 Let me welcome you. Let me welcome everyone to the Future Trends Forum I'm delighted to see so many of you here today for a fantastic guest and Incredibly important topic. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator host and chief cat herder And I'll be your guide in the next hour as we explore the fall semester with the help of a fantastic guest now I very very much like to welcome this week's guest It's an absolute delight to welcome back Matt Reed Some of you may know him as Dean dad is one of the most prolific commentators on inside higher ed Matt has been Running a column exploring what it means to be a dean for a long long time with a great mix of everything from deep Experience insight a great sense of humor and even literary theory. He's the vice president for academic affairs at Brookdale Community College He's previously been a guest on the program and I'm just absolutely as the British say chuffed to bits to welcome him back Matt, hello, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Oh glad to see you here And I appreciate your negative space background. Yeah Yeah, I tried putting this up in front of the bookshelves with the lighting was terrible. So, yeah Well, this gives you kind of like 1970s vibe maybe yeah, it's kind of early political prisoner, but Well, if you need help we can we can get food parcels into the garden in New Jersey I wasn't gonna say that that's too easy Listen Matt, I asked people to introduce themselves and I've asked you to introduce yourself before and I just gave a quick quick sketch But let me ask this You're looking ahead to the next academic year to fall and spring What are you know as you're trying to deal with this combination of massive political mobilization and pandemic? What are the say the top three or four issues that as a dean you're spending most of your time thinking about? Okay, I should clarify although the title of the blog is Confessions of a Community College Dean I've actually been a vice president since 2008. Oh, excuse me Title of the blog because Dean dad has alliteration and it kind of became a brand so just it's stuck vice president dad It doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work as well No in facing the coming fall and coming year The single biggest issue I think is the uncertainty Over the May and June Every every Monday night in May and June I hosted a zoom call for folks from Brookdale called it Mondays with Matt and Every Monday night at 7 go online and folks would be able to come on and what I was hoping would happen was we'd have sort of an open-ended conversation and we would Develop solutions together and sort of talk through different scenarios What I found though was the the desire for certainty was so strong that Honest and transparent answers along the lines of we don't know that yet Really just annoyed people They wanted to know for certain. What is the plan for September tell me right now? And why are you holding back on me and why are you not telling us everything as if We knew It was so I discovered there was a difference between transparency and certainty And that I was being transparent about the uncertainty of the situation, but they didn't like that what they want Yeah, and so I had to eventually stop doing the series because I realized they're just annoying everybody by saying, you know We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet Among the considerations I should clarify up front Brookdale is a community college It is a commuter school. We don't have dorms. We have no residential component at all So that makes certain decisions a lot easier, you know, we don't have to figure out how do you handle dorms? Do you bring people back to dorms? We never had dorm revenue as part of our budget? So that's a non-issue for us, which is helpful But there are plenty of other issues to work with we have some programs for which Going online is relatively easy Psychology history, you know polyside my own my own field That's fairly easy to do online that's fairly direct We also have automotive tech Where people actually take apart transmissions and rebuild them. We have culinary. We have ceramics These really don't lend themselves to a virtual or distant delivery. You need to get hands-on so we've had to Send a sort of nuanced and split message to the world and it's hard to communicate nuance or split nuanced or split messages Basically, we're doing everything virtually that can be done virtually So every liberal arts class every math class every anything that works online is going to be done online But automotive will still be on campus Culinary will still be on campus Not entirely there are certain lecture components that can move online But there are pretty inescapable hands-on pieces So with those hands-on pieces we've had to look at Personal protective equipment we've had to look at cleaning protocols Setting up a campus that was really built to bring people together Now to keep them apart Which was never the idea So we have to kind of work backwards An entire Institution built on the notion of accessibility now has to lock down That's not what it was built to do It was built to be accessible and when I say built I mean physically it was literally built to be accessible There's ramps everywhere and we just installed ADA doors. Now we have to lock them all So there's that challenge there's also the challenge of budgetary uncertainty Over the past few decades as you well know and you've written about at length The the burden of paying for public higher ed has shifted from the public to students Which means from an institutional perspective enrollment fluctuations matter more If tuition