The Institute offered several sessions on issues that are keeping academic leaders awake at night as their campuses both navigate the current pandemic and plan for the post-COVID future. Among the numerous concurrent and discussion sessions that explored coronavirus-related challenges, four are featured below.
Provosts Deliberate Closing and Re-Opening: What Worked and What Didn’t?
(Clockwise) Moderator Jo Ellen Parker, senior vice president of CIC; panelist Cheryl Kisunzu of
Washington Adventist University (MD); an ASL interpreter; and panelists Wendy Sherman Heckler of
Otterbein University (OH) and Tracy Parkinson of
Mars Hill University (NC).
What lessons can be drawn from the way campuses closed in the spring and how they reopened in the fall? In a concurrent session on lessons learned during the pandemic, panelists Cheryl Kisunzu, provost of
Washington Adventist University (MD); Tracy Parkinson, provost and vice president for enrollment management of
Mars Hill University (NC); and Wendy Sherman Heckler, provost of
Otterbein University (OH), explored what worked and what didn’t in decision making and actions taken as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that wreaked havoc on academic calendars in 2020.
Opening the session, Kisunzu said Washington Adventist implemented COVID-19 practices such as mask wearing, social distancing, and a blend of in-person and online classes, as well as contact tracing and taking temperatures. “We want to regain an in-person experience in spring 2021,” she said, “but COVID-19 cases are rising in the [Washington, DC] area. So we are caught in the middle of being attentive to the well-being of students and constituents and wanting to honor their legitimate requests and expectations for in-person learning.”
Parkinson has made decisions about campus closings, reopenings, and safety measures at two institutions during the pandemic—Coker University (SC) and
Mars Hill—having taken office at the latter in June. Although the campuses are similar, he noted key differences in political and social views, public attitudes, and practices in the two states that affected how parents and students responded to campus decisions regarding the coronavirus. For example, students in South Carolina were less likely to question the university’s approach about safety measures, but they were much more likely to react negatively to those measures. And students in North Carolina were more inclined to comply with safety protocols, but their parents were more inclined to scrutinize campus decisions.
Heckler agreed that “place matters” as does “who you are.” When making decisions during the start of the pandemic, she said that Otterbein “had to double-down on its identity as a relational institution, so we allowed students to return to campus and choose a mix of online or in-person classes.”
Parkinson remarked that Mars Hill also allowed flexibility for the fall semester: Faculty members could choose to teach remotely or in person and students could be on or off campus. If on campus, students could choose whether to have a roommate. While this was the “right decision,” challenges arose when both faculty members and students changed their minds about remote versus in-person classes immediately before the start of the semester as coronavirus cases rose. The campus also was aggressive with quarantining and chose to move to a block schedule (with two seven-week blocks), which allowed students to take two or three classes in each block versus the typical five or six courses in a semester. This latter decision “immediately reduced the number of contacts among students and faculty, and it meant that we used half of our facilities…allowing us to leverage our best classrooms.” The new schedule was challenging, however, both for faculty members and students who had never experienced the system before. Parkinson concluded, “The biggest lesson for me is that every good decision that you make has a challenge associated with it.”
Shared governance and collaborative decision making has helped many campuses make solid, timely decisions during this pandemic. For example, Heckler said Otterbein created a series of ad hoc decision-making committees of students, faculty, and staff to focus on communications, budgeting and finances, and how to stay connected to the community, support students, and maximize experiential learning opportunities. These committees “allowed shared input and collaboration to help make critical decisions much faster than otherwise, in a manner that avoided suspicion and mistrust,” she concluded.
Trust and integrity are core values that help campus administrators make solid decisions, agreed Kisunzu. As for what didn’t work at Washington Adventist, she shared “We recognized we weren’t as attentive to strategies for community, for engagement, or to attend to feelings of isolation among students.” The university learned that students needed help to form virtual study groups and that administrators needed to attend to the psycho-social dimension of community learning.
As campuses look to spring 2021 and make decisions for the future, the panelists said they would encourage a culture of shared responsibility, factor in breaks for students and faculty members to recharge, try new approaches to course schedules (such as a January three-week term to allow students to catch up or retake classes), and attend to the psycho-social realities of online learning.
CAOs Explore Successful Academic Strategies for the Coronavirus Era and After

(Top to bottom) Panelists Terri Bonebright of Hendrix College (AR), Kerry D. Fulcher of Point Loma Nazarene University (CA), and David A. Berque of DePauw University (IN).
