Karen Gross: How small private colleges can adapt to pandemic

The dining hall and Mather Building at Vermont’s Marlboro College, whose campus may be repurposed into a new kind of higher-education facility.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Pre-pandemic, a good number of us lamented the demise of small colleges. Let’s define these here as non-elite colleges with enrollment of fewer than 1,500 full-time undergraduate students. For the most part, these institutions have few graduate programs, a handful at most.

Some of these colleges have closed; some have merged; some have partnered. Whatever the structure, it feels to me still like small colleges are failing and closing in droves. Just look at the recent debacle in Vermont concerning its fiscally fragile state college system.

For some small institutions, it certainly seemed like a premature and even unnecessary death. The four main causes for closure (or its equivalent) proffered publicly by campus personnel were straightforward: changing demographics with accompanying declining enrollment; high tuition costs leading to steep discounting and concerns regarding rising student debt loads; campus personnel costs (think tenure or long-term contracts) and accompanying retirement benefits; and absence of a large endowments to withstand and be buffered from shifting and changing tides.

Some of us saw other deficiencies that the colleges and their boards were less keen on referencing or addressing out loud: poor presidential leadership (as in really poor judgment and decision-making or failure to decide anything); lack of institutional vision and innovation, particularly in a fashion that anticipated trends and currents that were on the horizon; weak board oversight and failure to ask the tough questions; board fear of litigation (think Mount Ida College, in Newton, Mass.); and growth in administrative personnel leading to bloat and higher-than-needed costs.

Some folks are fighting back and some are wondering why others aren’t fighting harder to save colleges, not just for the students, faculty, staff and alums but for the local communities where these colleges are located and who depend on them for revenue. There’s been no shortage of suggestions for how to save the many small colleges that dot our landscape, especially in New England.

And we can and should continue these conversations about these failures and the wasted salvation efforts; they are instructive for future thinking and reflection. They offer clues and insights for the remaining small colleges.

Along came the pandemic

Then along came COVID-19 and with it, institutional closures due and a quick shift to online learning (which might be a misnomer in some instances in terms of whether learning actually occurred). The higher education landscape changed in a nanosecond. More closures are expected.

Admissions and retention for fall 2020 has become a guessing game as it remains unclear if existing students will return to campus and whether new students will enroll. Deposited new students can and might well melt in substantial numbers. We just don’t know.

And each passing month, using metrics from the past (as if they have continued applicability), we fail to reliably predict the future. For some small colleges, a loss of 10 or 20 students can make the difference between a balanced and unbalanced budget. And accreditors are watching fiscal stability like hawks. (The reasons for that need their own article.)

The debate has raged about reopening and if it happens, how it can be done safely, thoughtfully and wisely. New models and schedules are being considered; institutions are hedging their bets as if they foresee when a second “wave” (assuming we even characterize new cases as a wave) of the pandemic could hit. Scheduling courses of limited size and ensuring social distancing in residential halls, dining halls and activities are subjects for planning. The CDC has offered some guidance (quite generalized) as have others—individuals and organizations alike.

Despite these resources, everyone seemed to be fumbling around for reopening solutions for students, faculty and staff. What institutions are saying publicly and what they are feeling in privacy about the reality of reopening is not in concert. For example, some colleges still are running two-track planning: planning for online and planning for brick-and-mortar learning. And the idea here is that as the date for reopening approaches, both approaches will be ready to launch, depending on which is most suited to the moment.

And racial tensions ….

And then, racial tensions boiled over and as of this writing, have not ceased. Street protests—peaceful and non-peaceful—highlight anger, centuries in the making, at the lack of equality in our nation. With police gunning down or kneeing down minority men, police departments almost everywhere are coming under fire, including campus police forces. Folks are asking if we should even have police forces (on and off campus) as we knew them or should we defund and restart with new structures, new goals, new training, new personnel? All of these issues are boiling over as reopening plans are being crafted.

For some students, already worried about starting college online or in some newly designed format with no track record, a gap year seems like an idea with credibility. With the protests and racial tensions, the idea of using a gap year to focus on advocating for racial justice becomes increasingly appealing and, in fact, a worthy alternative to a bumpy college start. This happened in the 1960s too.

For colleges, the responses to racial tension are a critical issue for the fall, with or without brick-and-mortar reopening. Consider how campuses will need to adjust to and handle protests and ensure both freedom of speech and safety? What changes will campuses make to recognize their own histories of racism and some of their current approaches that fail to reflect the need for racial equality?

In this context, I am reminded of the disconcerting encounters (via email and then in person) of house masters at Yale and students residents about types of Halloween costumes that passed muster even if offensive to some. The net result was that the master and his wife ceased being house masters at the time and stopped teaching the next semester. We can debate how the story got such traction and how it ended; some of us still can’t quite believe that a valued and respected faculty member, with deep experience, behaved in such a disrespectful manner.

A salvation strategy

In reflecting on the myriad of issues just described in all their complexities, I read a recent tweet from Prof. Susan Dynarski, a well-respected professor who regularly comments insightfully on issues in higher education. In the context of her concerns about campuses reopening and the reasons higher education institutions may be so keen on brick-and-mortar courses (they want the money), she suggested that perhaps the only places where COVID safety and education can coexist are rural small college campuses.

Bells went off in my head. She is largely right and those of us who have spent time thinking about these campuses can attest to their ability, with innovative thinking and bold leadership, to respond to COVID and offer in-person education. Here are some concrete approaches, including references to the plans of Degrees of Freedom to open on the Marlboro (Vt.) College campus in September 2020. Yes, a new college opening during the pandemic.

Three important notes before turning to concrete ways small campuses can operate effectively and safely and with deep change:

First, some larger campuses can try some or even the majority of the ideas proffered here. And they may be able to do so with success but their efforts will not be easy or cheap or natural extensions of prior approaches. What small colleges offer is experience.

Second, the items identified are not in order of importance and there is some inevitable overlap in solutions and approaches. For many, starting with academics seems right. For me, focusing on land and what can be done on it and with it is a better starting point. And don’t misunderstand me; land is not more important than learning. Land (and its use) is what in a COVID-19 era makes real learning (broadly defined) possible.

Third, the ambiguity in the title to this article is intended: The pandemic will be a savior for small colleges because small colleges may be the only safe places in which quality in-person education can happen.

A sampling of how small rural colleges could adapt

Land. The pandemic has struck both urban and rural environments and the idea that rural communities are immune from COVID-19 is just not accurate. And the impact on rural places—with their lack of resources—can be worse for patients than urban sites. So just reopening in rural environments is not the answer.

To be sure, we seem to know less each day as new information and data surface. But rural small college campuses often sit on hundreds of acres, meaning there is a legitimate way to create a COVID-free bubble-like environment. Note that the NBA is trying a similar bubble approach in Orlando. It is too early to know whether this approach will create herd immunity.

To add to the benefits of new ways to use large plots of rural land, we now have community-by-community data on COVID-19 cases; and, when we plumb the data, there are small towns where the pandemic has not invaded or has invaded minimally. If you eliminate nursing homes from the calculations and people who were affected over the age of 75, there are communities with low incidence of COVID.

For this article, let’s focus on campuses with at least 25 acres of open land that is usable—land without buildings or sports fields or parking lots.

Access to healthcare. Now, an immediate reopening concern and question with the idea of remote/rural environments: Were the pandemic to come to campus, how would the students get healthcare? We need to focus, then, on reopening campuses that have hospitals within close proximity and ways nearby smaller hospitals connect to larger hospital networks. Take, for instance, a college in or near Bennington, Vermont. The town has an established hospital that has partnered with Dartmouth’s well-known medical facilities; there is even a helipad to transport ill patients from Bennington to Hanover in minutes. Literally.

Small colleges reopening in rural settings need a partnership with the nearest and best medical facility, ideally one with transport and easy access to larger health facilities. This will matter to the families of students who may think rural means absence of access to quality medical care. Based on conversations with Seth Andrew, the founder of Degrees of Freedom, this is the precise approach they are planning when they open on the Marlboro campus. And we are talking here not about reopening an existing college, but rather opening a new college in the era of COVID.

One critical and too often-ignored part of healthcare is mental health, a critically important topic in our COVID and race-tense world. Trauma and its symptomology abound and campuses need to become trauma responsive, something in which they have little or no training and experience. The social distancing, the omnipresence of death and dying, experienced discrimination and harassment, separation based on going off to college for the first time and in uncertain times—these are all tough issues.

We need to question whether our current campus mental health personnel are sufficient and how we can meet the inevitable needs of students. (Faculty and staff will have their own needs in this regard with respect to primary and secondary and vicarious trauma.)

Several solutions emerge: faculty and staff development in trauma responsiveness before students arrive on campus and thereafter; telemental health opportunities for all campus personnel; and added hiring of social workers or counselors. We need trauma-informed orientations for all returning and new students; these should not be one-off events but ongoing efforts to process the transition to college and the world around us.

These are not all cost-free solutions but they are critical to student academic and psychosocial success. It is not enough for students to survive; they need to thrive.

Activities. A rural environment also allows for a series of non-academic activities that can be done safely and provide important avenues for student engagement with social distancing well in place. Hikes in the woods, classes held outdoors (during certain seasons), activities on outdoor fields. Learning about nature, the environment, drawing and painting and writing outdoors could all happen with ease and social distancing.

Imagine an outdoor movie theater or outdoor concerts, with music blasting across the acreage. And picture an artistic way of creating social distancing that builds off the “wrapping” approaches of the recently deceased installation artist Christo. Picture many brightly colored mats, each 6 –8 feet apart, placed across a huge lawn. If one took a drone photo of the area, it would like painted spots on an enormous lawn—signaling color and festivity!

Then consider a return to “old-fashioned” games like bocce and croquet and even putting golf courses with 6 holes. Think about beanbag tosses done with teams. Picture single person ping-pong and tennis. These can all be done in wide-open spaces, created at little cost.

In terms of more “formal” and traditional sports (and one hopes the NCAA will see the light and allow for fewer official sports in DI, DII and DIII during this time without colleges risking eligibility), think about track and field, with staggered race starts. Think about golf. Think about tennis. In some rural communities, these resources are available and could be cleaned and dedicated to a college’s use.

Think about swimming or sailing or kayaking (instead of more expensive sculling) if a campus has access to water close by. Indeed, many rural campuses have their own ponds, often not used in the past for student activities. But they could be converted to student use. I am thinking about the pond at Smith College (to be sure, not a small rural college as defined here); the pond was once the place where Smith students got engaged. Now, it could be populated with small single person pedal boats.

Housing. Consider residential halls that can provide only single rooms with toilets shared among very small numbers of students. Yes, there is some risk in common areas (more on that in a minute) but small campuses can function with only single-room occupancy. For example, Southern Vermont College, were it still in existence, could have housed well over 300 students in single rooms.

An added option, well worthy of consideration, is building yurts to install on a campus for housing. Imagine small yurts dotting the campus landscape. And the creation of toilet facilities would come at a cost but not excessive (there are even portable toilet/shower trailers). And the facilities could be limited to small numbers of students accessing them. Some students would find living in a yurt or pod appealing and adventurous.

Another option to consider is motels that dot rural college communities and must currently be struggling with occupancy. These can be single-occupancy units with individual bathrooms, something that may appeal to parents and caregivers who think their students would be safer at home or in off-campus housing with one roommate. One can only assume that motels would be more than willing to partner for these purposes; indeed, Southern Vermont College partnered with such a motel close to campus during a short-term housing shortage.

One additional option to consider and one being used by Degrees of Freedom: short stints on a campus (say two weeks) several times a year rather than a semester-long session (even if compressed). The idea is that while on campus during these residential stays, no one goes on or off campus. Students would be tested pre-arrival and then “bubbled” thereafter. Others are pondering even shorter stays on campus with hybrid learning using the same faculty to do the in person and online learning—all options worth considering.

Food Service. Large dining halls and buffets are out. So are crowded dining tables. But on a small campus, especially one with several cooking facilities, there could be dining areas and shifts. Consider different eating times or outdoor eating or take out, just the way some restaurants are now doing now.

Imagine food service delivery carts driving around a campus. Add in an ice cream truck that goes from area to area within the campus boundaries.

There could be food cooking that is then shared consistent with social distancing. Several students could prepare a meal with a recipe from a particular culture and distribute the meals across campus. Then another group would cook something from another nationality. In some communities, different families make enough food to share on a designated weeknight; then, they talk about the different meals they are receiving and sharing online. Call it once-a-week dining together, so to speak. There could be baking contests and tastings of various sorts. There are many variations on these themes.

In the right environment, there could be food gardens. We have edible schools; why not create edible colleges? And unused grown food or food prepared in the just described manner could be distributed (safely) to low-income families to seniors who are housebound or unable to cook.

All of this can be boiled down to this notion: Campus Meals on Wheels.

One added idea to deal with seating that complies with social distancing, picture Adirondack chairs, perhaps painted in the college colors, that are linked together by rope that knots them at seven-foot intervals. Having abundant space makes this possible. Imagine 12 connected chairs. They could be configured into the circle or a “U” shape or a line. These Adirondack chairs could be brought inside when the weather shifts with dining in large open indoor spaces like gyms. See this image for a sense of the vitality of these chairs. This idea that can be used in academic settings as well.)

Academics. Small campuses regularly have small classes. Having class sizes under 15 is the norm. And it would be possible to break larger classes on a small campus into sections, perhaps with an online lecture/discussion and then breakout groups without any change. Classrooms are right-sized for this now without any adjustments.

Support services, if needed, could be provided with individualized online access to meet these needs. Think the support equivalent of telehealth appointments.

Materials used in courses could be open-access resources so students wouldn’t need to buy books in a store or online. As such, there would not be concerns about sharing materials and viral transmission on surfaces. Colleges would not need to run a bookstore (often not a money maker). Other course materials could all be purchased or available online for free through the web. Faculty assignments could be tailored to online free resources.

Faculty (since most small colleges do not use teaching assistants other than more advanced students to serve as tutors or mentors) could meet individually with students in open environments, not closed-in offices. These could be in open spaces with few people nearby. On a rural campus with huge open spaces and places, this approach is feasible.

Two added academic-related ideas to test out during this period.

First, students (and faculty and staff) could document the entire range of campus COVID responses. They could photograph activities and classes; they could tape interviews; they could write stories and reports. In other words, the COVID responsiveness would, in and of itself, be an academic activity. What is gathered could be used to help other campuses; it could document history; it could engage students in what is truly an extraordinary period in American history; students could get copies of some document/report/visual product that they could have for decades to come. Like the academic equivalent of a home run ball from Babe Ruth.

Second, efforts to help the local community could be front and center of a campus’s focus. Courses could be designed to provide assistance to those within the community, whether that is food or tutoring or conversation. Consider these empathy-generating courses. There could also be appropriate campus-community activities where the community virtually engages with students, say, a musical performance or a shared movie.

One final idea within the academic arena: What if faculty and students took a free online course together? Picture a course not offered by the small college but credit worthy and available from another institution and, critically, of considerable interest. Suppose it was a course on pandemics through time or public health approaches to disease spread and control or a course on the history of protest movements in the U.S. and abroad. (Yes, these could be offered on campus if there are experts in these fields with the courses ready for fall 2020.) Then faculty and students could do the work together; call it collaborative learning where the learners are teachers and the teachers are learners. In-person discussions would accompany the online course. On-campus faculty could design assignments and do grading.

Maintaining the bubble. Instead of cars on campuses (which would be disallowed), there could be daily runs by the college personnel to food stores, drug stores and Walmart-like places. Students could submit lists of what they want and need. Then, these items could arrive back on campus and students could retrieve (and pay for) what they ordered. This would work with privacy respected.

Picture a car lot off campus so that students could access in emergencies or at the end of short semesters. But the key is that the cars could not come to campus and students could not exit campus. In many rural communities, there is actually no place to go within easy walking distance. So the campus has to create the access to needed products (in addition to online resources) and the engagement options.

Students, faculty, staff and administrators would all be required to wear masks, even though some might question their necessity. The idea is that they are needed because faculty and staff and administrators likely live off campus and need health checks daily to return to campus. Or, for willing employees, there could be on-campus housing provided for them and their families.

The life outside the bubble of faculty, staff and administrators does present risk. They may have children or partners who become infected from schools and workplaces and other types of engagement. I think we have to rely here on responsibility and decency and the collective, shared effort to enable safety coupled with innovation and creative learning and engagement.

Input channels. This article is a sampling of the initiatives a rural small college could advance if it reopened in fall 2020 or January 2021. But there are critical ways to generate further ideas, namely getting input from faculty, staff, students and alums. These could be in response to particular COVID issues that arise or they could be ideas that individuals have. This is a call for innovation and creativity and engagement.

Ponder shared solutions to hygiene. Ponder germ lotion distribution at set locations in creatively designed stands. Ponder rules for what happens if students do not social distance (or faculty/staff and administrators for that matter). Ponder new ways to engage across campus. Ponder courses that would have new importance in this era of COVID.

Communications. If ever there were a time for quality, transparent, truthful communications, it would be when a college prepares for and then reopens and progresses through a semester. This communication would be directed to those on campus. It would also need to include outreach to alums, parents/caregivers and the community. Communication with other campuses, accreditors and employers would also be needed.

We need to use different channels: emails; social media; phone (as in talking); webinars and call-in numbers. A hotline makes sense too.

For this to work, the communicators need to wear a different headset from that to which they are accustomed. Words, tone, style, content matter more than ever. Trauma-responsive terminology, psychological sensitivity, cultural sensitivity are all critical components of a COVID-era communications plan.

