Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Leadership

‘One of Us’: A President’s Message Stuns Faculty After Their Colleague Dies of Covid-19

By Emma Pettit November 23, 2020
Neil Matkin (right), Collin College district president, and other guest speakers discuss the future of Collin County during a Dallas Morning News subscriber event at Legacy Hall’s Unlawful Assembly Brewing in Plano. Credit: Jason Janik
Neil Matkin (right), president of Collin College, faces a loss of trust by some faculty members.Jason Janik

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

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

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.”

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

A version of this article appeared in the December 11, 2020, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Community Colleges Leadership & Governance
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Emma-Pettit.png
About the Author
Emma Pettit
Emma Pettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Joan Wong for The Chronicle
Productivity Measures
A 4/4 Teaching Load Becomes Law at Most of Wisconsin’s Public Universities
Illustration showing a letter from the South Carolina Secretary of State over a photo of the Bob Jones University campus.
Missing Files
Apparent Paperwork Error Threatens Bob Jones U.'s Legal Standing in South Carolina
Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on February 27, 2025, the morning after pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building to protest the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
A College Vows to Stop Engaging With Some Student Activists to Settle a Lawsuit Brought by Jewish Students
LeeNIHGhosting-0709
Stuck in limbo
The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH

From The Review

Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin