It is a disappointing time for those of us who value accountability.  Governments across the country (outside the Atlantic, anyway) are failing us – badly – in their pandemic responses.  And yet, apparently there are no political consequences for their shameful performance and the accompanying body count.  The Ford and Legault governments, with close to 10,000 deaths between them, are rising high in the polls.  Because everyone (again, if you ignore the Atlantic provinces) is making similar pig-headed mistakes, everyone gets a pass! 

In contrast, Canadian higher education has mostly been a model in this pandemic.  Certainly if you compare our national sector performance against those of the UK and the US – countries which lend new meaning to the phrase “crossing a minefield in clown shoes” – we look extremely good, at least from the point of view of providing program continuity and keeping our community safe.   But while these are important achievements, the fact that we have managed this does not give Canadian universities and colleges a pass.  There are lots of areas where performance still can be measured, and lessons from these observations applied not just in the immediate response to the pandemic but to longer-term aspects of institutional government and management.

The first thing everyone should be doing is checking in on students to see how they view the transition to online.  It’s not so much a question of looking at “satisfaction” (which is a meaningless term); rather, it’s about gauging how students perceive institutions’ efforts to keep education going in this trying time.  How many hours of contact are they getting?  Do they see professors making real efforts to adapt to the online format, or are they just getting slide decks and told to read it themselves?  What kinds of interaction are they getting with either professors or teaching assistants?  What kinds of use are they making of library services?  Of student services? 

(Plus, you can see how many students might prefer the current set up to going back to the old one.  I continue to think there is a bigger market here than institutions may think, primarily among older students.  Not a majority or anything, but enough that a clever and nimble university might profit from focussing on them.)

Anyways this kind of thing universities can do right now.  For instance, we’ve put together a survey with Strategic Counsel right now to look at these issues and allowing institutions to compare themselves against a national benchmark.  But it’s not the only thing for institutions to think about.  There are a lot of deeper issues to think about in terms of management and governance which have implications far beyond COVID.

When COVID arrived in March, it tested institutional powers of emergency response, which includes several facets of information-gathering, decision-making and communications.  All those things are important in running a university on an ongoing basis.  It would be helpful to understand how individual institutions performed in these tasks to learn lessons for future emergencies.

Over the next few weeks, as we all tried to stumble across the winter term finish line, an immense number of decisions had to be made with respect to how to get through the year.  Which rules to abandon or modify (especially with respect to student assessment and final exams).  How to help international students and study abroad students who were stranded after the airlines basically shut down.  How to temporarily shut down laboratories, and above all how to make the shift to remote work manageable.   This phase, which generally lasted into May, also challenged institutions in terms of communications but also – especially – tested university management’s ability to understand dozens of unfolding challenges and to triage decisions according to their importance (this was not easy because so many of them were interrelated).  My impression as an outsider watching the sector is that this triaging worked reasonably well where decisions were not overly centralized in the President’s office and were subject to quite a bit of informal and formal consultations.  Knowing how institutions performed at this task would probably be useful to anyone evaluating current Presidential performance come contract renewal time.

But it is how things went in the summer that need to be the focus of substantial evaluation.  Back in May, there were a dizzying array of choices to be made about how to manage the fall term, both in terms of mode(s) of delivery, admissions (particularly international students) and student support.  Narrowing down those choices to make some basic decisions about delivery was job 1.  Making the new system work for students without utterly exhausting professors was job 2.  Both of these decisions required leadership teams who could consult both widely and quickly, who could see the challenges inherent in different types of decisions, who could communicate clearly with all stakeholders (a lot of institutions blew that one) and who – above all – make available all necessary resources to support professors in moving to a remote platform for the fall term.  Above all, this set of challenges required an understanding of complexity (since pretty much every decision affected every other decision) as well as nimbleness and decisiveness.  And in an ever-changing world, these are incredibly important traits for a university to have.  Using the COVID experience to improve in these areas should be a priority.

For all these reasons, I think most institutions would be well-served if at some point in the new year they set in place an honest, unflinching process which examined how well they reacted to the challenges of COVID.  A deep audit, not based on simple surveys, but rather based on extensive listening to the main stakeholders – academics, staff, students – as to how the last nine months went.  Even better: have many institutions do the same exercise together so they can learn not only their own lessons but understand how others may have approached things differently. 

This is what true learning organizations do: they put in place processes to help them learn from experience.    I wonder how many of our universities and colleges will take these steps and listen to some hard feedback?