“FAU has 26 positive Covid-19 cases. But why don’t you know that?” That headline on an April 10 story in Florida Atlantic University’s student paper couldn’t have meant good news for the institution’s leaders. They had informed the community of the university’s first Covid-19 case on March 17, but had not disclosed subsequent cases. When the paper’s editor in chief, Kristen Grau, asked for an updated total, she learned that now 19 students and seven employees had tested positive.
Why had those cases not been announced? Joshua Glanzer, a university spokesman, told Grau that since the campus had essentially shut down, FAU was relying on self-reports. “Therefore,” he said, “our numbers may not represent the true number and reflect students, faculty, and staff who are learning and working remotely.” Glanzer did not respond to her request for more details on the positive cases, such as where the students lived, or what buildings the seven employees worked in.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
There “was no real risk of the virus spreading on our campuses” once the university went remote, Glanzer wrote in a statement to The Chronicle.
That response stands in marked contrast to those of the Universities of Florida and of South Florida, which post logs of their Covid-19 cases and update them as new cases become known. The University of Florida’s public log states whether the case is a student or employee, the university building most affected, and whether the person lives on campus.
Let your university community know that they should expect to have cases on campus.
How much to say, when to say it, and to whom, are key questions for higher education leaders as they approach the high-stakes gamble of whether to reopen their campuses in the fall. While the students, faculty, and staff members who’ve experienced months of disruption — and local businesses who depend on lively campuses — would love to see that happen, reopening will present big risks. A failure to communicate effectively now may cause confusion and suspicion. If things go wrong, resulting in a wave of infections and even death, shattered public trust may stain a college’s reputation for decades.
Already this summer, college leaders must exert exquisite control over how they communicate about their plans, balancing rosy promises of a fall on campus with a clear commitment to the highest standard of care. Playing down the dangers could, come fall, turn a challenge into a fiasco.
Studies show that “people would rather have the truth,” said Michael Cherenson, an executive vice president at SCG Advertising & Public Relations. “The trust-building that happens from the exchange of accurate information is more powerful than the negative headline.”
Talking to Students — and Their Families
Already, many colleges have adopted a strategy of communicating frequently to avoid the impression that they are playing a game of bait-and-switch. While plans are developing and students are still making up their minds, colleges have an incentive to be in touch often and in detail about what’s going on. They should be including parents in their messaging, too. Parents are often an important part of the early college search, then cede final decisions to students. But worries about Covid-19 “are pushing parents back into more of the front seat with their student this late in the game,” said Kirsten Fedderke, a senior vice president at Lipman Hearne, a marketing company that works with colleges.
Even if a college is still formulating its plans, said Suzanne Grigalunas, an enrollment market strategist at Lipman Hearne, parents “want to be in the loop on those plans as they evolve and to hear continual communication about deadline changes or housing changes, or how in general the schools will be handling it.”
The “how” of decision-making at colleges may be almost as important to students and their parents as the outcome of those decisions themselves. “Families need to hear that leadership is in place,” said Parrot, “and that decisions are fact- and data based. And they need to know that institutions have students’ best interests at heart.” If students and their parents feel they understand why decisions are being made, they are more likely to accept them with good will.
Managing expectations will require deft needle-threading and, perhaps, new tactics. Cherenson identified one such practice — “attitude inoculation,” a strategy that involves preparing your audience for what might happen by, essentially, giving them a little bit of bad news in advance.
“Let your university community know that they should expect to have cases on campus,” he said. “They should expect that there might be disruption. … They should be inoculating themselves by preparing the various constituent groups for what might be the inevitable.”
How to convey that information? With a personal touch. While emails and video town halls are important for getting the word out to the wider community, Grigalunas said she’s heard parents say that much of the communication they’re receiving from colleges is transactional and informational. Colleges shouldn’t neglect to acknowledge the anxiety of the moment and “the enthusiasm and the hope and some of those more positive emotions that are tied with the start of a college experience.”
