How a Small College Thinks It Can Survive Covid-19

I knocked on the door of Quinby House, the 1867 Italianate mansion that serves as the president’s residence at Illinois’s Monmouth College, then quickly scampered back down the steps to wait at the bottom, a good 12 feet from the door, as Clarence R. Wyatt opened it and invited me inside.

I shook my head. Even though I had traveled all over the Midwest last week, I had tried to limit my exposure, as much as possible, to the coronavirus. I was on my way back from a road trip to Minnesota, traveling through Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio — a landscape dotted with private institutions that have had to adapt to declining enrollment, questions from students about the colleges’ return on investment, and increasing competition from public institutions. This fall would bring unprecedented challenges.

Wyatt directed me to the patio in the backyard, where I met Mark Willhardt, the vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, and Duane Bonifer, the college’s communications director. I brought some local craft beer; Wyatt, a Kentuckian, provided the bourbon. We sat six feet apart as the sun went down, talking about higher education in the Covid-19 era and how a small Midwestern college would navigate a very unusual fall, even as it planned to open in a couple of weeks for an in-person semester.

Monmouth has its vulnerabilities: 900 students, a $110-million endowment, and a location — in a little hamlet of 9,000 people, with the nearest city in Galesburg, population 31,000 — in a depressed part of western Illinois, a state that has been a leading exporter of students in recent years. But Wyatt and Willhardt insisted that the college could weather the year, relying on its small size, long history, growing endowment, and solid status in the community as strengths to draw on.

“We are not MacMurray,” Wyatt said sternly, referring to the small private college two hours to the south that announced its closure in the spring. That institution, with a tiny $5-million endowment, had mismanaged its academic programs and money, Wyatt and Willhardt said. (Monmouth and MacMurray share a Scottish heritage; after the closure, Monmouth invited MacMurray’s students to “pack your tartan” and journey north to join the Fighting Scots.)

Monmouth’s recent years, by contrast, had seen the college gaining momentum: It has raised $60 million for its endowment in the past several years, with a $75-million goal by the end of 2022. Monmouth’s profile has gone up in several rankings, and the college draws from a more geographically diverse pool than it did five years ago. To remain competitive, Monmouth has established transfer agreements with Carl Sandburg College, a two-year institution in Galesburg that is free to local high-school students with a C average or better.

Liberal Arts and Athletics

Liberal arts is a staple, and Willhardt said the college had grown increasingly sophisticated about how those programs connect to the job market. Recently, the college has created or revitalized programs in data science, engineering, neuroscience, and kinesiology, the latter a natural attraction to Monmouth’s many athletes, who compose about half the enrollment.

“They come in their first year as athletes, and then they realize they’re students when they’re here,” Willhardt said. “When that happens, they’re looking for majors that help them keep that connection going.” Kinesiology is one of those programs.

But athletics posed one of the college’s big challenges for the fall. On the week I visited, Monmouth announced it was canceling all fall sports. Wyatt said he and other presidents in the Division III Midwest Conference — which also includes institutions like Cornell College, in Iowa, and Lawrence University, in Wisconsin — had deliberated about the sports season for months, desperately trying to think of ways to limit athletes’ travel and potential exposure.

“For many of us in the conference, athletics is an important part of the experience,” said Wyatt. “It is a significant draw for prospective students, and it’s also a powerful instrument for retention. Our student-athletes retain at a higher rate than the general student population.”

But many conference members simply did not have the infrastructure on campus or in their small towns to provide the regular coronavirus testing that the National Collegiate Athletic Association recommends, a lack that exposed the colleges to liability, Wyatt said. Even low-risk, noncontact sports, like cross-country, have had their seasons canceled out of a concern for “equity”; you can’t say yes to that team’s 20 runners but no to 120 football players, Wyatt noted.

Ultimately, a college is about academics, not sports. “When it comes down to it, the core of what we need to do this fall is to deliver the intellectual experience for our students,” he said. “Anything else is gravy.” Monmouth will provide opportunities for athletes to do supplemental training (like weightlifting) and have social events (like, say, movies about football shown to a crowd spread out on the field).

So far, the college is closely tracking how many students it expects will show up in the fall for a shortened semester that will end before Thanksgiving: 875, based on deposits and conversations with prospective and returning students. Like many other institutions, Monmouth will space out students in classes, push aspects of courses online, and stagger activity in amenities like the dining halls. With warm weather in central Illinois until late October or early November, many classes can meet outside.

Wyatt and Willhardt said they expect more than 90 percent of enrolled students will be in residence this fall at the college.

Summer Calm Between Storms

The spring was a scramble. “My office became a combination of the Situation Room and a fraternity-house basement,” said Wyatt, with boxes of takeout food piling up, as the administration worked all hours to shut down the campus, work out refunds for room and board, and try to get a group of students and instructors back from Prague before they were stranded in Europe.

Online instruction was a “hodgepodge,” admitted Willhardt, with faculty members working on a range of platforms and approaches to make the transition from the physical classroom within a few days.

Like many small colleges, Monmouth draws students from first-generation families who are eligible for Pell Grants; those students found new stresses on their end, too, in the form of lost family wages and strained environments at home. Some professors had to become more attuned to those stresses, Willhardt said, and expand their notions of what a class is, or when learning can occur.

He hopes those lessons have sunk in for the fall. Willhardt said the college would instruct all professors to use Monmouth’s course-management system along with Zoom. “Get your students used to it,” he said, “because if there’s an outbreak, conditions change in the town, Illinois shuts down — whatever happens — and we have to go remote, then we’re good.”

Pedagogically, the college would be OK. Finances might be a different story. If Monmouth has to shut down in the middle of the fall semester, the college would have to cut its budget and may have to reduce salaries too. “It’s certainly everyone’s hope that by the time we get to this point next year, this is a bad memory,” said Wyatt. But he also hopes the crisis will force the college to reconsider what kind of education students want, and how that education might be delivered.

“Just as this millennial generation is not going to work for one employer for an entire career, you’re going to see a lot more students picking and choosing across a buffet of educational opportunities,” he said. Small colleges cannot assume that students will simply enroll and show up as they did in the past, he thinks. Instead, institutions will need to offer courses both online and in person, synchronously and asynchronously, with extensive partnerships with local employers and community organizations that can offer students jobs and experiences.

“The necessity of the moment is helping us focus,” he said, “helping us unleash some of that creativity, with the realization that our curriculum, that our educational experience, has to be one that responds to the marketplace.”

Even so, with coronavirus-case numbers on the rise in the Midwest last week, our distant meeting on the patio, just two weeks before the start of the semester, came at a precarious moment: Will Monmouth — or the colleges in the region like it — be able to get to the end of the term on campus? Wyatt won’t make a prediction.

“I can’t get inside the mind of the virus,” he said. “I don’t think anybody can answer that question.”

But given Monmouth’s size and population of athletes, the college is going to try to appeal to the team spirit of the community, to encourage mask wearing, social distancing, and other precautions.

“Here, it’s ‘rally round the tartan,’” Wyatt said. “We are the Scots, we’re all in this together, and the greatest gifts that we can give each other: No. 1, each other’s health. And No. 2, a full semester together.”