Weekly Briefing: Where Do We Go From Here? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

What does higher ed look like after the lockdown?

Harry Haysom for The Chronicle

Don't look now, but around the corner is the Covid-19 lockdown anniversary — sometime in March, depending on where you live and when your state shut down.

The coronavirus changed higher education. It's still reshaping the industry, and there will probably be more shifts to come. How do you quantify those changes? How do you take stock of a year punctuated by an endless stream of Zoom links and misremembered passwords? And what does this year of lockdowns, unplanned distance learning, and social unrest mean for the future?

This year our annual TrendsReport aims to answer those questions. The report tackles, among other things, how the pandemic has accelerated surveillance of students, how hits to revenue will shape colleges in the future, and how likely higher education is to exhibit real racial progress.

To settle on the five stories in the report, the deputy managing editor Jennifer Ruark solicited ideas from readers and held several virtual brainstorming sessions with reporters and other editors, talking about what they were hearing from sources and what patterns they were seeing.

Every article in the report illustrates the big picture with case studies of individual colleges. Take the State University of New York’s Oneonta campus, where town and gown got off to a rough start last March. The conflicts and the events that followed showed just how important, and fragile, the relationships between college campuses and their surrounding towns have become. In the Trends Report, and all year long, we look for stories like that: Tales that stand alone, but reveal something more.

Read the full report here.

Miss you.

Last weekend I asked readers to tell me about the casual encounters or acquaintances that they miss now that the coronavirus has sent most of us indoors for a whole year. Here are two:

Melba Veguilla Sánchez is a lifeguard at the Universidad de Sagrado Corazón, in Puerto Rico. She misses Mr. Berrios, a blind swimmer who before the pandemic came to the pool about three times a day. Sometimes he was too chatty between swimming laps. He always popped up to ask how long he had been swimming, Sánchez writes. She was proud of his drive. Other times he stopped by with his guide dog to socialize. He even asked her to read a letter out loud to him. Sánchez writes that she wonders how Mr. Berrios is doing and who is helping him. "I want this to end, I want to talk to my swimmer again, I want my pool back to being crowded," she writes. "I miss talking and the noise of people. But I miss, the most, the blind swimmer who can't stop talking. I want to give him the time. I miss Mr. Berrios."

Emily Fogel Conway, an academic-advising official for undergraduates at Pennsylvania State University, didn't know their names. They didn't chat about serious topics, but she misses her fellow bus riders during her commute. "I still think about how it was possible to develop small intimacies with virtual strangers," she writes, "in a space where the concept of physical distancing would have been impracticable."

What are you sick of?

Nearly a year ago, the Covid-19 pandemic upended our lives. To report on how this past year has changed us and will continue to define our lives and our work, we want to know: How are you feeling? What are you sick of? What do you miss? Help us document the year by filling out this Google Form about your pandemic experience.

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Weekly Briefing: Where Do We Go From Here? - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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