Alexa, play music!” My friends whose parents were in the last years or even decade of their lives worried that their parents would not be able to enjoy their lives as before. They also wondered if and when they would see them again.

I also wondered what changes would remain. How would the workplace change? Education? Medicine? Travel? Would anything go back to the way it was before? Would people who lost their jobs get them back? It was just several months into the pandemic when some businesses went fully remote, the owners giving up their leases as they realized their employees could work remotely without paying rent for a physical space. There were so many questions with no answers.

And then there was the political chaos, the racial tensions, the social justice movements, the shootings of so many Black men and women, mass shootings, the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, and the loss of so many loved ones. On top of the pandemic, it was hard not to feel that we were (and I think still are) terribly broken as a country and that our democracy was (and is) at stake.

This chapter is about what I witnessed over the 20+ months of the pandemic. My observations fall into three main categories with several observations in each. The first set of observations centers on what many schools saw as a dramatic increase in cheating.¹ The second has to do with increases in parental intervention (while hard to believe it could increase, it did). As stated earlier, we are well past “Blackhawk parenting” and into the “snowplow” stage, and on our way to a stage not yet defined. A friend recently told me her colleague calls these parents “curling parents.” Like snowplow parents, they are out in front rapidly and frantically clearing and modifying the path ahead. The third set of observations highlights the significant rise in people treating a college degree as a commodity. Finally, COVID had, and continues to have, a significant impact on student mental health which is discussed briefly in the summary and elsewhere in the book.

The Increase in Academic Cheating

As the pandemic extended on (and on) and students were learning remotely, certain departments at my university (primarily STEM programs) reported increases in cheating. This increase also happened at other schools.² As the number of sites offering “help” grew, so did the number of sites that provide online proctoring software. I will not “name names” here, especially since there are lawsuits pending against those who claim these sites do more harm than good. If you do a quick search, you will find the types of sites I am referring to.

Several departments at my college knew students were cheating, but we were at an impasse since no one could identify the individuals. Some website services were emailing out URLs and emails (which led nowhere since the email addresses were anonymous aliases). How the students were cheating was also hard to determine though faculty imagined it included working with others, looking up answers, using various sites to compute the answers, etc. The faculty were torn between wanting to stop cheating by insisting every student keep their camera on and knowing that many students did not want to turn on their cameras since they did not want others to see themselves or their surroundings.

Students were pushing back against online proctoring software saying it was intrusive, embarrassing, and/or humiliating and that it violated their right to privacy. Some students filed lawsuits. In January 2021, for example, a student filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University “for violating an Illinois law on biometric information privacy.”³ The suit argued that Northwestern collects and then owns the biometric data collected by the online proctoring software used and does not give the student a choice on if it can be collected and how it can be used. Another lawsuit was filed against DePaul University in March 2021.⁴ This lawsuit states that a 2008 Illinois privacy law was designed to “protect against invasion of privacy, identity theft and other economic injuries…”⁵ The suit claimed that, like Northwestern, DePaul violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act because it did not ask for consent before collecting and storing student data.

Was there really an increase in cheating, or did we just not know how frequently it was happening before? If cheating did increase, why? Was it stress? Was it easier to cheat in an online class?

The reasons for cheating are many and somewhat obvious, at least to those of us in education. They include, but are not limited to:

Pressure to earn excellent grades
Fear of parental retribution for poor grades
Misbelief that all As gets you a better job
Lack of time management skills
Lack of organization to study
Poor study habits
Fear of failure
Poor planning
Boredom
Opportunity

Cheating irks the faculty who are trying to teach and who want the focus to be on learning and not test scores. Yet, we seem unable to move away from testing and grades.⁶ At UVA, we have had conversations about what eliminating grades in the first year would look like and about “grade forgiveness” policies. While traditional grading persists at most colleges, some are trying alternatives such as “ungrading.”⁷

Parental Overstep: The Next Level

My experiences, and those of my colleagues, was that parental interference reached a whole new level beyond “snowplow parenting” during the pandemic. Parents sat in the background of classes, listened in on phone meetings, and they sat in on Zoom calls. What comes after helicopter parent, Blackhawk parent, and snowplow parent? What are their children called?

According to Julie Lythcott-Haims,⁸ millennials in the workplace have a few names and these names work for college as well. There are “orchids” (because they can’t survive outside a greenhouse) or “teacups” (because they chip easily and are therefore ruined). Lythcott-Haims says that educator Joe Maruszczak calls them “veal” because they are raised in a controlled environment and led to metaphorical slaughter;⁹ they cannot cope on their own without parental involvement.