Two Institute sessions explored academic strategies and curricular adaptations that CIC member institutions have implemented during the coronavirus pandemic. Presenters emphasized the importance of flexibility and teamwork during the pandemic as well as assessment of which adaptations to retain once the crisis passes.
Kerry D. Fulcher, provost and CAO of
Point Loma Nazarene University (CA), began the concurrent session on “Academic Strategies for the COVID-19 Era and Beyond” by invoking blogger and executive development specialist Nick Petrie’s concept of “post-traumatic growth.” According to Petrie, some institutions respond to adversity by succumbing or barely muddling through while others learn to thrive—and “we wanted to make sure that we ended up in that thriving category.” To that end, Fulcher and his colleagues focused on three strategies: more flexible approaches to shared governance, better communication between academic leaders and other campus constituents, and selective adaptation of new technologies.
The key innovation in faculty governance at Point Loma Nazarene was the creation of a Summer Governance Council. Proposed by the university leaders and approved by the faculty, the council gave faculty members a voice in the exceptionally rapid decision-making process. Then, as the academic year began, Zoom-based faculty meetings and a temporary hold on many committee meetings opened more space for faculty members to concentrate on teaching and the most pressing governance issues raised by the pandemic.
These developments were supported by several new approaches to faculty communication, including Zoom-based town halls that routinely attracted hundreds of faculty and staff members (more than triple the participation in previous face-to-face events) and “virtual provost office hours” that served to “reduce [the inevitable] transactional distance barriers” between faculty and academic leaders, even on a small campus. The faculty, in turn, applied the same combination of flexible communication and new technology to the classroom, supporting hybrid courses across the curriculum and experimenting with clinical placements for nursing students outside of traditional hospital settings. These were all innovations for the university, “but we are going to continue them in the post-coronavirus context.”
Terri Bonebright, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost of
Hendrix College (AR), also focused on flexible approaches to governance and new collaborations across divisional barriers as necessary responses to the pandemic. Under normal conditions, she noted, different parts of a college (such as academic affairs, athletics, and the business office) may have relatively little incentive to “collaborate actively,” while “some individuals with specific functions or jobs within [the college] also can tend to be inflexible in terms of their job duties.” But 2020 was not a normal year.
Bonebright described several unprecedented approaches undertaken at Hendrix during the pandemic. For example, the director of events, who was already familiar with campus facilities and used to working with external groups to bring events to campus, was pressed into service as the new contact tracing coordinator when the usual campus events were curtailed. Then, when Hendrix introduced a tuition-free fifth year for students whose residential experience was disrupted by the pandemic, the institution also created a new cross-functional team with representatives from academic affairs, the academic success office, admissions, athletics, and the registrar’s office to “make sure that students can take advantage of this…program in a way that really helps them focus on their careers.”
These initiatives have worked as emergency measures, but “flexibility is a double-edged sword.” Bonebright expressed particular concerns about redeployed staff members who might become overburdened with new responsibilities on top of old ones, the potential confusion when multiple new work groups “all try to solve the same problem” without adequate coordination, and the temptation to go back to old approaches too quickly. “We need to be very careful to make sure that we are assessing our student programs so that we aren’t cutting [new] things that work well and that we enhance things when our students are back.”
The final panelist—David A. Berque, vice president for academic affairs at
DePauw University (IN)—continued to shift the conversation from lesson learned to “lesson that might need to be
unlearned” once the pandemic is over. A computer scientist by training, he focused most of his presentation on the strategic uses of technology. Most colleges, he noted, “found ways during the pandemic to use technology to deliver existing courses online. We really didn’t have any choice but to do that.” But using technology for instruction was not enough, he argued. DePauw, for example, also devoted technology resources to student support services, faculty development, instructional support for faculty members who shifted to remote teaching, and to develop a timely new summer course on ethics and pandemics designed to introduce incoming students to college-level instruction while reducing admissions melt.
Despite the success of these immediate responses to the pandemic, Berque left the participants with a challenging question: “Are there things that we’ve learned that we can do which we may want to discontinue (or may need to discontinue) depending on the mission of our institution?” These things, he concluded, might even include the new approaches to flexible governance, operational structures, and reliance on instructional technology that the three presenters discussed during the session.
A concurrent session devoted to “Curricular Adaptation to the COVID Crisis” revisited some of the same themes as the “Academic Strategies” session, including the importance of creative flexibility in the face of the pandemic and assessment of adaptations to retain once the crisis passes. Eric Boynton, provost and dean of the college at
Beloit College (WI), and Suzan Harrison, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at
Eckerd College (FL), structured the conversation around five topics, with specific examples from each campus followed by a broader discussion and questions from the audience. Highlights of the five key topics follow:
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Adapting the Academic Calendar: In May 2020, Beloit became one of the first colleges in the country to announce the shift from a traditional fall semester schedule to shorter teaching modules of six weeks and two courses each. The shift allowed for more flexibility in the event of campus closures and more focused attention on student learning. Soon after, Eckerd announced its own schedule of half-semester modules plus even shorter three-and-a-half-week blocks designed to stagger the return of students to campus in fall 2020. This adaptation required flexibility on the part of students, faculty members, and administrative offices. For instance, Eckerd’s Office of Institutional Research “had to develop an algorithm to help us figure out where to place the classes in this new structure in ways that would preserve as many student registrations as possible,” Harrison said.
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Faculty Development for Teaching and Learning: Both institutions invested in additional faculty development. Eckerd recruited faculty members from colleges with more extensive experience in block teaching, including
Colorado College and
Cornell College (IA), to offer workshops on restructuring course syllabi while local faculty members developed a new Teaching and Learning Commons to collect and share resources. Beloit also drew upon the expertise of peer institutions, including Duke Kunshan University in China (a new liberal arts institution that focuses on modular instruction) and fellow members of the
Associated Colleges of the Midwest (IL). Indeed, Boynton argued that a willingness to rely more heavily on partners and peers should be one of the enduring adaptive lessons of the coronavirus crisis.
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New Mechanisms and Structures for Faculty Involvement: In addition to leaning on peer institutions in new ways, academic leaders at Eckerd and Beloit also leaned heavily on their faculty members. As Boynton recounted, “We had about ten days to restructure the semester into modules—which just made the hair in the back of my neck stand on end. But our departments and department chairs essentially trusted two well-regarded faculty [members] to take the semester system and put it into blocks.” The faculty also revamped the course schedule to explain to students the rationale for new course calendars and formats (online, in-person, or hybrid), in a process that Boynton described as “a mechanism that bred confidence … [because everyone could see] the experience that we were expecting people to have in the fall.” At Eckerd, faculty committees likewise took the lead in sequencing new course offerings, polling students about their initial experience with reconfigured courses, and developing an online forum for faculty to share questions and concerns about teaching through a pandemic.
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Physical Adaptations to the Campus: Like many other colleges, Beloit and Eckerd moved at least some on-campus instruction out of doors during the fall semester. That might have seemed easier in sunny Florida than Wisconsin—but amidst the threat of tropic storms, Eckerd also needed to reckon with a lack of formal outdoor teaching spaces and an IT infrastructure geared toward interior spaces. Two faculty members in the environmental studies program stepped forward to map the entire campus and identify 30 locations that could hold socially distanced outdoor classrooms of 25 students or more; the IT staff increased Wi-Fi reception in these areas; tents were erected in the sunniest location on the list; and students were instructed to come prepared with folding chairs, bug spray, and sunscreen. Beloit also constructed outdoor tents during the balmiest parts of fall, but focused on reducing campus density through a combination of in-person and hybrid courses.
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When the Students Came Back: The real test of adaptations at every college came when students returned to campus (or opened their laptops) in the fall. And the most important adaptation, Harrison and Boynton agreed, had to be the behavior of students. “We realized that early on we had to include students in the decision-making and policy-making processes [during the summer] in order for us to have a safe opening in the fall,” says Boynton, and efforts at both institutions “to foster a culture of … self care as community care” seem to have paid off. An important aspect of this was translating campus rituals and communal activities to alternative modes—such as Eckerd’s traditional candlelit ceremony for incoming students, which was moved outdoors this year (see photo below).