When the world is filled with confusion and uncertainty and instability and frequent events that rattle even the most stable individuals, we need outreach that is calming, accurate and forthright. No dancing around issues; no avoidance of hard topics; no pretending all is as it was.

Just imagine the inverse of communications now and one can get a sense of what is needed.

Creativity, innovation and risk modulation

For those of us who care about education, small colleges and student success, the pandemic may be the needed opening for enabling these institutions to remain a part of the educational landscape.

We are living in times where the old ways can’t and don’t and won’t work. Being small, with quality leadership, enables fast, nimble and creative approaches. The risk of reopening for small colleges isn’t all that great given that their very livelihood is in question.

Change in education is notoriously slow. We are wed to what we have done and what has gone on for decades or centuries before the world changed. It would be absurd to suggest that small colleges needed the pandemic and racial tensions to survive. But it is fair to say that we shouldn’t let a crisis (actually many crises) go to waste. They may just be a way to save some of our small colleges and enable in-person education to proceed in fall 2020. It might be a way to enable student success and implement changes that actually stick because they work.

The risk is in not doing anything. We can’t afford that now. In a world of uncertainty, of this I am sure: Education needs to change, and small colleges can be a big part of the solution.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her new book, Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Solutions and Strategies for Educators, PreK-College, was just released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Some colleges must reopen by the fall or die

The former Southern Vermont College, in Bennington, closed last year. It’s one of several small New England colleges put out of business by changing student demographics. COVID-19 is likely to kill more of them in the coming months.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Kudos to Brown University and some other schools that are making  dorm rooms available to house front-line workers in the pandemic emergency. With large parts of these institutions effectively closed, they have plenty of space to offer.

But what happens next September? Many colleges and universities are now agonizing over whether COVID-19 will let them safely physically reopen. If not, how many students and their parents will be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars  to take classes via the likes of Zoom? The  claims that online learning is almost as good as in-person classes are laughable.   Zoom, Skype, et al., are technically impressive but frankly as a teaching vehicle they suck (to coin a phrase) compared to in-person instruction.

So I’d guess that many students will decide to take a “gap year,” with the idea of entering, or returning to, college in the fall of 2021. The trouble is that there won’t be many jobs available for them in the interim and that some of their colleges will die as the pandemic dries up their tuition and fees revenue.

It’s not clear how Trump’s latest immigration/foreign visitor orders might affect, at least indirectly,  many foreign students at American colleges and universities, most paying full freight. The American Council on Education says that more than 1 million foreign students attend U.S. colleges and universities, contributing more than $39 billion to the economy and subsidizing American students.

In any case, a lot of these colleges must physically reopen by the fall or die.

David R. Evans: How is Bulgaria like New England?

Graduating seniors at the American University in Bulgaria

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

This question in the headline above probably seems like a lead-in for a funny non-sequitur, but bear with me for a moment.

The American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), in Blagoevgrad, where I currently serve as interim president, was founded in 1991, soon after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, originally as a branch campus of the University of Maine. Like several other international institutions, AUBG is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education, so we’re at least an honorary New England institution. This strategy streamlined initial accreditation and provided us with a base of institutional resources to start from scratch in a country that had no tradition of American-style undergraduate education. We have long since become completely independent, but our roots in New England remain fundamental to our institutional identity.

Our mission was, and remains, to promote democratic values and open inquiry and to provide opportunities for students to experience the freeing—liberating—benefits of the liberal arts. We strive to create engaged, effective citizens, critical thinkers and excellent communicators empowered by their education to take an active role in their professions and communities and always work to make the world better.

In this respect, AUBG embodies a modern version of the ethos that founded so many colleges in New England and spread across the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries. While unlike many such institutions, we have no history as a training ground for the clergy, the parallels remain clear: Our founders envisioned a better world and hoped, through establishing this institution, to play a definitive role in bringing that better world into being. In a country where, for nearly a half-century prior to our founding, the absolute last thing the communist government wanted was engaged, empowered democratic citizens who had learned and been encouraged to question and critique everything, our project and mission to bring the outcomes of a good liberal arts education to Bulgaria have been genuinely revolutionary.

AUBG also shares with many small New England colleges some significant challenges. Most importantly, Bulgaria, like many parts of New England, is in a serious demographic crisis. Bulgaria is a small country with a population of just under seven million people. Its population peaked at nearly nine million in about 1985, and has been declining ever since. Moreover, its fertility rate has been below replacement since about 1985 and is now at only 1.6 live births per woman, while the replacement rate is about 2.1. Because AUBG, like most private colleges, is significantly dependent on tuition revenue, and because our primary market is Bulgaria, the steady decline in our national population is something to take very seriously. We are, in short, deep into the worst nightmares that Nathan Grawe has recently articulated in his indispensable book, Demographics and Demand for Higher Education

Unlike institutions in the U.S., we face another specific enrollment challenge. When AUBG was founded, Bulgaria was not a member of the European Union, and the university quickly became an—if not the—institution of choice for Bulgarian young people seeking a top-quality education conducted in English. However, since Bulgaria joined the E.U. in 2007, such young people have a range of options throughout Europe at very favorable prices and have chosen particularly to pursue higher education in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Because of generous public support for higher education in the E.U., there are some parallels with the challenges the “free public college” movement poses to private institutions in the U.S., but the complexities of language and culture further complicate these situations.

In Bulgaria and most of our primary markets extending throughout Eastern Europe, we face another issue in that we proudly promote American-style liberal arts undergraduate education (though honestly more in philosophy and educational practice than in our majors, which are highly weighted toward careers in our service region in business, IT, journalism and communications, and politics).

Where in the U.S., comparable institutions face increasing skepticism about the “liberal arts” in general, in our area, the question is more about what a liberal arts education actually is, and how it differs and adds value to the undergraduate experience. The public universities of Bulgaria, of which there are many, tend to follow the European model of institutional specialization, with strong specific emphases rather than a deep investment in broad liberal education. (The technocratic and often applied focus of many of these universities is also surely a relic of communist practices as well.) In that context, as sadly often in the U.S. as well, our stress on general education is often seen as alien and unhelpful, a useless distraction from the actual business at hand. In many cases, our programs require an additional year to accommodate our curriculum’s required breadth, as we follow the traditional American four-year bachelor’s model, and this added time requires a real commitment on the part of our students and their families.

