 to see you all even virtually, and thanks so much for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the plenary days that are concluding the Spring 2021 virtual member meeting for the Coalition. I wanted to say a few things about the meeting and a few words of welcome, and then I'm going to get on to the the primary discussion for this session, which is to give you a quick readout on the executive roundtables. So I'm delighted that we are joined by member reps and guests, and it's also wonderful that because the virtual environment lets us be a little more flexible, we've been able to accommodate some extra participation from our member institutions, and that's a delightful thing too. I want to say a special welcome to the clear fellows who've joined us, and you'll meet some of them on Friday, and also to the ARL leadership and career development fellows who are with us today. I'd like to welcome our international members and guests. Perhaps one of the bits of good news is that I think Zoom has probably made your travel to the meeting substantially less arduous than when you did it in person. I'll say just a couple quick mechanical things. We have got closed captioning available, a transcript, and you can turn that on if it's helpful to you. We are recording this session just as we have recorded pretty much all of sessions at the virtual Spring meeting, and we will be making those recordings publicly available after the meeting. There is a chat, and please feel free to use that. There is also a Q&A tool, and I would welcome questions as we go along, particularly on the report on the roundtable, either in Q&A or the chat. I can also turn people's microphones on if you want to ask a more protracted question by voice. You can just raise your hand or say something in the chat. I think that's all the mechanical stuff that I wanted to mention. Let me just say a few things about the meeting as a whole. Everybody is pretty drastically zoomed out after a year of pandemic, and one of the things I'm hearing consistently from our members is that the demands on their time and even more so on their attention are becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. Also, having a greater ability to schedule your engagement with things has been very welcome for many of our participants. We decided to do things very differently this spring than we have done for the last two virtual meetings. This meeting has a much smaller footprint and particularly a much smaller synchronous footprint. We had about nine total synchronous project briefing sessions last week spread out across the week, and I think those were all really excellent sessions. I was able to get to all of them. At the beginning of the meeting, we also released a substantial number of pre-recorded on-demand project briefings. I haven't had an opportunity to watch all of them yet, but I have watched a number of them, and I can tell you there are definitely some gems in there. I invite you to have a look at those as your time and interest permits. There are a couple that extend or relate to synchronous presentations as well, and I'll mention a couple of those. The plenary days are today, tomorrow, Thursday, and the meeting concludes Friday. Again, we've taken a sort of a view on the plenary days that less is more here, and we've tried to emphasize rapidly developing things that I feel haven't been getting enough attention, or opportunities to really interact with individuals or groups of people. I'll just take a moment to to review that the plenary days for you. Today, I'm going to try and summarize the executive round table, what I heard there, more on that in a minute. Later today, we will have a plenary session on remote access to archives and the sorcery project. This is a very important development that has, like so many other things, been given much greater emphasis by the inability to visit archives and special collections, especially those that aren't at your home institution during the pandemic. It raises a lot of questions, and I think is going to be an important thematic discussion in the coming years, and you'll see when I give you the readout on the executive round tables, how it connects up in a couple of places. We'll conclude today with a panel on the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and their plans for what is essentially a big common shared collection among the libraries in the alliance. We will emphasize the implications of this for electronic material rather than just the physical materials. Tomorrow, we will have two sessions, one that looks at the emerging roles of chief information security officers and chief privacy officers and how those two roles relate to each other, which is complicated. We'll also begin to explore how other parts of our universities can work with these positions, particularly around issues like privacy and the use of information by third parties. Many of our libraries have gotten very active in this area and of course face very complex privacy trade-offs as they license electronic materials, so I think that's going to be a very valuable conversation. We're also going to get a lovely treat tomorrow. I am delighted to bring Carrie Jordan to CNI. She is the executive director of the Carpentries, which is something that many of our institutions rely on, but I suspect is not thoroughly understood, particularly at a leadership level in our institutions and offers tremendous opportunities for collaboration going forward. We will conclude on Friday with a panel of new clear fellows. We'll learn about what they're doing and what they're experiencing, and then I will wrap the meeting up with a few comments and a little discussion of where CNI is going to be, some things CNI is going to be doing over the next few months. We have a question here about the on-demand briefings. The on-demand briefings will be available publicly. They will be available via SCED for registered attendees and they'll go up on all the usual CNI video channels, Vimeo and YouTube. In the week or 10 days kind of thing following the meeting. As for recorded sessions, sure, there's no reason why you can't share them with a few colleagues, but also be mindful that they'll be out there within, as I say, a week, 10 days or so, for the public at large. We certainly welcome you sharing those just as widely as it makes sense. I'm delighted whenever I hear about reuse of those materials. That's a quick summary of the plans for the remainder of the meeting. Any questions about that before I get on to the round table? Hearing none, let me move on. As many of you know, we have been doing executive round tables in conjunction with our meetings for a long time now. Now that we've moved the meetings virtual for the time being, we've also done some additional executive round tables. Some of them designed to really take advantage of the fact that we could bring in members of your institutional leadership who could contribute to a topic at hand, such as research continuity, but in the world of physical meetings might not be willing to put in the time and expense to physically travel to a round table. We normally produce reports, written reports of these round tables, and we will for the one we just conducted. I would guesstimate that that will be available probably mid-April timeframe and we'll announce that when it's available. But the topic was both of such broad interest to our members and also had enough connections to other things that I thought we'd be discussing during the plenary days that I felt it would be useful to give you at least a fast kind of synthesis and readout of what I heard at those round tables. The topic of the round tables was assumptions and strategies for the post-COVID environment, or at least we hope it's going to be post-COVID, going into academic year 2021, 2022, and beyond. And really what we wanted to do was get some insight into how institutions were thinking about the fall, where their assumptions were, where their uncertainties were in planning, and what they thought were going to be the key issues and challenges going forward. We held three convenings of the round table, each one with different institutional participants on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week. It was a very busy week. And I've done my best over the course of the last few days to try and extract commonalities, key themes, and particularly interesting or important observations as they struck me. So I'm going to try and give you that overview now. And I ask for your indulgence. This is not perfectly polished. This is really a fast turnaround synthesis. And I would welcome questions and comments on this as I get to the end of it. So let me begin. So the first thing I want to say is that well, every institution is sort of thinking about how do we go from where we are today to where we need to be and want to be in fall 2021, not every institution is starting from the same place. And it's really easy as institutions become deeply engaged in their own local planning to miss that fact. There are institutions in the United States that didn't close ever or that just shut down for maybe a month in March of 2021. There are other institutions that basically shut down in March of 2021 and have been doing virtually all remote instruction since then. And are now thinking in terms of in fall 2021, we will make our return after more than a year back to in-person education. So depending on where you're starting from, your scenarios going forward are indeed very, very different. Furthermore, the situation in the U.S. is not the same as the situation in other nations. We had a very good participation from our Canadian members and it was really helpful to understand just how different the situation and the working assumptions are among at least the Canadian institutions that participated in our discussions. Sadly, we did not have any participation from our U.K. institutions or from institutions elsewhere, for example, in continental Europe. And so I can't tell you very much about their planning assumptions. I have had a few conversations with colleagues at JISC about this, but I really don't feel that I have a good enough understanding to say much. So that's another important framing comment. My final framing comment is that we focused largely on instruction and on campus kind of operations rather than on the research enterprise in these conversations, although we certainly touched on it. We will be taking a closer look at the research enterprise going forward later on in probably in June. And I'll say more about that on Friday, but that wasn't the primary focus here. What I can tell you is that since maybe April or thereabouts of 2020, research has been slowly but systematically reopening on our campuses to the extent that it was shut down. And our labs at most institutions are operating, at least on a limited basis. There are still many limitations. For example, face-to-face field work is greatly constrained. There are many other constraints, but that wasn't a major focus. And my expectation is that we will continue to see sort of slow and steady progress on the research enterprise. So let me now talk more specifics. So in the United States, the broad assumption pretty much every institution is students are back on campus, faculty are back on campus, vaccines are very widely available. Everybody is certainly mindful that we could have wildcards coming up that change those assumptions, you know, the emergence of a really nasty variant or something of that nature. But the sense is one of optimism. Now, you will find that as you ask more detailed questions that I'll come to in a minute about what the students will be doing and how instruction is going to be conducted and things like that, that there are quite a lot of caveats and I'll explore many of those. The Canadian situation is quite different. Most of our Canadian colleagues indicated that they expect a largely remote 2021 fall semester. And that they are going to be bringing students back in limited numbers carefully and that perhaps they