were 20% of our budget An enrollment drop of 10% You know it could handle it if Twition is 57% of our budget which it is Then an enrollment drop of 20% hurts that does real damage We don't know what the enrollment picture is going to be this fall Right now we're down from last year Although we're up in the summer So that was good news I'm sorry. That was good news. It is it is it was welcome As you know in the Northeast the number of 18 year olds has been dropping for a while and continues to drop So we've been on kind of a long-term slide since the peak of the Great Recession We're the pit of the Great Recession depending how you look at it But this really is A new variable something we have no track record of dealing with We don't know yet if we're gonna come in lower than last year higher than last year If I had to guess I would say higher I think we're gonna see a kind of August run And I'm basing that on the number of four-year schools that are reluctantly admitting that they really can't be in person in the fall and We Intend to be there for students who decide well now wait a minute if I'm staying home anyway Interesting and I'm taking classes online anyway. Yeah Why not pay community college tuition instead of private university tuition for the same class Which will transfer? It's a pretty good value proposition and so I'm hoping that folks start to figure that out But it is hard to hard to predict it's just because this is such a black swan event And then the other piece that you mentioned of the sort of racial tensions and racial Awakening in a sense That Has changed some of the discussion in a really positive way To give it a couple of examples over the past few years Brookdale I was tasked with developing the academic master plan for the college So what are the main goals for you know the next few years and I have a Long-standing skepticism towards strategic planning generally Because every strategic plan I'd ever been involved with or seen prior to here was a wish list and They're about as relevant as wish lists tend to be and a couple years ago I went through a Program with the Aspen Institute for future presidents and A former president from Northern Virginia Bob Templin talked about his strategic plan and his strategic plan had one goal And I remember raising my hand and saying wait you mean it can have a point It had literally never occurred to me because I'd never seen one that did And so I thought all right, that's a valuable lesson. So for the academic master plan And it I can build boil it down to one sentence Which is the top priority for academic affairs the next five years is the reduction or elimination of achievement gaps by race period and then everything else flows from that and this was we came up with that two years ago now and That sounds sort of Simplistic or maybe anodine, but when you operationalize that that means making fundamental changes to the structure of what you're doing So I went in with the Assumption and I think is correct that if all you do to improve the outcomes of black students is Target new help to black students You're kind of missing the point Because that assumes that the problem is that black students are somehow Less than and they need to be fixed. I Don't buy that. I just fundamentally don't buy that. I think the issue is that we have habits and structures and practices that Take a certain culture as the norm and take everyone else is sort of deviating from the norm and then Those who deviate from the norm have a harder time So for example in concrete terms that means embracing open educational resources as an equality initiative Cost is a major barrier and class and race do overlap in predictable ways Or shorter courses and this is where I really got a lot of pushback Nationally the data I've seen show that seven week or eight week classes have much higher success rates than 15 week classes hmm, and that In schools that have moved from a 15 week or 16 week semester to breaking in half Mm-hmm seven or eight Achievement gaps drop significantly and stay small And I thought now that's kind of nifty because that's something we actually control We control the academic calendar. We don't need I don't need the president. I'd say it's to understand it We can do it ourselves What I discovered though is a lot of people are very invested in the way they have always done it Mm-hmm, and if you confront them with But the evidence shows There are varying degrees of willingness to hear that So, you know, I've had to kind of shrink it down pilot it Which is not a great way to test that particular thesis But it gives some indication of you know when people talk about structural racism That can be kind of hard for a lot of people to picture and any picture of structure But if you look at what are the structures you have to change to have less racist outcomes Suddenly it becomes really really clear what structural racism is Something as simple as changing the academic calendar takes years and fights and there's ill-will and It's a slog. It's really really hard. There are people who Don't believe they're doing anything wrong They believe quite strongly that the way they've always done it is the way it has to be And when you suggest well, no places that actually made the switch have seen these improvements You start getting into the nitpicking Well, that's different You know, that school is different or our school is different and there's always some difference It's been an education for me and seeing how do you get from A statement like okay racism is bad And the vast majority of people on campus will will buy that statement Sure But when you follow it with and therefore