I bring a very particular, painful experience to my work here, because I was the president of the private Southern Vermont College when it closed last spring as a result of declining enrollment and the associated financial stress. I have seen first-hand the challenges that face private colleges in a highly competitive market, with a product not fully understood or appreciated by its clientele, and presenting a value proposition that is not always evident to the people who most need to embrace it. There, our mission was to provide a strong, broad education to a student body comprising mostly first-generation students and students from diverse and high-need backgrounds. Over time, and exacerbated by the broad declines in high school graduates across our region, it became increasingly difficult to manage institutional finances to support affordable access for them and thus to convince them to invest in our institution despite our evident success in supporting students to graduation and successful careers.

At recent professional meetings back in the U.S., in conversations with colleagues, I have been struck by how comparable, if not similar, our challenges are. Like many colleagues, I take strength from the power and importance of AUBG’s mission and from the tremendous success of our alumni, and work constantly to ensure that this mission can endure in the context of unprecedented challenges to a basic model that has, as New Englanders know, developed and supported exceptional leaders for over three centuries.

David R. Evans is interim president of the American University in Bulgaria.

RIP: Seal of Southern Vermont College, in Bennington, 1926-2019

Karen Gross: As school shootings continue, college students must ask if they're next

Scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, when heavily armed 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot to death 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot to death his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In a matter of seconds, a student at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif., injured and killed a handful of his fellow students and then shot himself. He died shortly thereafter. We read about such incidents and lament their happening. We see television footage and peruse articles and social media postings. We mourn for the students injured and killed and worry about their families and friends.

And we wonder why this shooting happened. And we wonder why so many shootings happen.

Despite the usual outpouring of support for survivors and displays of empathy, those of us in higher education often don’t reflect on how all these K-12 shootings can and likely will affect us directly. We don’t consider how high school shootings will impact the college students we now have and the students we will have in the future—especially if we are geographically separated. It is as if we see the K-12 shootings as something that happens “over there” with “younger” students; meanwhile, we worry about a myriad of issues on our own campuses including potential shootings on campus, but also drug overdoses and sexual harassment.

The story that struck a chord

One particular story in the Los Angeles Times that got my attention. It was about how the shooting at the high school in Santa Clarita affected the students at a nearby elementary school. These younger students were preparing for a Thanksgiving pageant. The image of youngsters in their Pilgrim costumes crying upon learning of the shooting and being held in place at their school is fraught with irony: a supposed celebration of freedom and togetherness (even if sanitized by a retelling of our history with Native Americans) is disturbed by violence. No “Thanks” in this planned Thanksgiving pageant. While the emotions differed among the younger and somewhat older students at the elementary school, they were affected, as were their parents, according to the article and other reports.

Thinking about that story made me realize that many in higher education (with some exceptions of course) do not realize that trauma travels with a student forward in time. And it is as if trauma were in a suitcase and with the passage of time, that suitcase grows. As and when new traumas occur or there are new triggering events, the trauma suitcase expands and the holder of the suitcase experiences their autonomic nervous system on high alert.

As one author quoted in a recent article on student mental health stated, trauma sits in an invisible backpack that a student carries. What is in that suitcase/backpack affects not just the student him or herself; it affects those around the student, including those who teach them. That’s where secondary and vicarious trauma occur.

In sum, the reach of shootings is wide and deep and continuous.

Trauma and college students

The students who have experienced shootings will, one hopes, someday enter postsecondary education. But the institutions that will be serving them need to know that the trauma of the applicants, and later of enrolled students, does not get parked at the proverbial gate to higher education. And for those entering a residential college, with the transition into a dorm, the challenges are even greater: new roommate, new living situation, new location. For all new college students, there is a sense of disquiet when the new collegiate experience starts, and they are the “newbies,” even if they are enthusiastic, engaged and willing to learn.

We often use orientations at the start of college to inform students on a wide range of matters, including sexual policies, drug use, alcohol and mental health. We provide IDs, and paperwork is completed. We give out swipe cards. There are financial aid or bursar meetings. Residential assistants hold get-togethers. There are often placement tests.

And, sadly, we think students are absorbing all this, even when tempered with “get-to-know-you games.”

What is happening for many students is that their autonomic nervous systems are on high alert. They cannot really hear, absorb and process what they are being told. They are trying to find their way to the bathroom and are worried about their interpersonal and academic success. They may think they flunked the placement test. They didn’t really understand the financial aid repayment options. They wonder if there were people there who would like them. They may be lonely or feel separation anxiety.

While student life personnel may deal effectively with some of these issues, faculty tend to just launch right into their subjects as if being in college is anticipated, expected and everyone is ready to roll ahead in the disciplines of the courses they select. Then students receive a syllabus, which is often long and the name itself is off-putting for some. We assign massive reading and ask questions to which students don’t know the answers or are reluctant to answer.

And that’s just the first week.

Transitions are not our strong suit

Here’s my point: Going to college is a transition and if you have ever been traumatized in your past, that event was your first transition. You transitioned from not being traumatized to being traumatized. And, once traumatized, other transitions kick off negative signals since the first transition was bad, and tell the autonomic nervous system to be on high alert.

For students who have been traumatized in the past, who have experienced attachment disorders or other trauma symptomology, there is unease. Whether or not students recognize what is happening to them, something is happening inside of them. And those adults within the college (not the new students who are adults of which there are a growing number) are often unaware of or unable to recognize trauma symptomology. They attribute what they see to a myriad of other factors, including that the quality of students is declining with the need to have better high school preparation and the decline of values in a generation. Perhaps the students are too “snowflaky” and their parents too involved.