won't see a large scale return to the campuses until spring of 2022. Vaccine rollout in Canada has been going more slowly than in the United States. One useful point is that well, many campuses are in the United States particularly are assuming that students by September thereabouts will be broadly vaccinated. And in fact, it is not entirely clear at this point what assumptions they are making about things like testing among their students and faculty. I have not found any institutions who are willing to say at this point that they are planning to mandate vaccines as a condition of student in person return to campus. And there appear to be two reasons for that. One is that this would be a very politically fraught decision, which in some cases may even run afoul perhaps of state laws that are under consideration in some states, forbidding, for example, employers to require COVID vaccinations. But also because right now all the vaccinations, all of the vaccines are being issued and administered under an emergency use authorization rather than a full license. And there seems to be at least a sense that it may be problematic to mandate them in the way that institutions have mandated other vaccinations in the past as long as they are not fully licensed for use but only available under emergency use authorization. The last thing I will say about the public health situation is that there are big uncertainties about distancing and how that relates to physical space and that has a whole cascade of other things in play. So, for example, if in the fall institutions are still expected to maintain six foot distancing among students in classrooms, that means that you have severe constraints on class sizes, severe stress on physical plant, and it may be necessary to do things like go to unusual scheduling in order to get maximized use of classrooms and things like that. Evening classes, Saturday classes, early morning classes, classes that all the times that students don't like and faculty don't like. On the other hand, we've already seen that the distancing in K through 12 according to CDC guidance has gone down to three feet. And it may very well be that when we get enough vaccine deployed that they will simply drop the distancing requirements, institutions just don't know. And that is making planning complicated. There are also issues about state and county regulations and how choices the institutions make do or don't match up to state and county regulations. So, for example, institutions may have mask mandates in states or counties or cities that don't have mask mandates. And there is some concern that that is going to be a source of increased tension and difficulty going forward. Let me turn to what instruction is likely to look like in the fall. And this is really interesting. So, the first thing I want to say is that we had some significant terminological or taxonomical problems in our conversations. There is a great lack of precision about how to describe some of the situations that we've been in at in various stages of trying to deal with the pandemic and remote instruction. So, I want to try and outline some of the issues here. So, one question we've got that's really central is to what extent are institutions going to continue to accommodate remote students? So, if the assumption is that students are going to be back in person because it is a residential program, are they going to have online versions of courses for those who want online versions? A number of state schools already have extensive online degree programs. Are they going to just direct students who want an online education into those programs and courses? Or are they going to continue the situation that I think many of our institutions who have students back, particularly undergraduate students back in person today, are doing? Where the idea is that all classes can be taken either or virtually all classes can be taken either in person or remotely. Now, there's a third thing in the mix here which is the so-called high-flex classrooms or hybrid classrooms where what you're doing is rather than serving some students that are remote and some students that are in person with it, with a course offering, you are trying to simultaneously accommodate people who are coming in remotely and people who are coming in in person. A number of schools have invested heavily in classrooms to be able to do this at vast expense. They have also discovered that in most cases to be able to do this successfully, you have to hire classroom monitors to help with managing the online and in-person folks. And at least based on all the anecdotal evidence that I've been able to pick up, most faculty hate this and most people think it's really a pretty crummy educational experience. And there seems to be a general feeling at most institutions that this is the situation to be avoided unless it's just a lecture class. I mean if it's just a lecture class, it really doesn't matter that much whether people are in person or remote. That's a lot more manageable than something with a significant degree of class interaction. So that's really a key question is what decisions are people going to make about what's the cutoff point for accommodating remote users when the program is designed to be residential and is fall 2021 going to be that point. Having said that, I want to make a few other points that kind of offset that. When you talk about back in person, most campuses are at least hedging about large lecture courses, very large lecture courses. Now at most institutions, if you look at the percentage of courses that are very large lecture courses and here I'm talking let's say 100 people and above or 200 people and above. These are a pretty small percentage of the absolute number of courses, but they're a significant number of student hours. There's a concern and it's partially driven by space density and partially by the notion that once you get past the first few rows in those very large lecture courses, it may as well be remote that those courses, perhaps the