Below are a few examples of the kinds of “issues” that were brought to me and to my office during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many more I could tell; I selected those examples that best represent the kinds of situations that cropped up, that illustrate how much worse behavior became during COVID, and that are different from the examples in Chapter 5. Though in the same genre as the examples presented in Chapter 5, these situations are somewhat different because they occurred under the stress of the global pandemic. Again, I cannot say for certain that COVID was the cause of these somewhat extreme cases of interference; it is possible that COVID only brought to light what was already happening.

You’re Wrong About Everything

At around 8:30 one evening as I was trying desperately to walk away from my computer, I received a new email message. In the world of overbearing parents, this message may have won a prize for the longest and most dramatic email. The email was an incredibly long rant filled with details criticizing an instructor, their method of teaching, their content, their exam (with detailed responses to several of the questions from the exam), their textbook, and the entire academic department. I cut and pasted it into a Word document—it was five pages long, single spaced. I read it twice. With a level of detail about their child’s class, the syllabus, and an exam that no parent needs, this parent picked apart everything while completely missing the concept of academic and intellectual freedom. They presented questions from a recent test along with their own reasons and rationale for why these questions were phrased incorrectly and neglected key concepts from the course. They also included statements on why their child’s answers to these questions were correct (though the instructor said they were not). Because of the level of detail in the email, I cannot share the best examples from the letter and still maintain anonymity. Here is one of the more generic comments that was included, referring to a question on the exam:

“This is a good question in terms of it referring to a particular ‘principle’ or theory so that the student knows the perspective of the intended response, but why is the order important? In any case, my [child] claims to have stated them in the proper order, and the TA¹⁰ did not explain any error, neither did [the professor] upon appeal.“

Imagine five pages of comments like this but with much more specific detail.

In my almost 30 years of working in the Dean’s office, I had never seen a letter like this. All I could think, as I usually do, was that this could not be healthy for the child. How will this roughly 20-year-old person ever navigate their life? At the same time, I also wondered if the student even knew the parent had written the email.

In the end, nothing changed. The student had already appealed their grade to the instructor and their incorrect answers were explained to them. Parents cannot submit appeals of any kind for their child. The department chair wrote a response attempting to explain academic freedom and the student’s right to appeal. At some point, we all had to stop responding and the grade stood as posted.

My Mistake is Your Fault

For almost two months, the university addressed a complaint by a parent whose child missed a key deadline. This deadline was well advertised, the school sent reminders about it through email and texts, and almost 500 other students accomplished the task. However, this student never contacted an advisor or dean, and their parent went to an external web source (i.e., not a University-sponsored website) for information. In addition, the error was a bit costly financially.

When I heard the family’s name, it was familiar to me. This same parent-child duo complained to the Dean’s office four years earlier over another issue and a smaller amount of money. It reminded me that I had spent almost 30 minutes on the phone with the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences on Mother’s Day four years earlier, while I was with my children and their significant others on a trip to Philadelphia, trying to sort out what this parent wanted.

The first time, the university ended up accommodating this parent and returning a small amount of money to them, money to which they were not entitled. They were not successful the second time around nor should they have been; they made the mistake. I can also add that this was not a family who was financially stressed.

“We” Can’t Figure This Out

Anecdotally, the number of emails using “we” certainly increased during COVID. In early June 2021, an email came in from the parent of a new transfer student—a student who had some college background regardless of whether they lived at home, in a dorm, or in an apartment.

Paraphrasing for anonymity, the start of the email went as follows:

We created a checklist based on the links you sent us (inserted below just as an FYI, no need to read). My child is working through them while awaiting the email about enrollment. We were hoping to watch these two webinars, but the links are invalid.

Below this was a lengthy list of the to-do items we sent to students, all color coded with various statuses and no doubt completed by the parent.

How will this young person succeed when they arrive on campus? Will their parent be keeping an assignment to-do list? Will they call multiple times a day to check in on their child? There is no scenario in which I see this as helpful and again, the message it sends to the student is, “I am doing this for you because you are not capable.”

How do I respond to these messages? I have learned that the response needs at least two things: (1) a sincere and empathetic acknowledgement of the problem and the stress it may be causing; and (2) a short answer that is direct and to the point. Here, again, I discovered that “less is always more.” I typically write directly to the student, copy the parent (or parents or guardians) who wrote, and offer our assistance to the student. FERPA prevents us from sharing information with a parent or guardian without the child confirming it is okay, but, more importantly, the student needs to take responsibility for their education. We rarely get responses back from anyone, parent or child. We did not get a response back in this case either.

Call the President!

It never ceases to amaze me how many times a parent asks a question, receives an answer they do not like, and then immediately sends an email complaining to the President of the University. Most of the time, the complaint is over something very trivial. Here is one example.

In 2021, my school, the College of Arts & Sciences, was in the process of implementing its first general education reform in just over 40 years. We had a three-year plan to scale up such that, after that time, all new students would enroll in a series of amazing classes we call “The Engagements.” As we scaled up the curriculum, we created two “pathways”—some students enrolled in the four 2-credit classes, and some took other classes. A parent wanted his child “out of these useless 2-credit classes.” The request was made to us, but it came in too late (we had a short window in which students were able request a change), so it was denied. The parent went right to the President. I am grateful that in my time as Associate Dean, the President’s office always backed us up. None of our decisions are ever made lightly; they are always made with much thought and after many conversations. We always strive to be fair to all students. The same was true in this case; we again responded to the student that it was too late to change pathways.

“I’m a Lawyer”

This is my absolute favorite line from a parent or guardian and the number of calls we received from parents who said they are lawyers increased during the pandemic. The call typically starts with something like, “I’m Mrs. Smith, Donna’s mother, and I am a lawyer. I’m calling about [fill in the blank]. This is a problem and I want it fixed.”
Three things always enter my mind. First, I wish I had a law degree so I could say “Really? So am I! Where did you go to law school?” I often think about finding a law school that would award me an honorary degree just so I can say this (not really, but you get the idea). Second, since I do not have an honorary degree, I wish I could respond, “Interesting, I’m Rachel, I’m an archaeologist.” And my third thought is that I have never started a conversation with “Hello, I’m Rachel and I’m an archaeologist with a Ph.D. in anthropology,” so you can guess why someone is saying they are a lawyer from the start.

My response, however, is typically something like “Thank you for calling, but if you are calling me as a lawyer, I need to end this conversation and direct you to the University’s Legal Counsel.”

The response is always, “Oh no, I’m just calling as Donna’s mother.”

The call that came in during July 2021 was from a parent, who started by saying they were a lawyer, and who claimed that between them, their spouse, their siblings, and their several children, they had over 130 years of higher education experience and thus knew a lot more than we did. They went on to complain about something quite simple and something the student should and could have been handling. Since we had the parent’s name, we looked them up to find they had been a lawyer, but had been disbarred. We asked that the student call us with their questions; they never did.

“We” Want to Enroll in a Class

The following message was sent to the College of Arts & Science’s email address in June 2021; the class and names have been changed to protect the identity of the sender.

Hi,

We are interested in enrolling a first-year student into ANTH 1010. The web site says to add this class for enrollment, but we get an error message.

Please advise.

Thank you,
Sam Doe

I wanted to respond saying how wonderful it was that the parent and child were both enrolling in the same class and could take some classes together. But, I also wanted to keep my job. So, my response to the parent was that their child needed to manage this, and that they could enroll in the class when it was their time to do so and if there was space. I must again ask how these young people are ever going to learn how to navigate the world with this level of interference during college.

What Class Should We Take?

I have no doubt that COVID increased the degree and intensity of parental intervention. Similar to the message above, this email also came in during the summer of 2021; the name and class have been changed to protect the identity of the sender. The conversation with the student’s parent went back and forth several times; the student never responded.

Following this initial exchange, the parent wrote five more times demanding answers and eventually responded in all capital letters with something like: “JUST ANSWER MY QUESTIONS!”

Why was this student unable to write an email to ask their own questions? How did we get to this place and why does it make me so frustrated? My frustration is more concern for these young people than anything else. I do not see how this helps the student and I do not know where it will lead. And I will again stress that when a parent does everything for their child, it sends the same message to them repeatedly—I am doing this for you because you are not capable of taking care of it yourself. Though we all wish it simply meant, “I just want to help you,” that is not the message the child receives.

The Commodification of Education (Take II)

This is a complex topic and, as I said earlier, one I cannot fully or sufficiently address in this book. I introduced the topic in Chapter 4, but I bring it up again here because the pandemic seemed, to me, to increase the idea of purchasing your education, degree, and diploma—of getting “your money’s worth.”

As colleges and universities across the country began to move all their classes online in March 2020, parents and students began demanding tuition refunds, accommodations, different grading options, late schedule changes, late grade changes, the deletion of failing grades, etc. On March 6, 2020, The New York Times published the article, “First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow.”¹¹ The article describes how the University of Washington moved its 50,000 students to online classes. Study abroad programs shut down and sent students home. Other programs were cancelled immediately because of their late start dates and some moved online. For many students, there would be no returning to college campuses after spring break.¹² The hope was that the situation would improve by the summer, but the online spring term rolled into online summer, fall 2020, and spring 2021.