One shooting, many consequences for students

The students in Santa Clarita have been traumatized by the shooting; the impact of the shooting on each student will differ depending on their background in terms of family stability and family dysfunction, prior trauma from other events including death, illness, accidents and injuries. The degree of closeness to the deceased and injured and the shooter are all issues that will affect these students. How the trauma and its symptoms are handled by their school and within their community are issues too, particularly when the school reopens and the details of the events are disclosed.

And anniversaries will occur and recur. Those are inevitabilities.

I worry a lot about those students who will head off to college soon, whether from Santa Clarita or elsewhere. Will this tragedy change where they apply? Will it change how they feel about leaving home? And once they choose a school, how easy will it be to adjust? Do they need a year off to work and reflect and process? Will they feel safe in a new place and space? Will they feel cared about by some adult? Will they have an outlet in which to share how the memories of the shooting keep flooding back at different times of day and night? Will they want a seat at orientation near a door? Will they want a dorm room on a high floor or a low floor?

Then, consider these possible other reactions of the survivors. Will they not want to attend classes in the morning (around the time of the shooting)? Where will they sit in the classroom? Will they be looking for exits? How will they respond to dorm alarms and other loud sounds and future drills? Will these survivors be able to manage stress? What if a student on their new campus is injured or killed or becomes ill? When the shooting occurred, what were they doing actually and can they do whatever that was again? Will a quadrangle ever feel totally safe?

As to the elementary school students, they will proceed through the educational pipeline and hopefully, many will land in colleges at some point in the next decade or so. They will not have forgotten the shooting or if they have, they have only forgotten it in their conscious memory. What has happened to them in the decade between the shooting and entering college? Any more trauma? Yes, of course. There will be other school shootings and deaths and injuries and car accidents.

Our trauma suitcases travel with us

Here’s the point: The school shooting will eventually land on college campuses in the invisible backpacks of students. Regrettably, most colleges are not trauma-informed nor trauma-responsive. And folks will be shocked when these students struggle or barely stay in school or drop out or stop out. Their learning, their memories, their engagement can all be impacted.

It’s time to see the trauma around us and how it affects education. And we need educators who can and will be ready, willing and able to be trauma-responsive at the university level. Are you confident that will happen? I’m not. That’s why this shooting makes the need to address trauma across the educational pipeline not a luxury, but a necessity.

The time to start is now.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her new book, Educating for Trauma, will be released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Al DeCiccio: Requiem for Southern Vermont College

Hunter Hall at Southern Vermont College.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

I was born in Lawrence, Mass., the first son of first-generation, working-class Italian-American parents—my mother, a nurse, and my dad, a shoe cutter in the old Everett Mills. The Everett Mills are across the street from the Holy Rosary Church. In that church, I walked barefooted down the aisle when I was 7 in an unsuccessful attempt to barter God for the sight back in my left eye, its cornea badly damaged by a direct hit from my then-best friend’s rock. His side won the battle that day a little more than 58 years ago.

I learned then, and I am re-learning yet again after the announcement that Southern Vermont College (SVC), would close at the end of the current semester,

that what the witches said about Macbeth’s approaching morphed into one of the important lessons my parents tried to teach me, “Never take anything for granted.”

I have always tried not to take things or people for granted. I am fortunate to have held faculty positions and administrative positions in my career. I have been humbled to hold the provost’s position at SVC, and I have been honored to work with special people, such as Greg Winterhalter, Sarah Nosek, Lynda Sinkiewich, Eric Despard and Jennifer Nelson.

Greg was a professor who studied with Howard Zinn and who cultivated in all of us a love for the fine arts. I saw Greg serve lunch he prepared to his first-year seminar students, and I benefited from his goodwill when he and his students helped in a project that garnered national recognition for SVC—establishing an exhibition for the Bennington Museum that displayed the genealogical histories of students following the methodology of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and including DNA research.

I observed Sarah Nosek move through the probationary period while also advancing the research of her students (rare in an undergraduate institution) and the leadership talents of women in the social sciences (notwithstanding annoying obstacles like the time, one rainy semester, her office filled up with water).

I watched Lynda Sinkiewich, a long-time faculty leader, model professionalism for newer faculty members when she worked year after year after year to earn her doctorate while teaching a full course load and assuming all faculty responsibilities.

An adjunct faculty member and a noted musician, Eric Despard went above and beyond his contracted responsibilities by performing at every SVC event; SVC’s de facto musical director without a full-time contract, he even brought established, well-known musicians to its beautiful theater, showing his deep appreciation for and dedication to the college.

And I saw Jennifer Nelson, a mathematician with the sensibility and talent of an artist, work 36 consecutive hours every new student orientation weekend to place incoming students in appropriate foundational science and math courses, a task she gladly accepted in addition to her full teaching load, leading the division of natural sciences and mathematics, and making her Bennington home a welcoming place for all colleagues.

So, like the magnificent Mount Anthony that looms above SVC, all of you and your special colleagues will arise and rejoice in the many associations you enjoyed as part of the SVC family (past and present). Of course, I am fully aware of the loss you all feel. For all of you, certainly, “peace comes dropping slow,” as Yeats wrote in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”). I can empathize with your loss, because I learned from Aristotle about how tragedy elicits daunting emotions. I also learned that, in the tragic experience, there can be catharsis, the purging of powerful emotions.

How might you have this catharsis?

Robert Frost, a poet who graduated from Lawrence High School as a co-valedictorian with his future wife, Elinor White, and who’s buried behind Bennington’s First Church, wrote this verse for the end of “The Tuft of Flowers”:

“’Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,/’Whether they work together or apart.’”

I know that, throughout the years, your colleagues and your students shared much wisdom and camaraderie with you. That can never be taken away. Though apart, you will indeed continue to work with those colleagues in the higher education enterprise of shaping women and men who will help our citizenry to lead happy and healthy lives. In the days to come before SVC’s commencement at which you will celebrate graduating students, you will work with non-graduating students to provide prospective academic opportunities. While these processes and possibilities unfold, you will experience catharsis.