we need to change All of a sudden that whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa You know, what do you mean change? That has been Eye-opening for me And I'm hopeful that in this new post george floyd era in which It's much harder to deny The pervasiveness of racism That maybe we can start to make some some more headway we can get past that first level of denial Um Because how is your how is your um, I mean, I know it's summer, but you you you and you've you've had an uptick in enrollment But how what's your sense of the brookdale community? I mean are they are they Are parts of it activized or mobilized and active by the black lives matter? Yeah, we've had over the summer. We've had a couple of sort of town meetings online Um, the president of brookdale david stout is a psychologist by training. He's very very good at sort of hard conversations and groups Um, that's one of his strengths So we've done a couple of town hall meetings online and folks have have shared some stories that were sort of shocking Um, nothing about brutality, but but more like, um, thoughtlessness just stupid things that people would say or do Uh hurtful things Microaggressions I'm sorry microaggressions. Yeah. Yeah um comments about hairstyles and you know Stupid stuff that nobody should have to deal with um And I see that as kind of stage one, you know, like let's get past pure denial or You know, there's that sort of um, I'm sure you read white fragility There's there's this notion that as soon as you mention that a given practice has a racist outcome A lot of people will immediately jump back to wait. Are you calling me racist? Well, no Personal attitudes and structural outcomes are two different things and I think it's hard to kind of disentangle those sometimes Well, let me let me pause just for a second and and and say first of all, thank you This is a you just we could stop now. I mean you just gave us a fantastic You know glimpse into not your thinking But also a way of thinking about how to transform Colleges for the fall But I want to I want to invite everybody to uh to chime in if you're new to the forum I'm just the emcee. I'm not the I'm not the speaker or the interviewer. I'm the Guide and uh, hopefully the pastor honor of your questions So if you have any any questions for Vice president Um, and if you have any questions about uh about what what he just said I'm thinking about strategic planning thinking about how uh faculty can change thinking about campus population shifts thinking about even the semester length The form is yours. I just you reach down to that white strip and either press the Raise hand button if you want to join us on stage or press the question mark And as I say that a question just appeared which is pretty magical So this let me flash this on the screen again if you're new to the forum. This is how one way it works um, and this is from Richard Burke at casper collage says in terms of evidence shows What can one do about the colleague who searches the internet simply searching for contrary evidence no matter the credibility of that source Yeah question Yeah, um Let me put that back up when you figured out. Let me know I guess my short answer would be um as a political scientist by training No public figure has ever had a 100 approval rating ever And so if you set that as your goal, you're bound to fail What you need to do is figure out. How do you get 51 and then win it? There will be people who will object and that's just a fact of life, but you can't let that stop you Hmm within higher ed. That's an almost radical proposition because there's such a Lip service page the idea of consensus But if you've ever been in some of these meetings, um consensus is often coercive It's often a few sort of very loud people opining at great length and with some Force behind it and a whole bunch of people going. Oh god. Please stop. Please stop. Please stop. Make it stop. Make it stop And so rather than engaging they just kind of shut down in hopes that the meeting will end And so you wind up with you know a few sort of True believers winning by default, but you've never had any real deliberation. You've never had any actual Back and forth Add to that In the context of you know years and years and years of tight budgets Um, it's hard to build trust when every single year you have to make another unpopular decision Uh, whether it's around professional development funding or course releases or class sizes or whatever Um, it's very difficult for folks to kind of separate the person from the position So there are times when A leader is put in a position where it's make the least bad choice You know And then you do and then the folks who don't like the least bad choice Who didn't see what the other alternatives were will think that you did that because you wanted to And the reason you wanted to is you're a horrible person And that's I guess there are times when that's true, but in my experience the much more common case is um We have a gap we need to fill the gap. There are only so many options to fill the gap The top five options that would get the most votes are all off the table for various reasons What do you do? um And every single time you do that it costs a little bit of goodwill So it's difficult to build the kind of trust where you can say to someone with a straight face. Look, I know you're not convinced But trust me. I know what I'm doing And have them say, okay At my previous college I got to the point where I was able to do that because we At that moment in history, we hadn't had the the budget hadn't fallen off the table yet And so it was relative. It wasn't Well funded, but it was steady