lectures will be done remote. Now it's very common in those big lecture courses of course to have a lecture and then have set problem sessions or discussion sessions which are much smaller. There are lots of them and the presumption is that those would continue to meet in person. But there does seem to be a very real conversation going on about whether it's time to start doing away with those gigantic lecture theaters and just doing those lectures online and recording them so people can revisit them. That's kind of significant and it's really very interesting. People are assuming that foreign students are still going to have some difficulties, that there are going to be barriers to foreign travel, that they may need to either defer admission for some foreign students or move them to other programs or do something and this ties back again to this issue of where do you kind of draw the line in terms of supporting remote users for a program that's designed to be primarily in person and face to face. This really becomes quite nuanced. For example, one can imagine at the graduate level some programs where depending on exactly what somebody wants to study they may be able to put together a year that makes sense that's entirely online if they can't come physically to the campus to the United States to study. A few other observations. At some institutions at least my sense is that there is starting to be a rather nuanced course by course assessment of what makes sense to do in person, what makes sense to do online and some of that is courses that have an in person component and an online component. Some of it is specific courses that the faculty decide work well online and that they'd like to keep online and in some cases they're very good reasons for keeping courses online. So I think that we will see that play out department by department institution by institution and I think that's a very healthy and rejuvenating kind of conversation for the instructional programs at our universities. Two final points. There are some things happening especially at the graduate level, at the research frontier level, at departmental symposia and things like that that are very interesting where we're seeing some signs of the emergence of much greater cross institutional activity around specific research topics. Things like colloquia or ongoing seminars that now draw people from all over the country or all over the world that are taking place virtually and how those proceed going forward is a very interesting question. Other little anecdotes, you know many faculty now are able to make a lot more use of guest speakers as part of their of their courses because the barriers to bringing a guest speaker to the course are much lower than getting them to physically travel to campus. Those those kinds of trends are liable to stay around. The last observation that I wanted to share about instruction is that freshmen and sophomores seem to be in general having the most difficulty with this shift to all remote instruction at campuses that went almost all or entirely remote for their undergraduates and that has suggested things about priorities for in-person courses, priorities for bringing students back to campus. I don't think that anybody has a full understanding yet of exactly what the causes are of those difficulties. It may just be that they have sort of less maturity as students at the college level. I mean for many freshmen the transition from high school to college can be notoriously challenging and in the remote environment they have been sort of adrift for many of the support structures that that help them in in-person settings. A few words about space. I already talked about the density issues. There are a few other things that are going on too though. If we get rid of big lectures and big lecture halls, what are we going to do with those big lecture halls? There is a conversation about remote work which I'll come to in a minute, which is really tied to how much office space we have on campus and who gets it and what it's used for and whether some of that can be repurposed. There are lots of unknowns there. I think that it's going to take a considerable amount of time to really negotiate a lot of these issues around space with campus communities. But one of the things I just want to put, two points I want to put on your radar screen. One of the things that the pandemic has really emphasized, particularly in attempts to do high-flex classes, is the enormous technology debt in many of our classrooms. We have not invested in this and a number of institutions have used this as an opportunity to do more investing. The other is that while it seems likely that there's going to be a considerable amount of rethinking over the next few years about who gets space on central campus, what kind of space, what we do with it, and what our instructional and collaboration spaces look like, there is a significant cost to remodeling and repurposing space. And I don't know of anybody who's really systematically budgeting for that at this point, but I do think that that is going to be a consequence and perhaps an inhibiting factor in the rethinking of and repurposing of space going forward. Let me talk about workforce. And there's a, this turned out to be a bigger subjective discussion and a more intense subjective discussion perhaps than I had originally expected. One thing I'll say is that right now, events and reality have completely outrun policy at most institutions. And institutions are just sort of operating under, based on necessity, based on temporary authorizations, doing things in the absence of policy and on it goes. HR units are really not moving terribly quickly about making sensible policies and clear policies going forward about remote work and about issues involving the remote workforce. One thing that we don't again have a good taxonomy for is what remote means. And I'll just distinguish two very, very different cases. One is the case of someone who works at home, who works at home a day a week, maybe two days