Collaborating with your colleagues and working together with students, you built an SVC community.

When you worked with those at Bennington College, Williams College and the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts to bring in special guests like Anita Hill, you extended community. When you brought in dance groups and musicians and artists and writers such as the poet laureate of Vermont, you extended community. When you encouraged collaboration with the Oldcastle Theatre Company, with high schools, and with the Community College of Vermont, you extended community. When Tom Redden and Tracey Forrest used their spirituality to work with Bennington’s Interfaith Council to offer a community-based course on comparative religion, you extended community. When you secured money to support civic projects which your students selected for funding, as Jeb Gorham did for years, you extended community.

Community is essential so that we do not succumb to the illusion of scarcity and so that we appreciate the material reality of abundant talents. Just because SVC was small, essentially one building (the Everett Mansion) and less than 1,000 students, its stakeholders did not lament a lack of resources; they showed they could think and act as if they were big, buoyed by the many advocates they gained from the Bennington community. In Wendell Berry’s “A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” we learn that “It was a different world, a new world to [Mary Penn] … a world of … community.” Mary Penn started to heal when she saw the power of a caring community. Your healing has already started because the community you built has acknowledged your efforts. That is why newspaper story after story reports that so many in Bennington are dismayed by the decision to close and so supportive of your preparation of the area’s nurses, radiologic technologists, writers, researchers, statisticians and law enforcement agents.

Hosting talent

SVC hosted so much talent—Andre Dubus III, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Katherine Paterson, Edward Zlotkowski, to name some—and was home to magnificent artistic performances and exhibitions. SVC made the nationally known Carnegie Classification List for Community Engagement—an astounding feat for a small college. SVC is a leader in laboratory learning. I am so sad that a college that Henry Louis Gates Jr., acknowledged as a place of excellence for first-generation and underserved students is going to close. That’s wicked. Still, SVC has left an indelible mark on higher education and in all those who have played a role advancing its noble mission.

Al DeCiccio, now dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Education at D’Youville College in Buffalo, N.Y., is the former provost of Southern Vermont College.

Karen Gross: About those 'certificates of failure'

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The news is filled with stories about the admissions scandals at elite colleges and universities. And recently, some of the wrongdoers have pled guilty and await punishment. Apparently, prosecutors are seeking jail time. Apart from jail time, I have already suggested approaches to punishment that involve fines that go into a cy pres fund to be redistributed to small non-elite colleges and their students. Ironically (or not), the fake charity to which these parents “donated” was intended to serve low-income kids. Hey, make that really happen … and legally.

At the same time, there have been articles about the competitiveness of elite colleges and universities and the need to provide courses or partial courses or seminars in failure. The idea is legitimizing failure; it happens to everyone after all. But, since some college students have never experienced failure (see above), the colleges need to include instruction on how to fail. And some even provide “certificates of failure’’ at the beginning or end of the courses. (See image above.)

One of the pre-course certificates is issued, I am embarrassed to say, by my alma mater, Smith College. It is provided before the seminar begins with the suggestion that it be displayed proudly. The certificate provides, in part,

“You are hereby authorized to screw up, bomb or fail at one or more relationships, hookups, friendships, texts, exams, extracurriculars or any other choices associated with college … and still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human.”

Apparently, students (at least those cited in the article about this in the New York Times) are delighted to hang these words in their dorm room. A recent article in The Washington Post shared similar initiatives, with some institutions replacing the word “failure” with “grit training” or “resiliency education,” although the certificates awarded for failure were noted.

I have no idea who invented this idea of certificates of failure for college students. Was it a psychology professor or a student-life professional or some consultant? Was it an expert in parent-child development? Answer that question, please.

From my perspective, this whole “accept” failure movement strikes me as what we term in other contexts “a first world problem.” In other words, learning about and dealing with failure is a problem for some students attending some elite colleges in America, where they suddenly get a low grade or struggle for the first time in their academic and personal lives.

From my experience in education, spanning early childhood education through adult education, I see the opposite experience among low-income, first-generation, minority, ethnically diverse and immigrant students. Many of these students experience failure early and often. In their schools, they are often, directly or indirectly, signaled: “You can’t make it.” Some are deprived access to gifted programs or AP courses. Surely they are not getting the level of tutoring that the wealthy can afford. There are assumptions, acknowledged or not, as to who progresses and where in education—from elementary school programs to elite public selective high schools to elite colleges (or any college actually). Just peruse the Pell Grant numbers of enrolled students at elite colleges (although the numbers are increasing).

I can’t count the number of students at Southern Vermont College (SVC), which is sadly failing now under current leadership and set to close unless miraculously saved (something for which I have been fighting), who said to me “I was told I was not college material.” Talk about not needing a certificate of failure. And many of the students we accepted back then at SVC had profiles that would have suggested that college was not in their future, let alone graduation. Indeed, the SVC Mountaineer Scholar Program, remarkable in so many respects though undermined of late sadly through mission drift at SVC, aimed to enroll students most thought would “never make it” in higher education. Some had projected graduation rates of under 9%; they too graduated.

There are many reasons that students have failed along the educational pipeline. Poor schools, poor teachers, fiscally underfunded schools, lack of parental support (or other adult support), cultural expectations and norms including few or no individuals believing in success. If you want to see this, view the movie Raising Bertie or the movie STEP. Surrounded by failure of every sort from food scarcity to parental absence, incarceration and addiction to homelessness, many of today’s college students have not experienced success. They have lived lives filled with failures.

These students don’t need lessons in failure; they need lessons in success and their capacity—remarkable capacity—to succeed.

I would add that trauma, a topic about which I have been writing regularly, has been a large contributor to low student expectations and misunderstanding of student capacities. Indeed, we know that trauma has many cognitive effects on student learning, and it is often mistaken for other student shortcomings—when actually the students did not ask for the trauma and had no choice in being on the receiving end. Children who have been traumatized and are not in trauma-sensitive environments with tools to defuse the autonomic nervous system can feel the effects for a lifetime. Trauma’s aftermath can make you feel like a failure when you are anything but. You are a survivor. But trauma and its impacts don’t disappear. Reflect on the recent suicides a year after Parkland and several years after Sandy Hook. Tragic.