So we were able to predict with some accuracy what kind of resources we had and therefore we could actually make thoughtful decisions about how to allocate them And by the time I left I remember in in 2015 Uh, the state put the state of massachusetts put through a rule change about transfer That needed to be approved at each campus and I took it to the college. Um, I don't know if we called it senate Gave like a five minute presentation Uh Someone asked me so you think it's good idea. I said unbalanced. Yeah, they said, okay, and they passed it Wow That was you can only do that after years of building trust You know what my priorities were where I was coming from and they figured out, okay If I'm saying that this makes sense academically, it probably does Wow At brookdale, it's been tougher because I got here pretty much at the moment the wheels had fallen off in terms of the budget and so Walking into the best of intentions. Um, there are times when It boils down to the least bad option So when folks have been in their perception and I get where this comes from they feel like they've been attacked For years Then when you come out and say trust me Their first response is seriously And so any assertion that you make is immediately contestable And you know as folks who've been on the internet a while know there's always Ammunition to contest anything on the internet. There are people on the internet who tell you the earth is flat literally so It's a I I agree that it can be frustrating. Um, I have felt that frustration personally But it's important to kind of step back and realize where that comes from You know, there might be 10 or 20 of people who are contrary just because that's how they're wired Whatever forget about them Then there are folks who May not pay that much attention day to day, but who get a general sense that things are getting worse And so they get defensive and then they start trying to hold on harder to what they have for fear of the change equals loss So then when you come through proposing a big change all they see is a big loss And and when you try to argue, well, no, this is actually a better thing. They're just not emotionally In a space to hear that Um, so instead I've had to go to a much more indirect route of sort of pilots and Demonstration projects and sort of viral transmission You get a few early adopters. They have some success. They tell their friends. They get some success. They tell their friends That works really well with something like OER where you can go course by course by course It doesn't work really well with something like the academic calendar because that's kind of institution-wide Let me pause you on that because because this is a Right below us. There are a whole stack of questions specifically about the academic calendar And I want to give folks a chance to share that Richard. Thank you for that great question Um, I really appreciate that and uh, mad. Thank you for that bracing look into the hard one lessons of of how Academic leadership can work. Let me There's actually three of these in a row So, um, let me just pop these up and and I think there may be a little overlap Let's let's let's hit each of these in a in particular This is william smith who says it asks if you could clarify the connection between the shift to an eight-week semester and structural racism Yes um, the reason that I'll give you an example odessa college in texas Which is a community college, um, the western part of the state Went to eight-week semesters About five years ago In the time since then the achievement gaps have dropped dramatically What happens is instead of taking instead of a student taking four or five classes at a time for 15 weeks at a time They'll take two at a time for seven or eight So over the course of 15 weeks they'll wind up taking the same number in total But they're only doing two at a time instead of four or five at a time They found that that makes the most difference for students who have um Who work a lot of hours a week for pay? Who have family commitments that draw them away? And in part this is going to sound simplistic, but it's true Um, it's easier to juggle two things than to juggle four things Oh So it's not just the length. It's also taking two classes instead of four right, but that's a key component of it So at any given moment you're only taking half as many But you still move through just as fast just you're doing you know instead of four over four months You two september october and then two november december When you do that, um the traditionally full-time prepared student does the same But the students who tend to struggle more in a traditional setting do a lot better and The shorter setting part of that is because there's less opportunity for life to get in the way Uh anyone who works in a community college had the experience of the hard-working student who you're rooting for Who has a sudden economic emergency? The car dies medical issue of the family whatever and they have to drop out Yeah, if a student drops out in the first week of november because of life In the traditional calendar, they've lost four or five classes. They've lost the entire semester It's like it's like they were never there If you split the semester and they have to leave in early november They've already got credit for those first two classes They they've got something in their back pocket So it's not a complete wipeout. They only lose two classes at a four They're likely to come back because they see a point to it They don't have to start from the beginning all over again. Which is really demoralizing Um, it just works better I've noticed when I was at holy oak Um