Hope lives on

New Year’s blogs convey messages of hope and optimism. That’s what the genre demands. This one is a little late and, well, you can imagine why. Given the turmoil on the national stage, my typically inexhaustible stores of hope and optimism have been in somewhat shorter supply. 

Like most of you, I’ve been reeling from a few realizations: 

• Our democracy is fragile and requires constant tending in order to survive, much less thrive.
• Fringe paramilitary, nativist, white nationalist, anarchist, and other groups—long a part of our national fabric and its political discourse—are active amongst us. They are better organized than they have been in quite some time due in part to economic dislocation, the hollowing out of the political center, and the intentional pandering of more extreme factions - left and right - interest in advancing their own position, market share, or both.
• Our nation, which has mobilized and channeled its vast intellectual, scientific, and financial resources so effectively and so heroically to deal with national emergencies in our past, is caught flat-footed, inept, and divided by a global pandemic that is taking a terrible toll measured in human life while exposing and exacerbating gross inequities that exist in our society.

Issues of a more local nature factor into the mix: 

• The pandemic is straining the comity that binds us with one another and with the communities in which our universities are located. What’s more, the experience of university life during a global pandemic is vastly altered in ways that stretch our students’ reserves of resilience, good humor, and understanding.
• Changes being made at all of our universities—while essential to secure the continued presence of quality, affordable postsecondary options for all Pennsylvanians—involve gut-wrenchingly difficult decisions that have real impacts on real people within our State System family.

So where to find the optimism and hope required for a New Year’s blog? Here are a few sources:

• The fabric of our republic has been tested—hard. As a political historian by training, I have watched these events unfold in part through that lens. Needless to say, I am profoundly concerned about our nation’s future. But I am also amazed by the resilience of our Constitution and the organs of our civil and political societies that breathe life into its ever-evolving use and interpretation. I emerge convinced that with proper attention, care, and feeding, our republic will survive and may once more emerge as a beacon on the hill demonstrating the power and advantages of democracy for people and nations worldwide.
• There are early signs suggesting that vaccines—in combination with ever better coordination at state and federal levels—will enable us to get our arms around and ultimately contain this scourge of a pandemic. We cannot lose focus on managing university operations in ways that mitigate the risks from COVID. But at last, we can also turn our attention to how the vaccine is distributed to members of our communities. 

Closer to home:

• Our universities navigated the pandemic effectively through the fall semester, ensuring students’ continued progress towards their degrees while mitigating health risks to all members of their communities. Universities adopted different approaches reflecting considerable variation in their circumstances, but together they demonstrated the starker choices once considered (e.g., between entirely remote and entirely in-person modalities) to be in fact false choices—just as it has proven false to assume a choice between mitigating pandemic risk and economic vitality.
• We are publicly and very visibly and directly addressing the challenges involved in ensuring our universities are inclusive communities—communities that are equally welcoming of all their members— including eliminating attainment gaps and ensuring the complexion of our employee and student bodies reflects that of Pennsylvania. There is a lot to do and the urgency of our doing it has only grown as evidence mounts about the gross inequality, race hatred, discrimination, and other forms of injustice that persist in our country. We embrace the extent of the challenges we face. We acknowledge the wrongs that have been done and that need righting. We expect the work will be excruciatingly hard, contentious, painful, and likely even slow in some regards. But let us never undervalue the seriousness of our commitment or the progress we are making (see more on this in an upcoming bulletin by my colleague, Vice Chancellor Denise Pearson).
• The work our universities are doing to ensure that affordable, quality, public higher education remains accessible in this state is hard but also inspiring for two reasons: (1) It is driven by the creativity and talent, grit and determination of our people and our collective commitment to mission; and (2) while it is hard and will impact real people with real lives, we have opportunities that may be rare across US higher education, even though our circumstances are not. To the circumstances, first: The challenges that drive us are not unique. Higher education is contracting; the demands of those it serves are changing; its business model is broken. No news here. Nor should anyone be surprised that the contractions that are happening across the country are also appearing here in Pennsylvania where public support for higher education ranks 47th nationally in terms of state funding per student. So where is the opportunity? Maybe here. Our faculty and staff are loyal and dedicated. They are also—and in part as consequence—considerably older on average than employees at peer institutions. (Ten years older on average in some employee groups.) This creates opportunities that other universities may not have and that we have been pursuing for some time through various retirement incentive programs.  If we get it right, we could significantly  reduce our reliance on furloughs/retrenchment and reduce the detrimental impact on members of our State System family—living into our new enrollment realities in a way that is respectful of our people, honors their service, and at the same time recognizes financial realities. 

