Welcome to the third installment of The Quandary, The Chronicle’s occasional series to answer your questions about college life during a pandemic. The questions were posed by you, our audience, including members of our Facebook group, Higher Ed and the Coronavirus. If you have a question, send it to fernanda@chronicle.com, or join our Facebook group and chime in.
How can the chair best represent your department in a season of budget cuts?
Most institutions will cut budgets, and some of those cuts could hit academic departments.
It’s too early to tell how academic programs will be affected by budget cuts prompted by the coronavirus economic crisis. Anything is possible. Higher education could even look completely different after the pandemic. Department chairs are positioned to lead that change and reinvention, says Ralph A. Gigliotti, director of the Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership at Rutgers University. Gigliotti is researching how department chairs at Big Ten conference universities are reacting to the crisis.
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.
Chairs should develop a coherent story line for the department — one that outlines department goals — to show leaders its value and how the department fits into the postcrisis institution, he says. Then chairs should keep the discussion going. This is a bit of the age-old practice of managing up, and listening to other leaders so they know you’re dealing with their concerns. When updating administrators, whether it’s via memo or Zoom presentation, show troublesome data points or problems alongside potential solutions. This conveys that you want your department to be part of conversations that could move the college forward, Gigliotti says.
Uncertainty abounds now at every level of an institution’s operation. At Appalachian State University, Richard Rheingans, a professor and chair of the department of sustainable development, says he’s focusing on what he can control. “We’re not waiting around for others to make decisions about what happens,” Rheingans says.
About two weeks before the university went online, Rheingans met with his department to make internal decisions. They changed some fall course offerings to focus on the pandemic, and planned to recruit new students who might not have been able to go to Boone, N.C., letting them know some coursework was shifting online. Outside of his department, Rheingans says he’s talking with the provost, the dean, and the council of department chairs to create an easier planning environment. Rheingans and his colleagues are asking administrators for more information to better understand the full picture of the university’s budget.
As administrators identify where they will cut and invest, it’s the chair’s job to ensure that the department is part of the investment, Rheingans says. That’s a lesson he learned during the 2008 recession, when he was at the University of Florida. At the same time, he says, you have to ensure and stress that your department is aligned with the institution’s mission and goals.
Understanding the department and university budgets is key, says Mary Miller, a professor and chair of the department of biology at Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tenn. If you know the budgets, and the department’s goals, you can better support students and the institution’s mission. It’s not just the chair who needs to examine the institution’s finances, she says. Faculty members should, too, so they can propose solutions and ideas. Empowering faculty members makes for better ideas and support for executing them later.
How can you continue student-support groups during the pandemic?
The more engaged students are in campus activities, the more likely they are to persist and graduate.
So even while colleges have been operating remotely this spring, they’ve been trying to maintain some semblance of the community that a campus environment can offer.
Chelsea Lancaster, a student-program adviser at Santa Barbara City College, a two-year institution, has continued its single-parent support group. On campus, 10 to 12 parents usually gathered every Friday in the press box of the college’s sports stadium, which overlooks the beach. On Zoom, the view isn’t as glamorous. But Lancaster, who was a parent while in college, says the group gives students a crucial place to connect and share struggles. Given that many are now doing full-time child care while continuing their studies, they have a lot to vent about.
Cynthia J. Atman, meanwhile, created a weekly support community she’s dubbed “Sketch N Kvetch.” Atman, a professor at the University of Washington who leads the Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching, says people in the group of eight to 10 — who are current and former students of hers — start by talking about how their weeks have been going. Usually a common theme surfaces, like the struggle to manage expectations or a lack of energy. Then they sketch their feelings and share the drawings via webcam.
In one sketch, Atman drew her home office, scrawling waves and using different colors to represent how her feelings shift, depending on the time of day and where she’s sitting. Meanwhile, an international student who has remained in campus housing during the pandemic drew her dorm room in contrast to the outside world.
“This was just something I thought I could do to help students who know me and are important to me,” Atman says. Several students have told her they appreciate focusing on mindfulness and being able to engage with academic content — many are studying design thinking — without having to worry about grades.
Adam Jussel, dean of students at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, created a virtual student union within Canvas, the popular course-management system — where students are already spending much of their time. It includes student discussion forums, campus announcements, and promotions of student activities. The virtual union has gotten 15,000 page visits since making its debut, in late April. Jussel says the university is considering using the space for new-student orientation this summer.
At the University of Virginia, Ashley E. Hosbach was hearing from graduate students who felt left out of support programs geared toward undergraduates. So Hosbach, the education and social-science research librarian, teamed up with a colleague to move their research and writing cafes online. The goal is to mimic a coffee-shop setting, music and all, she says. For two hours every week, seven to 10 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty and staff members hop on Zoom. They talk about what they’re working on, to hold each other accountable. Then they write.
Logistically, creating online support communities isn’t that difficult. Everyone is familiar with the various videoconference platforms by now. What’s trickier is getting students to show up.
One problem is that everyone feels Zoomed out. The single-parent group at Santa Barbara City College is still flourishing, but is drawing about half of its usual attendance. “Students are experiencing a lot of Zoom fatigue and parenting fatigue, and are just feeling really stretched to the limit in many ways,” Lancaster said.
Atman and Hosbach note that their respective student groups don’t require as much engagement with screens; they’re more about simply being in a virtual space with others while drawing or writing.
But Lancaster said she’s not fixating on participation numbers. That’s not why she preserved the group. “It’s about creating spaces for students that make them feel like they belong.”