“Online classes” and “online teaching” can mean many different things. There is certainly a huge difference between a very engaging seminar taught by a stellar faculty member and an asynchronous class in which the students watch recorded lectures, read posted materials, and submit assignments online. That said, even the latter can be done well and be an engaging class.

In spring 2020, the term was already well underway so, when we switched to remote learning, our students knew each other and they knew their instructors. There was a level of trust and engagement already established. In summer and fall 2020, and spring and summer 2021, that trust had to be created from scratch and built online. Some classes, like science labs, sculpture, dance, drawing, etc. were difficult or impossible to offer in an online format. Some were cancelled and some received permission to meet in person (with a smaller class size and social distancing). Some classes became better, some stayed the same, and some likely became worse. My own class, which I team taught with a wonderful colleague, moved seamlessly to Zoom. We were in the phase of the class where students were presenting their research projects so they could do that on Zoom, and we used the chat for the class to enter comments. We also used the “raise hand” function to keep track of who wanted to speak in class. While it was not the same, and we missed seeing them in person, it worked well.

Our most creative faculty made full use of Teams and Zoom with breakout rooms, whiteboard work, polling tools, etc. Inviting guest speakers became easier and, in many cases, free. Suddenly language classes could use Zoom to invite native speakers to talk with the class. Advanced seminars could bring in a range of people who were at the top of their fields to talk for 30, 60, or 90 minutes. The students became more comfortable in breakout room conversations. One of our anthropology faculty, Ira Bashkow, converted his lectures to podcasts and the students loved it.¹³ People got creative and good things resulted. However, there were still many families demanding tuition refunds, tuition reductions, and so on.

What is frustrating for many of us in higher education is that we know an online class that is developed and taught well will likely cost much more than delivering that same class in person. No one wanted to hear this response. Converting a class to an online format in one week was incredibly difficult, and there were some classes that no doubt delivered a lesser experience. And again, some labs, and drama, art, and music classes were cancelled because they could not be taught online.

In the end, while UVA did not refund or decrease tuition, they did something else. We offer a winter session, which we call January Term. It is a term in which students can take one three-credit class. Before COVID, several of these classes were study abroad classes leaving just after Christmas and returning a few days before the spring semester. That allowed for an abroad experience just over three weeks (not the same as a semester or a year, but still valuable). We also offered many classes on campus designed for this intensive format where classes met for four to five hours each day for eight to ten days. The university announced in fall 2020 that students who paid full time tuition that fall could take a winter session class in 2021 at no cost; those who paid full-time tuition in spring were eligible for a free class in our first summer session. All classes would be online and there would be no study abroad classes. Because we expected high enrollments, the university sent out a call for Faculty to create what they called Signature Classes. These classes would enroll 400 to 800 students with graduate students leading discussion sections of 30 students each. My colleague and I submitted a proposal which was accepted.

From the day we found out it was accepted in October 2020, we began preparing the class. We consulted with our Center for Teaching Excellence and the Learning Design & Technology groups for advice. We learned about specifications grading¹⁴ and decided to implement it. In the end, our class enrolled 440 undergraduate students, and we were assigned 17 graduate student teaching assistants and a head teaching assistant.

It was a wonderful and unusual experience. We wanted the class to be engaging, but we also needed to deliver content. We designed a structured format for each class, delivered over 10 days in two-hour sessions each day. Each session began with a 30- to 40-minute lecture for the entire class, followed by 50 minutes in breakout rooms with 18 students per group, each led by a teaching assistant (TA). The final 30 minutes were dedicated to completing a live, synchronous online assignment. We met with the TAs before and after each class to answer questions and make adjustments as needed. We dealt with the January 6 attack on the capital, staying on Zoom long after the class ended with our graduate students to help them (and ourselves) try to process what was happening and granted all our students extra time to complete their work. Coincidentally, it was the day I was lecturing about the collapse of prehistoric civilizations.

My colleague and I loved the experience, but were terrified to see our course evaluations. Did the students feel like they had engaged with us at all? Some came to our virtual office hours, but we did not get to meet the majority of students. We both had far less student contact than any prior class we taught. I did get to know a few students well, but not as many as I would have normally. Fortunately, the comments were positive. For example:

“This was one of the most interesting and engaging courses I have taken and if this course is available for future J–terms and taught by the same professors, I would highly recommend anyone to take it.”