The session concluded with a discussion about lessons learned and adaptations that are worth retaining in the future. Boynton was especially optimistic about the embrace of new teaching technologies and new teaching strategies: “[Small colleges adapted these] very rapidly and very effectively, and so I just want to say, watch out for the kind of pedagogy that’s going to be taking place over the coming years … now that we have all these tools flooding the field that we just didn’t capitalize on before.” Harrison was enthusiastic about the new flexibility in both calendars and teaching spaces, noting that “the academic program has just taken over the whole campus, indoors and outdoors.” Boynton concluded by acknowledging the burden of adaptation on administrators and faculty members, who have not had a break in almost a year; “but now that we’ve shaken things up, let’s go ahead and don’t let them solidify back into what we had before.”
Eckerd College (FL) held its traditional opening ceremony outdoors on August 31, 2020. (Photo courtesy of Eckerd College)
Higher Ed Attorneys Highlight Accommodation and Personnel Challenges during the Pandemic
Campus administrators have had to make rapid adjustments to classroom and workplace circumstances in response to the pandemic, but decision making has not always focused on employment policies or accommodation practices. During a concurrent session on “Accommodation and Personnel Challenges during the Pandemic,” two experienced higher education attorneys provided an overview of the current legal landscape and assessed what lies ahead for student and employee higher education policies.
Opening the session, Marti Fessenden, special counsel to the president at
Agnes Scott College (GA), and Hayley Hanson, a partner at Husch Blackwell, explored Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodations related to the pandemic. “The ADA and Title VII regulate employer disability-related inquiries and medical examinations for applicants and employees, prohibits employee exclusion from the workplace unless they present a direct threat to the workplace, and requires reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities,” said Hanson. Title I of the ADA states that “a direct threat in the workplace is judged by the severity of the condition and likelihood of harm.” A pandemic that is declared a direct threat by health authorities “expands the employer’s ability to require medical exams, make health-related inquiries, and exclude workers from the workplace.”
Hanson explained that “an employee is a direct threat to the workplace if an employer determines there is a significant risk of harm that cannot be eliminated.” Citing a court case that is applicable to colleges and universities, Hanson said the “EEOC [U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] had previously established a position that the ADA protects employees against actions based on a perceived risk of a future disability or perceived illness. But the 11th Circuit court ruled that the ADA does not prohibit employers from taking employment actions based on a potential future disability that a healthy person may experience later.”
What this means for colleges and universities, Hanson remarked, is that they
can take the temperatures of employees because of the threat of community spread; require that an employee stay home if symptomatic; and require a doctor’s note as certification of fitness for work. She cautioned that institutions may keep a log of medical information but must keep it confidential. In addition, campus officials can release the name of individuals infected with the coronavirus to health authorities and others, but the individual must authorize the release and provide a signed waiver that discloses the individual’s name. Campuses must have written documentation of this action.
Hansen also outlined Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations applicable to campuses. For example, “All employers must ensure they are free from recognized hazards that are likely to cause harm.” COVID-19 falls into that category. To meet OSHA’s reporting requirements, she said “campuses must communicate health and safety standards and information and publish percentages of positive cases.” She noted that most campuses have created webpages that provide updated information on coronavirus cases. OSHA also requires employers to offer personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer for employees, and campuses must stay apprised of changing federal, state, and local health and medical guidance.
Reopening campuses during a pandemic, said Fessenden, can lead to whistleblower complaints that the institution is not in compliance with OSHA regulations or voicing of concerns that CDC guidelines are not being followed. In whistleblower cases, an institution may not retaliate against the whistleblower. As campuses navigate employment issues in this pandemic context, she said, frequent and detailed communication with faculty, staff, human resources administrators, and counsel are all critical.
Campuses will need to consider what in-person learning looks like as cold weather requires everyone to be indoors, and whether to require coronavirus testing before the spring semester. Fessenden said campuses “may require a PCR (virus) test because of the direct threat from COVID-19 to the work environment” but the EEOC states that “employers
cannot require an antibody (former infection) test in a work environment.” Hanson added that campuses “need a clear plan as to what to do with the tests, how that information will be protected, and how to address positive cases. In addition, she suggested that campus policies “should mirror the CDC’s guidelines on quarantining (when an individual has been exposed to the coronavirus) and isolating (when an individual has coronavirus symptoms).
The panelists also explained regulations regarding the hiring process and the coronavirus. The bottom line is that “campuses
can screen for applicants with COVID; they
can delay the start date of a candidate with COVID symptoms; and, if a position requires an immediate start, they
can withdraw an offer of employment if an applicant has COVID or symptoms,” said Fessenden. But again, campuses should remain in close contact with their human resources administrators and legal counselors regarding personnel matters.