a week. And basically comes into the office, comes into the workplace the other three or four days a week. And by the way, if there's a meeting they need to come in for, it's really not a big problem for them to come in generally. Let's contrast that with the situation where you are deliberately hiring remote workers on a national or even international basis with the idea that they will be remote working from where they are. And maybe they'll come to campus once or twice a year by getting on an airplane for some kind of all hands meeting or something like that, or maybe they won't even do that. Those are real, real different scenarios. And it's really important, I think, to differentiate those as we talk about remote workers. We have a whole series of conversations about offices, private offices, shared office, or workspaces more broadly versus shared offices. And those go hand in hand with decisions about remote work. There are some very real concerns that people expressed about equity issues that are involved in remote work. Some jobs are easy to do remotely. Some jobs are impossible to do remotely. And that's a very uncomfortable reality for some folks. Many of our institutions are under hiring freezes. And a lot of them have also absorbed budget cuts by giving up open positions that they had. One of the pressures that this is creating for institutions, for organizations and institutions is that as their portfolio of services change, their portfolio of activities change, they've got an increasing mismatch between the staff they've got and the staff they need. And so this is leading to a lot of considerations about how we reskill or upskill or retrain staff that are on staff. One thing I'll note that has been particularly clumsy for some institutions is we have unions tied up in this which further complicate flexibility to reassign activities. We also, at some institutions, particularly in libraries where the librarians can win tenure, where they're treated as faculty, have some issues there as well that may limit the flexibility that leadership has to reorganize. A few other things that I'll just say about organizations very briefly. Many people commented on the increased communications burden both within an organization like SAIL Library or an IT organization and across entire campuses that has been created by the pandemic. And the sense that there was a greater need for various kinds of town hall meetings, open hours, the demand for communication and the need for communication is very high and very real. Another observation. Many of our supervisors and managers in our organizations never really had to manage remote workers before the pandemic suddenly hit. There actually are a whole series of skills, best practices, bodies of knowledge, and things like that about how to supervise and lead remote workers or organizations with some remote work and some in-person work. And we really need to think about how to develop and get those skills to our managers and supervisors in our organizations. Finally, there were a number of observations and I think this is important that as our organizations come back together largely in person, that those organizations are tired. They have been terrifically stressed that there's really a need for a kind of a time for healing and rebuilding of social capital and that we need to kind of make room for this as our institution, as our organizations try and come back together as we begin to see life beyond the pandemic. A few comments about library services. Many of these won't be surprising. There are a number of innovations that we're putting in place that seem to have been well received and will probably stay. Self-service checkout, pick up lockers, digitization has gotten an enormous boost. Digital reserves are very much the preferred thing now. More digitizing of special collections, more use of OERs, greater prioritization of digital content rather than printed content in acquisitions. One important thing about libraries in particular that was commented on by a number of institutions is that the pandemic has really changed the perception of what libraries can do and also of their importance in supporting the instructional and research missions of our institutions. Another thing, we're seeing more asynchronous instruction as opposed to synchronous instruction by libraries partially in response to the enormously increased demand for instruction in various kinds of particularly research skills. Controlled digital lending has become a much more mainstream idea at many of our institutions and it's really clear that we have a big problem now with audio and visual materials and streaming going forward. And in fact, just to make a kind of a broader statement, a lot of issues around our ability to use and share various forms of intellectual property that's licensed, be it video, audio, or software, specialized software as well, is heavily biased towards in-person sharing and use. And really any kind of instruction or research that depends on this is facing a strong driver to come back in person because we do not have the kinds of terms and conditions that we need to do this successfully in a online streamed and remote environment. Finally, in terms of library services, here's one that just left me with my mouth open and has really been sticking with me ever since. The observation that a participant made that a quarter of our undergraduates have no experience of a pre-pandemic research library as a place, as a center for collaboration, as a source of various kinds of services and expertise and resources, they just don't have it. And depending on their experiences before coming to the university, they may never have had it. They may never have encountered a major research library. They just don't know what they do. This is a quarter of our undergraduate students and we really need to think extremely carefully about what that means when we finally bring those students back on campus. Here's a group of other observations that they'll categorize nicely but are really important and I'll try and get through these fast. Residential broadband for both working at home and for students learning remotely has showed up as a critical issue and it's one that is not entirely under the control of the higher education community although they are doing what they can and this is going to need to be a priority both for individual institutions and collectively. It's been particularly aggravated when other community centers like public libraries are closed in many cases and we see people using Wi-Fi at fast food places because that's the only place they can get it. We actually heard horrible stories for example of actually faculty having to mail thumb drives with material to some students in who were living in places that are both Wi-Fi and cellular deserts. That's really how bad it is in parts of this country. Open access and open science has gotten a big boost. Preprints have gotten a really big boost and I think that momentum will continue. Centralization and consolidation and institutional standardization around both IT and instructional technology systems driven by costs, availability of expertise and cybersecurity issues seems to have really gotten a boost in this environment. Some of it is also the move to the cloud for some of these systems. Some of it's the need to procure brand new classes of system at a large scale. A really good example of this is remote proctoring. A lot of institutions are trying to figure out what to do about that and if they're going to deploy it or continue to deploy it, they'd like to standardize on a single solution for the institution a single contract. Many institutions have really increased their investments in instructional technology support in teaching and learning centers, in consulting with faculty on teaching and learning strategies. Part of this has been in response to an enormous scale up of demand from faculty for services in this area. We've also seen in the last year that faculty expertise in instructional technology has gotten a really big boost. Here's one that we will be exploring at some point in the future in more detail. Video management, especially as regards to remote or hybrid courses but not exclusively by any means, has now turned into a big expensive problem for a lot of institutions and is a problem that often nobody is managing in a very coherent way. That's one that's going to demand some attention. There's a policy question working around which is how important is it going to be to maintain instructional resilience and the capability to return quickly to remote operation for whatever reason into the future? This is one that, for example, some residential liberal arts institutions that are really eager to go back to residential in-person education are really going to need to think about. Digital public health and welfare has become a big kind of IT and service area at many of our campuses. Attestation, weekly testing and test result reporting, contact tracing, often with links to organizations that institutions didn't normally deal with, like county or state health systems. There's also a growing emphasis on student well-being and mental health as we've gone through this whole situation. It's really not clear that these systems are going to go away and they're likely to be a continued big source of investment. A couple of final observations. There's been a considerable loss of privacy. Some of this has been related to the move to remote instruction. Think, for example, of the horribly invasive things that come along with remote proctoring. Some of it is the whole digital public health situation. A lot of this loss of privacy somehow seems to have been normalized by the pandemic. We really need to look at this going forward and think pretty carefully about what compromises we've made and what compromises we want to continue to make. I think that there is a growing understanding that graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty are at particularly vulnerable points in their career, particularly those who have caregiving responsibilities, those who are precarious economically for other reasons. There's a lot of thinking about how to best support these folks and to be there for them and what can be done to improve the safety net on that. And here's a final one I'll leave you with. There were some fascinating variations of opinion about the scale of the lasting effects of the pandemic. It's always easy to privilege what's happening in the current moment. The most pivotal events of a lifetime, the most important election in our history, et cetera, et cetera, the greatest technological innovation of the century. It may be, and some have argued, that we're overestimating the lasting effects of the pandemic and that what we will genuinely see is a kind of a gradual and then fast return to something that looks a lot like life was before the pandemic, that this will have been a disaster that we passed through. There's another argument that was made very compelling by others that this is a sociotechnical change that's probably on the scale of World War II. If you look at things like the levels of government spending and the undertaking of debt, the economic restructuring, the demographic and labor force events, the adoption of new technologies, all of these kinds of things, the sheer level of death that has taken place in the last year, these are things that are objectively at those levels. We'll see, but I do think that it is worth reflecting on the extent of change that we will see starting, let's say, in fall of 2021 and beyond as we come out of this. And that is my very fast preliminary, tentative synthesis. I would welcome comments and questions. Please put them in the chat, raise your hands, use the Q&A tool, the floor is open. What surprises people in that readout? Or for those of you who are there, how did perhaps my summary misrepresent what you think you heard? Natalie's observation here is very interesting. We don't just need a safety net for postdocs and those entering job