I brought back the january intercession. They had gotten rid of it at one point When I got there, I brought it back and it was a two and a half week intensive January terms you'd take one class yeah, the Pass rate about 94 percent Wow For community college that's off the charts That's extraordinary Part of that was self-selection, but part of that was they only took one class right So for two two and a half weeks, whatever it was they did one thing. They were juggling one ball Juggling one ball is easy, you know It was the ability to focus um, that's In broad terms, and I'm using these terms are broadly Students of color low-income students tend to have more complicated lives outside of class In terms of jobs and families and economics I say tend to it's not universal, but it's an act in the aggregate To the extent that you can reduce the number of balls anyone has to juggle at one time You're going to disproportionately benefit the ones who have the most complicated lives outside That's that's fantastic. Um in the in the chat Amanda Burbage notes that um, someone who leaves say november They um, they're not losing four or five tuition expenses, but only two That's true Yeah reduces the return to title four, which is part of the institutional incentive You don't have to return as much financial aid because they finish two classes We have um, uh another question that follows up on that and this is just this is fascinating and this is from uh John stites at georgetown. He says aren't are there more externalities that have to shift Before seven to eight week modules become more common financially backages student visas campus housing I mean so campus housing is as much of an issue but on campus jobs and so on right Yes and no, um, again, we're community a commuter school. So campus housing is not an issue for us um, it does create some issues in terms of student visas and registrar things like add drop dates have to change um registration policies even things like deciding from the from the the perspective of the deans deciding When to cancel small classes um, if a professor is teaching two and two or two and three or whatever if When do you make the call on the second half class? because If if a first half class doesn't run they can make it up in the second half if a second half class doesn't run What do they do? That's particularly true in the spring So there are workload issues you have to figure out. There's a lot of details, but it's been done And in fact in achieving the dream, which is a national organization Mostly community colleges focused on reducing achievement gaps Short semesters has been one of the most popular and most supported changes Um, because it does have a greater impact on students with complicated lives Well, that's thank you for the question john. There's there's a lot going on Um, by the way, if you're new to the forum or to the shinding technology, those are examples of text questions Let me now show you an example of a video question and we bring up um, a student of mine who nevertheless still still talks to us in public and They have a a very very good question. So let me bring up wesson radomsky Hello wesson Hey there. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, perfectly Excellent. So, um, my question is following up on that influx you're expecting of students from more expensive four-year institutions who might be taking a break From those institutions this fall or entire academic year and i'm wondering how you expect to have to Shift your thinking about planning for this upcoming year to accommodate those students and whether you expect it to Impact your relationships with some of those four-year institutions I know it's those transfer agreements are really important And I know that quite a few four-year institutions don't allow students to take Courses for credit at other institutions while they're on a leave of absence So i'm just wondering if you've been thinking about ways to navigate that and how you're thinking about this That's a great question. Thank you. Um, I've had to deal with that directly. My son is Starting as a sophomore this fall at university of virginia. He was a freshman this past year And when they've they've been going back and forth on how much to open up and whether you can go back Um, when I raised the question, you know, could you take a summer course at brookdale while you're home? He contacted uva and discovered they won't let you transfer credits in once you've matriculated They will let you transfer them in at the point of admission Once you're in that's it Um, I'll admit. I was kind of annoyed by that Um, there are schools that do that and I think over time they're going to come under pressure or not to Because the numbers are going to change A lot of these policies were made prior to a pandemic Were not made with a pandemic in mind To give you an example of that we have a pass no credit option at brookdale But in order to take a course pass fail essentially By policy the student has to make that decision within the first three weeks of the semester Now if you remember in the spring the pandemic hit in march yeah, so You know by the time the pandemic hit that deadline in past and a whole bunch of students immediately panicked and rightly so Now in that case we were able to push through An extension we extended it through the end of the semester The first concern that I got from the faculty when I raised it was will the courses transfer And because a lot of four-year schools would not take courses with a pass as a grade Um If you'll remember in spring 2020 as the semester wore on more and more schools started issuing statements saying for this one semester yes, we'll take passes because The world went off the tracks Um, I think over time we're going to see something similar happen with four-year schools that right now have been holding the line against transfer credits They've been able to do it up until now because it's been small numbers But we're going to see big numbers of students either skipping a year entirely or doing, you know community college or some variation for a while And at some point the force of gravity just becomes too strong. You just can't keep keep fighting it Now I say that partially hoping it's true um You're right that the the relationships with the four-year schools can be tricky Um, and they vary by state This is There are states like florida Where a lot of the community colleges have started offering four-year degrees And so that's how they handle it. You know, it's not it's no longer a transfer issue. It's just continuity um In new jersey a few schools applied to do that the state pushed back the four-year school is pushed back It was a whole thing and they compromised on a three plus one That they allow three plus one agreements So now you can do three years at the community college and then transfer just for the fourth year to Rutgers or wherever And that way you're only doing one year of the four-year school tuition level The four-year schools weren't totally thrilled with that, but they were happier with that than they would have been with us offering bachelor degrees The reason we were able to pull that off is the cost argument is just becoming so powerful the four-year schools have become so expensive student debt is such an issue It's getting harder to kind of turn up your nose at the idea You know our full-time if you're a full-time student at brookdale and you don't qualify for free community college, which many of them do It's about six thousand dollars a year As opposed to 60 Right, you know, it it becomes very difficult to hold the line against numbers like that So i'm hoping that um, you're right in the short term. I think it's going to be Um tense they're going to be some difficult conversations and not everything is going to go smoothly In the long term though, I think that the force of numbers is so strong Um, I mean harvard can do what it wants, but outside of the top maybe 50 It's going to be hard for them to hold the line Thank you. That's a fantastic question. Listen. Thank you very very much And uh, what a what a deep answer Um, as usual, I'm delighted by my students because wasn't just plunged into the the the dark matter of you know transfer credits, which is so That's really no, that's my world that I like that. Yeah Well, you can use that analogy and enjoy it if so if you're if you're new to the forum That's that's how easily a video question works if you'd like to follow wasn't just press the raised hand button and and you can join us um, we have a few a few more text questions that I want to make sure that we get in And there's one from jason green in arkansas And jason asks as regards to fault planning Do the uncertainty constrain the options available to you in the sense that by the time the uncertainty decreased There wasn't enough time to implement Yeah, um I wish I could say yes to that It's a little bit backwards. What happened was uh more As we came to realize just how much would be involved in running more on site classes It became progressively clearer that it would be overwhelming that we just did not have the infrastructure um And so it wasn't so much that we Ran out of time um, it was more a matter of of As it went from abstract to concrete and we realized okay, how much How much PPE do we have how much plexiglass can we put up? How do you actually do a lecture in a room with 20 people? Without spitting on people um, how would that actually work the the more concrete we got the more Clear it became that we just weren't ready to do that at scale And so we kind of backed into it I shared on the blog the the the thing that really pushed me into over the edge into Supporting the move to go as virtual as we possibly can was childcare Um, our local k-12 districts still mostly haven't announced what they're doing for the fall and we're here. Yeah And July 3rd, we still don't know We're hearing rumors of you know, two days on three days off mornings afternoons, whatever We have a lot of students who are parents And we have a lot of faculty and staff who are parents of school age kids If we try to compel folks to come to campus But their kids can't go to school because the school is closed for them that day We create horrible childcare issues That no one has figured out how to handle um And I did not want to be the one to put somebody in a position where they had to choose between their job and their kid At least couldn't do it So between the logistics and the childcare we kind of The the as virtual as you can be option Kind of was the only one that survived process of elimination Thank you. Um, and that's uh, that's a I'm always amazed at um at uh, how clearly you might should distill so many of these many complicated issues into um It's really their their their essence here um Speaking of uh, you mentioned Odessa college in texas. We have another longtime friend of the forum Uh, who's also in texas who also works at the uh, sometimes the hueson community college system This is tom hams And uh, he has a question Hello tom Hello Everybody uh doing okay. I hope um, so My i i'm mr. Systems thinker So I have a question for you in terms of those kind of systemic changes that you were You've been discussing like the eight week semester. Um, or short shorter term six weeks semesters I