The news arrived on Friday, nested deep in an email that landed during a Faculty Council Zoom meeting. Only after someone had reached the 22nd paragraph did professors learn what had happened, and when they did, a few began to cry.
“To date, we are aware of one Collin College student who has passed away from complications from Covid-19 and, as of last week, one faculty member,” H. Neil Matkin, president of the community-college district in Texas, wrote. The student’s death had been reported in late October, but the announcement that a colleague had died came as a fresh blow. In the same paragraph, near the bottom of the email, Matkin also disclosed that a staff member was hospitalized.
All of it appeared in an email beneath the subject line “College Update & Happy Thanksgiving!”
People on the Zoom call were stunned into silence. To them, the message’s framing seemed callous, like the death was an afterthought. The faculty member was unnamed. “We didn’t know who it was,” said Kim Parker Nyman, a professor of communication, “but it was one of us.”
The framing of their colleague’s death read like an afterthought to some faculty.
That weekend, they’d learn the faculty member’s identity from an online fund raiser for medical and funeral expenses: Iris Meda, a recently retired nurse who, during the pandemic, felt called to train aspiring nurses.
In a Sunday night email, Matkin told The Chronicle that he didn’t name Meda because the college hadn’t received permission from her family to release details. On Monday morning, he emailed Collin employees with more information about Meda. She taught “Nurse Aide” courses at the college’s technical campus and to a group of dual-credit high-school students. It was in the high-school classroom that she came into contact with an infected student, Matkin said.
“She was 70 years old although her daughter reported that her mom was so excited to teach at Collin College she appeared much younger,” he wrote.
To Nyman and to others, Matkin’s “Happy Thanksgiving!” email was emblematic of how Collin College leadership has neglected or negated faculty concerns throughout the pandemic. For months, instructors have told the president that they don’t feel protected by the institution’s plans and that he has been dismissive, said Audra Heaslip, a council member who teaches humanities and literature. When it comes to shared governance, “there is none,” said Lorena Rodriguez, who teaches economics.
(Faculty members who spoke with The Chronicle stressed that they speak for themselves and not their employer.)
But Matkin said his critics are the ones running roughshod over shared governance. He told The Chronicle that a “small group of faculty” continue to “utilize media sources to air their long-standing grievances, which is their First Amendment right.”
Their “ongoing disregard for dignity and respect, due process, and shared governance within the college is unfortunate,” he said, “but not surprising.”
Dialogue, Not Demands
Months earlier, instructors had pressed Matkin and senior administrators to involve the faculty in the college district’s pandemic plans at its five campuses, which serve Collin and Rockwell Counties, north and northeast of Dallas. In June, Heaslip compiled research about the risks of Covid-19 related to classroom instruction and campus interactions. More than 100 full-time faculty members signed the document and also wrote in their own concerns.
It included recommendations, including that the college should hold most courses online this fall. (About 25 percent of enrolled students are learning in-person, 40 percent are in a blended model, and 35 percent are online, the vice president of external relations said in an email.) The idea was to create a dialogue, said Heaslip, not present a list of demands.
The paper morphed into a Faculty Council resolution. Matkin responded point by point, in part agreeing with what the council asked for, like requiring social distancing in classrooms and the use of masks by faculty, staff, and students. But he was also skeptical that the views of faculty members who wanted face-to-face teaching were being represented. He “decided to dig a little deeper,” he wrote in an email. So a poll was taken of 20 faculty members at one of Collin’s campuses , Matkin said, and “ALL desired face-to-face courses” this fall.
He found it “ironic” that some of the “chief proponents” of going fully online “failed to speak to the faculty they were charged to represent,” he wrote. “We will explore this further together as time goes on.”
Perhaps it is because I am an optimist by nature, but I rarely allow myself to focus on the worst-case scenario.
Heaslip and others read that as a rebuke of the Faculty Council. Matkin’s emails to faculty had already been met with skepticism and would continue to be over the ensuing months. Some instructors thought they underplayed the pandemic’s dangers.
In a late June update, he wrote: “I marvel that, as a college, we seem so incredibly polarized and fearful over the unknown when, in fact, we know more every single day about the circumstances we are facing. Perhaps it is because I am an optimist by nature, but I rarely allow myself to focus on the worst-case scenario. ... I have chosen to never live my life in fear.”
“If one were to watch the news (pick your channel),” Matkin wrote, “you would hear that Texas has become a hotbed for the spread of the virus.” (That day, Texas reported 5,890 new cases, more than five times what was reported at the beginning of the month.) Later in the email, Matkin said it’s important to keep in mind that “every news outlet is funded by advertising dollars,” which is relevant when “we assess the information we receive through the media.”
“Friends,” he finally implored, “can we take a step back and re-evaluate what we actually know today? From my vantage point, we must do our own thinking. We are, after all, in the thinking business, are we not?”
In August, Matkin told the Board of Trustees that the effects of the pandemic “have been blown utterly out of proportion across our nation and reported with unfortunate sensationalism and few facts.” To justify that characterization, Matkin attempted to calculate the mortality rate of the virus in Collin County. To date, there had been 10,169 reported cases, resulting in 100 deaths, he wrote. He divided the number of deaths by the total population in Collin County — just over a million residents — and reported that statistic as 9.6 deaths per 100,000 residents.
That is not how the World Health Organization measures Covid-19’s deadliness. There are two metrics. The infection fatality rate looks at the proportion of deaths among all infected individuals, and the case fatality ratio estimates the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases. Neither divides by the entire population in a given area.
Nevertheless, Matkin concluded: “To put it in perspective, the chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident in the State of Texas is 1 in 103 or slightly over 1%. That’s over one hundred times more likely than dying from the Coronavirus. If you find better numbers, please enlighten me.”
He shared his message to trustees with the faculty. Michael Phillips, who teaches history, was appalled. The numbers were completely inaccurate, he said. “Plus, car wrecks are not contagious”
A week later, Matkin wrote that his last email “spurred a lot of great back and forth conversation albeit some unfortunately taking offense.”
What he meant, he said, was to give an example of a dangerous activity that “society has successfully mitigated.” He remained convinced the risk of the coronavirus could be mitigated.
In his Friday email, Matkin said that campus safety protocols have been effective. But he urged the community to continue taking precautions and to “remain vigilant”; Covid-19 had hit his family close to home. Three of his nephews had contracted the virus, he wrote, and two had died.
Some faculty members have lost whatever confidence they had in Matkin. The gulf between disillusioned instructors and their institution’s leader is wide.
Nyman, the communication professor, doesn’t know if it can be spanned. A lot feels broken.
“I moved across the county to teach here,” she said. “Right now, I won’t even wear a Collin T-shirt.”