markets, we might need life rings for some of them. What do these look like for what you've heard so far? I really don't know. I don't think that people have thought that far out. I think that there are some studies coming out that are beginning to give us an understanding, though, of just how damaging this has been to some of those folks, especially to caregivers. I mean, there's a pretty horrifying study that came out of the National Academies of the effects of the pandemic on women in science, technical, engineering, mathematics, and medical fields came out about maybe two, three weeks ago, and there's more on the way. Rob has got a whole series of comments here that are interesting about, we don't know to what extent there'll be a push. We don't really understand the student demand side here very well either. Are students going to want more online, more remote? Are we going to see a larger part of the student body gravitating towards institutions that offer remote instruction? Right now, it's a little too early to tell, but we will definitely need to understand that. And, you know, the flip side is, are they going to want more on site, more in person, as a reaction to this? We don't know. We're going to find out. I mean, one commentator speculated that in fact, we may find there's a social and behavioral change and a version to gathering that even when we can gather safely, when there's a large scale deployment of vaccination, that in fact, people will be reluctant to do that. They won't want to gather. They won't, you know, a lot of people will take many years to be comfortable coming back to big crowds and crowded events. There's a question about how the life of the student will change, how residential campus life will change. We didn't discuss that much. The only thing I can tell you there that might be interesting is that many campuses that had been using dorms, you know, where you had two or more people to a dorm room or a dorm suite, took it down to single occupancy during the pandemic when they did have students back. There was already a growing amount of pressure at many institutions for single occupancy dorms, and we may see that that is a change that sticks at some schools at least, or that sticks to some extent, that there is a greater emphasis on single occupancy dorm life than the whole experience of having college roommates. A very interesting question from Tara Lynn about the discussion of the amount of turnover at leadership levels and the exhaustion, the wave of retirements. We didn't discuss that but there is no question that is a thing. I mean, there are requirements happening at a very rapid rate, and I think that you're going to see another round of those as we start getting through this. While there were some people who just said, you know, I can retire now. I don't want to deal with this, and I am just going to call it a career. There are other people who felt I need to take my organization through to the other side of this, but when I get to the other side, I'm done. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Oh gosh, lots of questions coming now. Here's one that I'll share. It's really interesting. At NC State, we've been pondering the same questions about how we can get it do over library orientation for this year's first year students. A lack of physical presence is also corresponding to drop in online library resources, presumably because they can't find out what's there. We're also finding it's not just library services that are experiencing less uptake but academic services across the campus. This will increase the drumbeat for re-establishing the full residential campus experience. That's interesting. We did not share a lot of usage data about various kinds of services in these conversations. I think many people felt that we were in such an anomalous setting right now that, you know, all of those kinds of numbers needed to be taken with a little bit of a grain of soul. What surprised me did not talk about the rise in negative societal views of higher ed and emphasis of higher ed as a private good. We didn't talk about that because we really were talking mostly about institutional strategies for operating in a post-COVID environment. I think that these kinds of questions are really questions to some extent for the top level leadership of our institutions about how they are relating to society as a whole and about the role and mission of their institution. They just really weren't the focus of our conversations. There is a huge question showing up around that and about the implications for the public goods that they support, like libraries, archives. The echo for time for healing and the underscoring of that. Someone sharing the experience of having a child who's now thinking about college and a high school-aged child considering college and really the whole value proposition feeling very different, particularly in the uncertainties here. A question about what is this going to do to town-down relationships? That was something we touched on lightly and I think is a genuine open question going forward with many, many dimensions, particularly when you get into places where there really is a fairly intimate town-down relationship as opposed to being a university in a massive city. I think it's going to be very important to watch how that evolves going forward, especially in the broader social context. We've gone on a little past the hour that I intended to cover and I see we've still got a lot of attendees with us. I would propose we take maybe a couple more comments or observations if there are any and then we adjourn to get ready for the upcoming sorcery session. Any final comments or questions? Hearing none, thank you for joining us for this plenary day and thanks for joining us for this preliminary readout and we will explore all of this more in the report that we will be putting out from these roundtables. As you can see, there are many, many open questions for us to explore together going forward. So thank you so much for joining us today.