Beginning after spring break, about 200 employees at the University of Kentucky called and spoke with every one of its 30,000 students over the course of about a month. Students were asked to rate their transition to remote learning so far, and those who indicated they’d been having some bumps received follow-up contact. Even if students and their families don’t agree with every decision the university makes regarding the virus, said Jay Blanton, the university’s chief communications officer, “they would have to see that, hey, this place took the time to care about my son or daughter and check on them.”
Colleges will need good relationships with students and parents for some of the tough conversations to come. If classes are held online this fall, for example, many families will expect to pay much less. A survey of parents of collegebound high-school seniors conducted by Lipman Hearne found that 60 percent of respondents expect discounts on tuition for online-only semesters — discounts that most colleges, already facing precarious finances for the fall, are not offering so far.
Institutions will need to make a case for their decision either way — on the safety of their campus if they reopen, and on the value of their courses if they have to return to online teaching. If they choose the latter, they need to be candid about why it costs what it does. Colleges are typically loath to discuss their finances publicly, but Covid-19 has “given them a bit of cover,” Parrot said. “Institutions are getting a little bit more leeway to roll out where their finances are at this moment, because most of higher education is in a really difficult spot.”
Talking With Faculty and Staff Members
Employees are probably more sensitive than many students to the risks of returning to campus. That makes sense: On a typical campus, faculty and staff members are in close contact with students. There are more faculty age 55 or older than in the general work force, according to a recent report from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Because older people and those with underlying medical conditions seem to be at a higher risk for severe illness from the coronavirus, those employees, especially, have reason to worry.
Particularly in the liberal arts, “we’re meant to be in little rooms, sitting around, talking,” said Kristalyn Shefveland, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana. Shefveland wonders what those classrooms would look like with social-distancing measures in place. Would she enter the room first and just stay in a corner?
Academic freedom guarantees our right not only to decide what to teach but also how to teach.
At Temple University, where Devon Powers is an associate professor of advertising and media and communication, some buildings don’t have women’s bathrooms on every floor, so the idea that everyone could just wash their hands between classes seems implausible.
Faculty members, central to carrying out the missions of their institutions, need more than just frequent updates from college leaders. They want to be in on the decision-making. As colleges develop their plans, task forces have multiplied, some of them with faculty representatives.
Remember that communication with employees has a ripple effect: If administrators are assuring students and others that they’ll be safe but unconvinced professors are posting concerns about reopening on social media, “those stories become dissonant,” said Lipman Hearne’s Grigalunas, and could undermine the overall message.
Mark McClellan is the acting associate vice chancellor for general education at Arkansas State University-Mid-South, a community college near the Arkansas-Tennessee border. McClellan said he’s been hosting virtual listening sessions with no more than four faculty members at a time to get a sense of their concerns. He recommends small groups because at full faculty meetings, the same people tend to talk, he said.
Other colleges are asking faculty members to share their concerns electronically. Joyce McConnell, Colorado State University’s president, told people on campus to email their questions about how Colorado State plans to recover from the continuing Covid-19 crisis. About 21 pages of questions came in, said a university spokesman. She and members of her leadership team then answered the most common questions — like, how will CSU keep everyone healthy? — in a video. “I’ll caution you that this would not fly on TikTok,” McConnell said in an email to the Colorado State community. This video is “long and substantive.”
Texas Christian University distributed a survey to employees, including the faculty, which Jason Helms, an associate professor of English, found a bit biased. It seemed to him the questions were posed in a way that revealed a preference for face-to-face instruction. He remembers one question as some variation of, If you’re uncomfortable with returning to campus, what kinds of things would make you feel more comfortable? Helms said he answered: “No cases in the area.”
Helms said he’s staying off campus this fall no matter what. His 2-year-old daughter has a congenital heart defect, and he can teach remotely. He’s got a doctor’s note if need be. His case, he said, is clear cut. He’s more worried about staff members and nontenured faculty, who aren’t able to advocate for why they should work remotely, or who can’t perform their jobs virtually.
Some colleges are preparing for the inevitability that some faculty members won’t want to return to campus this fall. The University of Oregon asked faculty and graduate employees who are at a “higher risk,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, to submit requests to continue working remotely through the fall term — a move that was criticized by the faculty union.