remember early on in one of the discussions. Um, I think it was the chronicle discussion ryan was hosting now Uh, there was discussion about you know, everybody going to really short semesters as a as a way of dealing with the virus because you know, the same kind of parameters that um tend to impact students having Interesting lives. We all have interesting lives now as I said in the chat, right? So, uh, you know, we don't know when the next flare-up's going to come We don't know we're going to have to shut down ryan has that has a wonderful term for it called toggle term um, but um, what I'm seeing a lot of institutions including my own uh Doing though is is rejecting that kind of systemic change And um, my question to you is you know from your experience from what you're seeing in terms of the conversations You're having either within the college or with colleagues at other colleges Are you seeing that the um The pandemic is providing opportunities for more systemic change or Or less systemic change because I think both are potential Reactions, uh to that. So that's my question. That's a great question. Um, I'm gonna say yes Yeah There's a short term and a long term in the short term It's kind of you know, when when the boat is taking on water The first thing to do is not to discuss the merits of air travel, right? The first thing to do is plug the holes in the boat Right. So right now. We're kind of at that whole plugging stage that you know Um, oh crap international students. What do we do, you know that kind of stuff? um Just the other day for instance, uh, we have For the for the we're running some in progress classes this summer These are classes that were interrupted in the spring That have a hands-on component like automotive. They're coming in now in late summer to finish up And we have temperature checks Uh, for before folks can get into the buildings And before they even get to the temperature check, they have an online questionnaire. They have to fill out Have you been in contact with anyone with coveted? Do you have a fever or that kind of stuff? On day one, we realized it became really clear when some of the crew arrived that oh, we forgot to put that in Spanish There we've got, you know, some of the cleaning crew Is Spanish speaking and they had they struggled with the English in the quiz It that that kind of stuff, you know, there's a lot of very very tactical as opposed to strategic thinking Because there's just a whole lot of system stuff that that we have to change on the fly Right now with CARES Act funding for example One of the the part that goes to the institution as opposed to the part that goes to students Can only be used for expenses that you would not otherwise have had except for the pandemic So you can't just use you can't just put it in your operating budget, which would have helped actually Instead you can only use it for new things So you get into situations where you're trying to define You know, okay, is this expense recurring or new? It's different, but how different and why different and so you spend a lot of time arguing over those things Because right now we're in the stage of don't let the boat sink Um, I think what's going to happen though as with the previous question about transfer Once we get past the the short term sort of panic And I got to tell you the the stress level in april and may was beyond belief Once that starts to subside and we start to get into a little bit more routine Then I think we're going to start discovering that you know what? Online works better than we gave it credit for And maybe that opens up new affordances in terms of competency based education or dual enrollment or workplace, you know incumbent worker training things that we've kind of known but have been sort of slow to address because There was pushed back and it wasn't urgent and there's always something else to do It's suddenly a lot of the more dogmatic William F. Buckley had this description of conservatism Stand to thwart history yelling stop, you know Most campuses have people who do that for fun um That that position has become untenable You cannot argue with the straight face this fall that we shouldn't change anything It's just not a credible position So now that sort of dogmatic Conservatism is really off the table That opens up space to discuss more ambitious plans Which I think is great And long overdue frankly The folks who read my stuff for years know that I've been pushing against some of these things for a long time And I feel like for a long time the sort of what political scientists call the overton window Was just closed. You just you just could not get purchased on some of these things It's starting to open now It's opening by necessity We'll share with you with the part of the odessa story I finally met greg williams who's the president of odessa college At one of the aspen things and I asked him point blank, you know when I've tried to do this at brookdale I got all this pushback. How did you get it done? And he's he said well the state of texas told us if we didn't improve our enrollment in two years They shut us down and I thought oh, I get it. They had a gun to their head Yeah, you know if you don't have a gun to your head, it's easy to put off these hard conversations They had a gun to their head In a sense covet is putting a gun to the head of most of higher education now And while I would have preferred that we didn't need that Any number of reasons It it does open up space to try some things that were not on the table a year ago And so yeah, of course, then we're gonna have a vaccine and the guns are going to go back in the holster Right, maybe in the moment