Most of us don’t need certificates of failure. We have failed. We have experienced lowered expectations. We know what it is like not to succeed and to watch others around us fail with regularity.

The focus on “certificates of failure” makes me ill actually. It applies to such a narrow segment of college students. Why is it that we can’t pay more attention to the vast majority of students and put our time, our energy, our money and our focus on their successes—hard-fought successes—in a world that dealt them failure? Yet again, we focus all our attention in the media and elsewhere on the elite as if that is all that matters and as if that is somehow representative of the vast majority of the population.

So, with the elite parents bribing and certificates of failure to offset lots of success and soft shells in some children raised to always feel good, let’s shift gears immediately. Let’s help non-elite colleges and students across the educational landscape for whom failure has been a constant companion. We don’t need a certificate of failure. It is evident in lives being lived. Instead, we need folks who believe in our success.

Karen Gross is senior counsel with Finn Partners, former president of Southern Vermont College and author of Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students.

Karen Gross: Truth, transparency, trust and the nearby gorilla

 

In the space of a few weeks in February, we lost the well-regarded journalists Bob Simon, David Carr and Ned Colt, while NBC’s Brian Williams was dethroned amid scandal. In all these cases, the words “truth” and “trust” and less commonly “transparency” have taken center stage. Quality media professionals succeed because they are truthful, and there is transparency in verifying that truth; together, this breeds trust. Trust is the one value central to anyone involved with reporting news.

The words “truth,” “transparency” and “trust” recently have taken on renewed importance in higher education. The reporting and handling of sexual assaults, athletic cheating scandals, Muslim student deaths, the intrusion into the admissions process by college/university presidents forcing acceptance of new students who are politically connected, and fraternity hazing among other inappropriate activities have run headlong into efforts to determine the truth, demonstrate institutional transparency and establish and maintain trust among the wide range of stakeholders.

One example: The “facts” that appeared in a Rolling Stone article related to an alleged rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia were later retracted. Before this occurred, actions were taken by the university against that fraternity. When the implicated fraternity challenged the factual assertions, a different version of the “facts” emerged, then challenged by the rape victim and some of her friends. The university changed its stand. Then and not without controversy, sorority women on the UVA campus were directed by their national organization not go to frat parties because of safety risks.

The problem with the three “t” words is their complexity—within and outside higher education. Determining “truth” is not easy. Consider the Rashomon effect; different people witnessing an event perceive and describe that event differently. This may be because of faulty memory or unconscious personal bias or unspoken leanings toward a desired outcome and other reasons. Usually, witnesses do not self-perceive as liars. Evidence of challenges of fact-finding abounds in the handling of disciplinary matters on campuses across the nation, raising the need for independent investigators in Title IX cases.

Another distortion of truth can come from “not seeing” all that is there. In the oft-seen film clip showing the students throwing a basketball to each other, a gorilla crosses the room. Because the viewers have been asked to focus on and count the number of throws, many never see the gorilla in the room. Really.

Our capacity to “see” and “share” the truth also depends on what “truth” we are addressing. The truth of some facts—like the world is round—are easy to establish. Other perceived facts like “there is a God” are surely debatable. In classrooms early on, students often seek to identify “the” answer only to learn there is no answer, a frustrating reality for many students.

Transparency, a term that is oft used to refer to the need for government openness, is equally complex. When information reflects badly on a college or university, there is often an effort to bury that truth, lest parents or new students learn of it. But with the Internet, failure to disclose is fraught with risk, as the negative information will be found, worsening the absence of transparency. It is vastly better that institutions, rather than outsiders, control their own bad news.

There are times when telling the truth will produce serious adverse consequences. In the movie The Imitation Game, even with its adaptations of history, there is proof positive of the devastating consequences of “truths” contained in the decoded messages, knowledge that forced individuals to make choices to protect the larger good. On a campus, too, disclosing information like the identity of a victim of rape can have serious consequences, particularly if the rapist is a popular figure on campus.

Establishing trust, animated by both truth and transparency, is hard. It takes time and we test its limits. We know a child’s development is impaired if a parent cannot be trusted. But losing trust is easier. One or two false steps can erode trust, and rebuilding it is not always possible—despite a myriad of past positive decisions. In a relationship, for example, trust undermined by infidelity can sometimes be overcome depending on the individuals, the circumstances and the gravity of the offenses.

Education leaders and campuses must build trust. College presidents know that if they lose the trust of their boards, their faculty, government officials and sometimes their students, their jobs are at risk. Of late, too many presidents have lost their positions because the trust others held in them was eroded beyond repair. No one is suggesting that university and college presidents be flawless. But, they must ferret out—and often quickly—what is fact and what is fiction. They must spend the time to think through the words they use to describe volatile situations. Above all else, they need to own the truth, whether it is good or bad.

In education circles, we often talk about truth-seeking. The word appears in college insignias. Consider Veritas. We use the phrase: And the truth shall set you free. But, perhaps genuine “trust” (which rests on truth and transparency) better embodies what we need to develop on campuses today. Some students have trusted their sexual partners only to then experience harassment and assault. Students have trusted that they and their colleagues can truly imbibe ad infinitum, only to later realize the deadly impact of alcohol poisoning and drunk driving. We trust that the academic community will protect us from killings and discrimination, a trust that is eroded by events like the shooting of Muslim students.

Judging from current events, trust on our campuses is eroding, including in our leaders and within the student population. Without trust, the connectivity so central to the creation of community and the capacity to learn and take risks diminishes. We need to spend more time rebuilding and valuing trust, not just divining and sharing truth.

Maybe the lessons from the three trustworthy media giants who died contrasted with the Shakespearean fall of now less than trustworthy Brian Williams will help education leaders and their communities refocus on the value of trust in its many dimensions. That, in a world of bad news, would be good.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. This originated in the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).