Many instructors have reservations about disclosing sensitive medical information, and are concerned about how that information will be used, David Cecil, the union’s executive director, wrote to the university’s associate general counsel. The union wants to make sure protections against misuse of the information are in place.
And the union also demanded to bargain with the university regarding reopening the campus in the fall. “Academic freedom guarantees our right not only to decide what to teach,” Cecil wrote, “but also how to teach.”
Some faculty members worry that they’ll be asked to teach in unsafe circumstances to protect their institutions’ bottom lines. They want leaders who will listen to those concerns, answer with as many specific details as possible, and admit what’s still unknown.
Even with clear lines of communication, faculty members have reason to be skeptical of bullish statements about reopening campuses. As Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington said on Twitter, preparing for face-to-face instruction would be the biggest logistical challenge any institution has ever attempted. And it’s happening at a time when budgets are shrinking.
It’s important to make that clear to the faculty and staff too. For example, the video put out by McConnell, CSU’s president, came with a clarification. It was filmed when the State of Colorado was predicting $2 billion in budget cuts for the 2021 fiscal year, which would “profoundly impact” higher education, she wrote in her message to campus. By the time the video was distributed, that estimate had topped $3 billion.
Talking With Neighbors
American cities have taken huge hits to their budgets, too — especially college towns. When students left en masse this spring to limit the spread of Covid-19, their absence highlighted the ties between colleges and their municipalities.
In Berkeley, Calif., local restaurants have seen March-through-May revenue drop by about 90 percent compared with last year, as students left the University of California at Berkeley campus and shelter-in-place orders were imposed, said Mayor Jesse Arreguín of Berkeley. Some businesses have had to lay off employees, while others have closed altogether.
If students don’t return to campus in the fall, the city could see a significant tax-revenue hit. Businesses wrote a letter to the university asking its leaders to consider in-person instruction in the fall and for an update on campus planning, Arreguín said.
Stephen M. Gavazzi, a professor at Ohio State University who trained as a marriage and family counselor, said the relationship between colleges and local communities is like a marriage: It requires mutual effort and comfort. The only difference? Colleges can’t divorce their college towns. That makes transparent and regular town-gown communication critical, he said, especially during a crisis like Covid-19. “In the absence of communication, people are going to assume the worst,” he said.
UC-Berkeley hasn’t made a final decision about how instruction will be conducted, but the chancellor, Carol T. Christ, has indicated that some or all classes might be delivered remotely. Mayor Arreguín is in regular contact with the chancellor, he said, and is involved in discussions about the format of the fall semester.
In the absence of communication, people are going to assume the worst.
Iowa State University’s leaders have increased the frequency of their contact with the community, now meeting every Thursday evening via videoconference with Story County’s mayors, city managers, and other public officials. And the International Town & Gown Association has been holding focus groups via Zoom of college and municipal leaders to discuss responses to the pandemic.
The main concern they’re hearing? How to keep both towns and campuses safe. That’s “really emerged as the driving factor of how they’re going to make decisions,” says Janet Lillie, an assistant vice president for community relations at Michigan State University and a moderator of the sessions.
As much as college towns would like students to return in the fall, if they do it will probably strain town-gown relations. Colleges will need to promote responsible student behavior beyond their boundaries — a challenge even under normal circumstances. Institutions may want to consider an idea raised in the town-gown association’s focus groups: asking students to sign a social contract.
Effective measures to promote student and community health will require cooperation from both groups, says Michael Newton, Iowa State’s associate vice president for public safety and chief of police. For example, to get students to wear face masks on a regular basis and promote the health of the campus and community, the institution will need the support of local businesses and other areas visited by students.
“If we want students, staff, and faculty to wear those masks, but they’re not being encouraged in retail establishments or apartment buildings across the community,” he said, “then we’re only winning half of the battle.”
If colleges plan to open their campuses, they must be able to explain, in depth and repeatedly to all their audiences, how they will keep everyone safe. People on campus and nearby will be trusting institutions with their lives, and all must feel confident in that trust. Grigalunas puts it this way: “It’s not just about your packaged brand’s voice.”