These efforts—however incremental, however challenging—restore faith in our ability to transform ourselves for the future. What replenishes my sense of optimism and hope are the many recent Zoom and email engagements I have had with university trustees and alumni—conversations that bear witness to the importance of our cause. The engagements I’m writing about arise directly out of work at all of our universities, including those pursuing far reaching and fundamental changes that will enable them to pursue their historic mission into the 21st century. These include universities that are considering integration: Bloomsburg, Lock Haven, and Mansfield in the north east, and California, Clarion, and Edinboro in the west – as well as others that are not – IUP, for example, and Cheyney.

The input has been welcomed. It has been actively sought. It has been rich, informative, influential. Most understand and support the logic of integration. Some get swept up with enthusiasm for it—particularly for thinking about designing a university around our students now and into the future. Virtually all tell a story about how one of our universities shaped and, in many cases, “saved” their lives. I’m not just writing about alumni who are looking back thinking fondly about youthful endeavors and accomplishments. I’m writing as well about those who graduated in the past five or so years. I am writing about people who have told me—sometimes through their tears—about how one of our universities lifted them and their family out of poverty or hopelessness or both. I am writing about people for whom a university experience set them on a path to economic or civic success, or towards tolerance and compassion for those with wholly different backgrounds. 

Our graduates are our greatest advocates. They know first-hand the power and promise of affordable public higher education. Their experience testifies to the importance of our work, to what we can do. The trajectory of their lives acts as a vivid reminder—in case we should need one—about why we must and will find a path to expanding opportunity and to enhancing our historic role as engines of economic development and social mobility. These conversations scream out not only that we can, but also that we must succeed in our cause. 

Okay. Deep breath. All in. 2021 here we come.

Final Thoughts

I am horrified, sickened by what happened last week in the nation’s capital. Ashamed of it. Trying to process images of fellow Americans desecrating all we hold dear: violently assaulting our house, our legislature; displaying at the seat of our democratic form of government overt symbols of racist oppression and systematic genocide; demonstrating that the greatest threat we face as a nation does not come from foreign actors but from within, from amongst our own.

I have always been profoundly grateful to work with you—to work in higher education. The experience of the past several weeks has deepened that gratitude. We have a profoundly important role to play helping our country sort through, make sense of, and tidy up from the intellectual and moral debris that resulted from last week’s failed coup in Washington, D.C.  I hope and pray that the lessons derived from our national experience will be actively discussed and debated for years to come in our classrooms (both physical and virtual) and in the countless co-curricular activities that enrich the university experiences we offer. I hope and pray that as educators emphasizing criticality, compassion, and compromise we will help to strengthen our civil society and restore civility and respect in our national political discourse. 

This task is a central part of our role as universities. It has taken on a sense of urgency, and frankly must breathe renewed energy into the journey we have been on for some years—future-proofing affordable access to postsecondary education for all Pennsylvanians through our System’s redesign. Succeeding in this quest we will: 

• build a lasting bulwark of our fragile democracy.
• assure that all Pennsylvanians have the opportunity our alumni enjoyed—through their education—to sustain themselves and their families, participate in the 21st century economy, and contribute to their communities.
• strengthen our civil and political societies, enlightening a people, engendering tolerance and fostering critical, compassionate, and respectful discourse even in profound disagreement.

“The mind once enlightened,” Thomas Paine wrote, “cannot become dark.”

 “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will,” for Abraham Lincoln, “become the philosophy of government in the next.”

Fiat Lux. Happy New Year, and thank you for all that you do.