The point is that online classes can be material thrown online quickly or they can be wonderful and engaging—the latter takes a lot of time, hard work, and money. Convincing parents of this difference was close to impossible.

I also must acknowledge that much of the college learning and social experience takes place outside of the classroom and that part of the experience did not exist during the pandemic. Though some clubs met online to stay in touch, these meetings could not replicate the in-person experience. Many students went part-time, and many took a leave of absence. I understood the reasons for those decisions. For those who stayed, many experienced some wonderful (though different) online, synchronous classroom experiences.

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and worsened problems already present in higher education. From accessibility and cost, to reliable internet, safe spaces to work, student privacy, housing and food insecurity, everything became more difficult for students, staff, and faculty.

Neuwirth et al. discuss the future of higher education in their 2020 article, “Reimagining higher education during and post-COVID-19: Challenges and opportunities.”¹⁵ They describe the many changes underway, issues around diversity, resource inequalities, and the issues concerning online education. For example, while many colleges poured resources into helping their faculty transition to online courses, often little help and guidance was directed to helping students figure out how to learn in the new virtual environment. Some classes were not all that different—one could argue a large lecture is a large lecture no matter whether it is online or in person. However, it is much harder to sleep in a large lecture hall than online. I know that during our winter session class we had students log into our class, mute their audio and video, and likely go back to sleep. When we moved students to discussion sections, there were always two to four students who were logged in, but not responsive to our verbal request to move. We would place these students in the waiting room, which meant they had to re-join the meeting and almost all would say, “So sorry, my internet froze.” While for a few students this may have been the truth, for the students who were not doing well, we knew that was likely not the case.

At my university, I saw the ongoing consequences of the policy changes we made to ease the burden on students—no probations, no suspensions, a lack of enforcement of “academic holds” that typically required a meeting with a dean to talk about an academic plan, and three semesters of the credit/no credit option for all classes, including requirements. For example, there was a student whom I will call Dylan who completed the fall 2019 term on academic probation. For the next three terms, Dylan took almost all their classes as credit/no credit¹⁶ and passed six credits in three terms, instead of what would normally have been 45 credits pre-COVID. In the fall of 2021, when we returned to normal policies, Dylan earned two Ds and three Fs and was academically suspended. By then, the student had used seven of their allotted eight full time semesters; while they should have earned around 105 credits, Dylan had just 63 credits. The student lost their financial aid and had little to no chance of ever earning a UVA degree. The hole that the student dug was so deep, I saw no way for them to climb out. While Dylan’s was an extreme case, there were other students in similar situations—so low on hours that they could not earn a degree and/or loss of financial aid.

While I said multiple times to several people that we will pay the price for all these leniencies, I do not know what else we could have done. Some students were able to sit out their one-year suspension and come back. Others had to take what credit they earned and try to complete a degree elsewhere. While some higher education professionals argued that we needed to continue to let things slide, I agree with the following words by Johnathan Malesic in his The New York Times opinion piece, “My College Students are Not OK.”¹⁷

“Higher education is now at a turning point. The accommodations for the pandemic can either end or be made permanent. The task won’t be easy, but universities need to help students rebuild their ability to learn. And to do that, everyone involved—students, faculties, administrators and the public at large—must insist on in-person classes and high expectations for fall 2022 and beyond.”¹⁸

If we are ever going to get back to something close to pre-COVID standards, we must start somewhere and there is likely no time like the present. Malesic also talks about the experiences of several faculty members, specifically what it is like to teach to little circles with initials. He mentions a Spanish instructor who “began calling her students her ‘divine little silent circles’… because she would typically see only their initials in a circle on her computer screen, none of them speaking.”¹⁹ This behavior may be okay in a large lecture; in my large online signature class, I could not see more than a few students at a time anyway. However, in a smaller class of, say, less than 30 students, I encouraged and pleaded with students to keep their video on when they could. I wanted to see them, I wanted them to see me and each other, and I wanted to know if they were engaged. Most of the administration agreed that we could not require students to keep their video on. Some students were in housing conditions they did not want anyone else to see. Some were in cars, libraries, bathrooms or any quiet place where they could find internet access. Though we were able to purchase “hot spots” for many students and faculty, those devices are not perfect and anyone without reliable internet struggled.

It goes without saying that the years since March 2020 have been difficult and challenging (and that is an understatement). It is my strong hope that higher education will recover and be stronger and better than it was before. There is a great deal of work to do to get there. In the next chapter, I provide some advice for how I think students can best succeed in college.

References