Planning for the Fall Is Like ‘Driving Through a Dense Fog’ How the presidents of two small liberal-arts colleges are navigating the coronavirus crisis By Len Gutkin and Maximillian Alvarez April 29, 2020

Pete Mauney Bard College In the last two months, the coronavirus crisis has forced colleges to shutter their classrooms and dormitories and move instruction online. What will happen next semester? The Chronicle Review talked (via Zoom, of course) with G. Gabrielle Starr and Leon Botstein, the presidents, respectively, of Pomona College and Bard College, to get a sense of how the leaders at smaller, undergraduate-focused liberal-arts schools are handling this critical period. Starr and Botstein discussed when and how to reopen, the advantages and risks of education technology, the importance of the arts and public culture, disaster preparedness, and the virtues of horror movies.

Len Gutkin: The president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, wrote an op- ed in The New York Times arguing that Brown and colleges like it need to be able to reopen in the fall. Is Bard going to open? Is Pomona? If so, what kind of opening will it be?

Leon Botstein: Yes. I think that we are going to open, and we’re going to open on schedule. The question of what kind of opening it will be is really dependent on federal, local, and state regulations. That’s hard to tell from here.

Places like Pomona and ourselves are in a terrifically privileged position because they’re small. We’re not giant tankers trying to move around. We have an obligation to be in the leadership of restoring public culture, and education is part of that public culture. It’s vital to a democracy. We don’t have a choice. We’re not a luxury enterprise.

G. Gabrielle Starr: Certainly we are planning to be open. We may delay opening slightly, we may open in October instead of September — and we’re also considering the possibility of having, for example, a quarter of the semester online. But regardless of what happens, Pomona will be continuing education for our students, and we’ll be back to doing research and creative production.

What I’m really worried about are schools that are not as well-equipped financially to be able to take on some of the extra needs that we know we are going to have. With a lot of unemployment, there’s going to be more need for financial aid. If we are going to be online in any way in the fall, we’ll have to make some additional investments in training and infrastructure. We’re quite lucky that we can draw on funds that we already have to make that happen.

But for a whole swath of schools, day-to-day survival is really going to be jeopardized. In terms of job-force development, lost creativity, lost productivity, the United States can’t afford to lose good schools that are serving the country.

Jemal Countess, Getty Images Leon Botstein, president of Bard College

Botstein: A longstanding mistake in American public policy, which has been exploited by both parties, is that education is some kind of a giveaway, some kind of a scheme that takes away from the economy. State universities have suffered nearly 30 years of deprived funding, while the cost of higher education is passed on to the consumer. What the government should do is renew the Morrill Act of the 1860s and recapitalize all the state universities. It should also take this opportunity to solve the student-loan problem and to rethink what universities mean for the well-being of the country.

Maximillian Alvarez: Can you give us a sense of what things look like under the hood — what discussions are happening, what calculations are being made?

Starr: In a lot of places, [secondary] schooling stopped at some point. There were estimates last month that perhaps one billion children would lose education as a result of this crisis. Two of our faculty members have decided to put together an online unit on college math for incoming first-year students, to try to hit where they left off and bring them along so that when they come to campus they’re not feeling the learning loss as much as they might otherwise. We are prioritizing people over other things. We’ve put a pause on some construction and renovation projects. It’s much more important to get students to campus and pay, as long as we can, all of our workers.

There are little things we have to think about. Are we going to need new kinds of air filtration in order to have people safely together? We have an epidemiologist consulting with us. We’ve had to identify different possibilities for decreasing density on the campus should we need to. We’re looking at how we would carry out dining so that people are not all in the same place together at the same time. We’re lucky enough that we can move some classes outside. We can have a choral concert in our Greek amphitheater — you can have social distancing and music together.

There are a lot of questions about testing and how we can use it — whether for antibodies or for the presence of the virus itself. We’re going to have to learn how to do quick sanitation.

And there may need to be restrictions. Spring break or fall break may have to be in situ — this is not the time for you to go to Catalina Island or Panama City Beach and bring a new range of pathogens back with you.

Botstein: To use your metaphor about looking under the hood — well, I liken this to driving a car in a thick fog. You go very slowly. You get out of the car and make sure the deer isn’t in the middle of the road. Then you get back in the car and move another few inches.

But the assurance of safety has its limits. The disease will still be with us. People will have to make judgments about their personal behavior.

Life is unsafe. And the question for every individual is, what level of safety are you willing to tolerate? Where is the trade off? We’ll have a vaccine for this, and hopefully sooner rather than later. But, as Gabi points out, some other pathogen will come our way. Are we going to finally sit down as a nation and have a national health-delivery system for all Americans?

Starr: On a lighter note, Leon, when you started off with the metaphor of driving through a dense fog, I realized that you’ve not watched enough horror movies to know that you never get out of your car in a dense fog. You just keep going.

Botstein: I don’t watch that many horror movies. Life is tough enough. I never go to the movies to get scared. I’m scared enough. The idea of paying money to be artificially scared seems to me to be counterintuitive.

Pomona College

G. Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College

Starr: But it’s a kind of disaster preparedness.

Alvarez: On disaster preparedness: Are there historical epochs, or major events in the past, that offer guidance here?

