No one wants to be the first one to say it, so I will.  Regular academic workloads are going to have to be re-arranged for the Summer and Fall Terms.  In most cases drastically.

This is simple math.  Providing quality teaching in the fall is going to require – in part – significantly smaller classes.  This will not only be true if the fall is fully online.  It will also be true if – as the currently fashionable musing has it – we move to some sort of “hybrid-flexible” approach where institutions will be able to offer face-to-face instruction to some-but-not-all-students while the rest get remote teaching.  Personally, I think this is a fantasy, because under any reasonable scenario, we still have physical distancing required well into the fall or maybe into the new year (take a look at this piece on student networking in a world of small classes: it’s not the big classes that are the problem, it’s the fact that students switch between very different small classes, thus coming into contact with hundreds of different students even without spending any time in mega-classes.) 

If you want the God’s honest truth, the likeliest path to some kind of face-to-face in the Fall is to keep all the undergraduates off campus and use large classrooms for face-to-face small-enrolment graduate classes. This is the only conceivable way to make face-to-face comply with likely social distancing rules.  Any other situation, which involves offering two-tier education depending on living arrangements – be that proximity of primary residence to campus, or residing with elderly relatives – is a total nightmare from an equity and community standpoint.

Holding the size of the student body more or less constant (and do check out the survey of returning students, incoming students and parents we at HESA Towers are partnering on with Strategic Counsel for more insight on that), smaller classes mean more instructors.  That could mean hiring boat-loads of graduate students and sessionals.  But who has money for that during the crisis?  That leaves the existing professoriate.

Now the existing professoriate, in most field and institutions, teaches less than it did 30 or 40 years ago.  Most of academia has, for various reasons arising from external pressure and internal preferences tended to place a greater role on research.  And there have been significant benefits to this policy in terms of research (though some costs as well). 

But this is an emergency.  The operating logics of the last forty years do not apply. 

Put bluntly: until the end of the emergency, most non-COVID-related research (broadly defined) should be on hold.  It’s not that this research is unimportant, but it is less important than ensuring we do not lose a generation of students.  And it will still be there to perform when the emergency is over.  Stop the tenure clocks, freeze promotion and merit increases (there will be no money for either, anyway).  But change up the workloads.   

The communities we all serve will be understanding of the challenges universities face in providing remote instruction if institutions are seen to be all-in on teaching their children.   We’re either all hands on deck for teaching in the Fall Term, or we’re running a terrible risk of alienating the public opinion the sector needs to cultivate in order to survive.  

Stay safe, everyone.