may pass. Maybe maybe But that's a big Yeah Tom thank you for the for the great question. Um, and make sure you put your Thank you your home page in the in the chats people can see it ideaspaces.net Um, you remind me uh of uh of the great uh Johnson quote, um, you know concentrates a man's mind wonderfully the knowledge. He's going to be hanged You know fortnight, right? Yeah, we're We're we're almost out of time and I want to make sure that we have uh that we don't lose any questions And we have one that came in earlier from uh, charles finley at northeastern not too far from you and charles asks going back to uh, uh removing Reducing uh race caps. So you mentioned one structure shorter class of calendar change What other structures influence outcomes perhaps rubrics or standards? Um, acuplacer Uh, acuplacer is a standardized placement test developed by the college board That has determined whether students go into remedial classes or not Uh, particularly in math Acuplacer is not terribly accurate. Acuplacer has biased results. Acuplacer is a nightmare I've gone on record publicly saying die acuplacer die um Acuplacer dropped the ball this spring When we went online, obviously the testing center had to close They had had sort of distance testing for a while, but then their proctoring center their distance proctoring center went down due to covid So we had to move away from acuplacer all together to a multi-factor placement I'm hopeful that we just stay with a multi-factor placement where we look at high school grades and we look at self-assessment John Hetz out in california has done some really interesting studies showing that uh at the community college level Students will self-place in math more accurately than a placement test will place them Wow Yeah And anyone who knows the literature on remediation knows that remediation has been disproportionately Uh negative It has hurt students of color and low-income students more than it has hurt quite students and upper-income students But it hurts most people who take it. Uh, and it's the time and the expense So to the extent that we can Get away from that that we can stop mistaking False precision for academic integrity I think that we can actually open things up and improve outcomes I take a good hard look at some of our financial aid policies They are complicated and I have huge respect for the folks who work in financial aid because wow those rules are complicated And they change quickly But to the extent that we can get away from some of the sillier financial aid rules that get in the way that would be wonderful Um better transfer would help. Uh, there's been all kinds of studies done on credit loss When students transfer from community colleges to four-year schools And again given that community colleges are more racially diverse than the average four-year school Uh credit loss upon transfer tends to impact as proportionally students of color The great thing about looking at uh racism if this is a great thing is that there's no shortage of it Um, there's plenty to be done. There is there's no shortage of work I'm not concerned the two years from now the master plan will be obsolete Um, that that's not a worry well, you know, you know, I like to um I like to close each forum session by thinking about the future Further ahead and you just did that perfectly Um, you know thinking two years ahead and and tom helped primus for this for the Possibility of a vaccine and what could what could happen afterwards um, you know, um We're at the top of the hour and and you've you've just been fantastic giving us a master class and thoughtful Um administration I I ask people all the time how to keep up with people and I tell them well Read inside higher ed and uh, read confessions of community college dean and there's there's matt read. He'll be all over the place Um, is that that's still the best place to find you? Yeah Well, um, thank you. Thank you again so much. Um, and I'm really I'm all best for this fall And uh, all that putting the good fight for community college is the biggest sector of american higher education Thank you. Thank you and stay safe You too Thank you everybody I will But don't go away friends because we have Uh, just a couple of notes about the next few weeks and I want to thank everybody For all their great questions by video and by chat And sarah, we'll have a recording up soon Just looking ahead for the next couple of months. We're going to have more discussion about black lives matter about fall planning More on improving teaching on public universities how to do video Well more and more topics coming up as the fall semester draws closer and closer If you want to talk about this and keep discussing it Please head to our different social media venues. Uh, we have groups on linkedin and facebook We have a slack group, but also especially, uh, twitter. In fact, um on twitter right now. Uh, it looks like, um Tim robbins went and tweeted a great great screenshot from the odessa college plan. Um, which is really helpful Thank you. Thank you tim If you'd also, uh, like to dive back into the past sessions, for example A recent session we looked at blake college as they moved from the 15 week semester to seven and a half week blocks Just head to our archive. We have almost 220 videos there right now. It's good tiny or l.com slash ftf archive And in the meantime, uh, please everybody. Thank you for thinking together with us Thank you so much for all of your all of your reflections and all for all of your ways of being together This is the best way forward. Uh, in the meantime, everybody, please take care Stay safe and we'll see you online Bye. Bye