Botstein: The year 2008 was a good prelude for most of us, because it showed that this tuition-dependent model of higher education is on its way out. We need some kind of restructuring of the financing of higher education. The Depression is also a very good model, because it turned the country’s attention to a greater investment in education, especially leading to the more universal completion of high school.

What worries me is the isolationism and the xenophobia that comes out of this thing. You know, the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn’t Spanish. There was nothing Spanish about it. And that kind of xenophobia is something that the past can teach us about.

But remember that after 1918 and 1919, there were the Gay Twenties. Public life erupted. The whole modern infrastructure of modern culture — movie theaters, dance halls — all really exploded in the wake of a much more severe loss of life and fear. So I think that there are some lessons from history, but there’s also the need to focus on opportunities. We don’t need to return to normal. We need to return to a better normal.

Starr: I learned a lot from having been through 9/11, and then, when I was at New York University, Hurricane Sandy. We were all without power, and I would walk with my kids to the office every day because they couldn’t go to school either. We had base camp at the library: all of the deans, and the president, and the provost. The key was communication. There were no cell towers, because they’d all been knocked out for lack of power. The phones went dead after the second day, again because there was no residual power in the lines. That means if you were going to know what was going on, you had to hoof it. Communication was everything.

Botstein: The one silver lining of this crisis is that we’ve learned the hard way how to use technology. And we’ve also discovered that this technology has limits. You know, before this happened there were a lot of people out there selling snake oil: “Well, machines can replace people and education, we’re old fashioned dinosaurs, we’re the horse and buggy of transportation. We’ve got cars, trains, planes, and you’re just running around with horse and buggies; you’re out of date, you’re obsolete.” That famous word, “the disruptor” — the real heroes were said to be the disruptors. That’s all snake oil.

Now there’s a real disruptor. The real disruptor comes in this pandemic, and what do we discover? The technology is great. But like every technology — like the book! — it will not replace the human being. Students are dying to come back to the classroom, to real contact with people. There’s no machine replacement, no robotics, no AI that’s going to replace the classroom. The university has gobbled up and digested, like a gigantic dinosaur, every technological innovation in our history from the printing press to the video camera, and now the internet. That’s the good news. We’re not going out of business. In fact, we are more popular than we used to be.

Gutkin: Are either of you worried that students might decide not to re-enroll for the fall semester on the theory that they may as well come back later when things are normal?

Botstein: Unlike Pomona — Pomona is a very wealthy institution, and it should be deeply grateful to its alumni and its trustees — we’re a poor institution. We’re not as poor as some. But all institutions, rich or poor, have to respond to the economic pressures on students.

But as for deciding not to go — I predict the opposite. There’ll be an upsurge in demand. Will we be able to finance the students? After World War 2 there was a GI bill. After the coronavirus there should be a coronavirus bill, which incentivizes our fellow citizens to go to school, not only because of the future of the nation but also to lessen the pressure on jobs for those who are jobless, who have already been in the job market and been thrown out.

Starr: Two years ago, if you wanted to take a gap year you could get a job, get some work experience, travel, do all sorts of things. A lot of those opportunities are gone. So for students who are living with their parents, many of them will be spending a fallow year. There is a cost to that.

Botstein: The area I’m most concerned about is performing arts and public culture. I’m a musician, so for me that is particularly acute. Part of culture is being in a shared space. Theater, dance, music — what’s going to happen to the orchestras, the operas, the big bands, Jazz at Lincoln Center? The arts infrastructure of this country is in private hands. That’s not right. It would be great if we had a Works Progress Administration equivalent in the arts. And the universities have a big role in the arts.

Gutkin: As I understand it, the humanities tend to thrive at places like Pomona or Bard when measured by enrollment in humanities courses and by majors, compared to many other kinds of institutions. What do those kinds of colleges need to do now at the convergence of two crises: a drop-off of humanities enrollments across the board long preceding the coronavirus, and the virus, which could massively accelerate this decline?

Starr: I wouldn’t say that we have not lost majors in the humanities. But I think that we have stabilized some. And we’ve seen large upticks in some of the performing arts, like dance.

I think that right now, when it’s time for us to recreate community, the arts are going to be crucial. The arts bring us together. All of the human stories — right now it’s journalism bringing those stories into our lives. But it’s going to be artists, as well, who will be chronicling some of what this has meant for the country. I studied 18th-century British literature in grad school. One of the books that I found most compelling was Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The problem he has is how to convey the magnitude of loss. I can tell you some numbers, but what’s the difference between imagining 18,000 dead and 200,000? That’s not something you can put in your visual imaginary. There have to be different ways of helping people to understand what the loss of human life looks like. At some point, we’ll be relying on our artists to help make us human again.

Botstein: People in such a crisis are looking for meaning. Meaning and purpose. They get that on the religious side, from traditions and faiths, and, on the secular side, from the culture of thought and of the arts. This is an opportunity for many of our colleagues in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in the arts as well, to rethink what they’re doing and connect it to the conduct of life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maximillian Alvarez is an associate editor at The Chronicle Review. Len Gutkin is an associate editor at The Chronicle Review and the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (University of Virginia Press).