My written Faculty President’s Report for the Whitworth Board of Trustees meeting in Fall 2020.
When I was a 12 or 13 year old young fool at summer camp, I took out a small sailboat—something like a Snark Sea Skimmer—with my young fool friend. These boats are unsinkable, the Internet tells me, but you sure can flip one over in the middle of the lake, if you’re a kid from the Midwest who just tried sailing for the first time, like, yesterday. Sure, sure, I can do this, I thought. But I couldn’t, yet. I would have tried again (because I’m like that), but I was a kid in Central Indiana, and I really didn’t get another shot. You may wonder why my scrappy little Indiana summer camp was even trying to teach small boat sailing with so little nearby water to work with. But they did it, and I benefited (so that’s probably your “why”). I learned to appreciate boats, some, and I learned I would need more water and more sailboats to really learn to sail. I also learned that sometimes you need more competent shipmates for situations when knowing the ropes is going to be crucial. That’s why I’m so glad to be sailing the choppy waters of 2020 with Whitworth’s faculty full of ace teachers who know a thing or two about adjusting the ropes, catching some wind, and helping students succeed.
All summer, we rethought our teaching and reworked our materials so that we could enter into WhitworthFLEX teaching in the fall. Practically, that has meant finding ways to have some of our students physically present and some online, and it’s meant finding ways to sometimes teach to both Zoom and the physical room, at the same time, while socially distancing. It’s meant being ready to have some students move suddenly into quarantine, and it’s meant finding ways to both show our students some grace and hold them accountable so that they can succeed in their studies. We got some enormous assists from Randy Michaelis and his COVID response team, from Ron Jacobson and his crew, who organized summer teaching workshops, and from the indefatigable Ken Pecka, who got us just enough tech in each room to make a real go of it.
One of the most encouraging things I’ve heard from folks along the way is that they’re taking new teaching ideas out of all this, and that they’re thinking about how to keep using those new ideas. They’re finding new ways to use video and audio, new ways to meet with students, and new ways to have students meet with each other. On our fall retreat day, I hosted an optional conversation about “finding the hallway,” in which 40-50 faculty members gathered to talk about building spontaneous community despite the limitations under which we’re now operating. In my home English department, we’re organizing weekly meetups, and we’re staging literary readings online in a way that allows us to include alums and other community members. Other departments are trying similar things, and part of what’s so encouraging is that I can tell some of these experiments are giving us helpful new tricks that we’ll be able to use for years to come.
In September, this faculty was ready for the arrival of what I started calling “the smoke monster”—an excruciating week of hazardous forest fire air that kept us indoors and out of our classrooms. Maybe “ready” is too strong a word; that was a challenging week. But what I and the members of the Faculty Executive heard over and over was that people were prepared, because of the work they had done over the summer, to move into online spaces and keep momentum going in their courses. Exec went looking for people who were panicked or bewildered, and we really mostly found people who were sad to be out of the physical classroom again, so soon, but pretty sure they could handle it. This is what you get when you head to sea with sailors who know what they’re doing.
As for the Faculty Executive Committee itself: We normally puts our heads together a couple of times in the summer to map out the year ahead. This year, emails and virtual discussions started by late July, and we’ve been meeting weekly in Zoom since the start of August. We planned and re-planned the Fall Faculty Retreat at least three times, as we adjusted to restrictions, and we finally came up with a simple retreat day—a devotion, that “hallway” discussion, an installation service, and all in Zoom. (The faculty missed being together, I think, but we connected pretty well and welcomed in newcomers as well as we could, under the circumstances.) As I write, Exec has been mapping out the year’s practical business—the development of new Handbook language around promotion and service, making recommendations about the work and status of “clinical” faculty members (as we welcome new ODT/DPT faculty members who fit that description), developing new protocols for research approval. It’s a strange year in which to be doing everyday stuff like that, but it feels good to get back to it, too, as we develop a relationship to our new provost and enter into interesting and encouraging conversations with him about teaching, communication, and administration here at Whitworth.
Whitworth University
9/2021