Faculty President’s 2nd Letter to the Faculty, Fall 2020
This long note responds to understandable faculty concerns in the lead up to the 20-21 academic year and sets the stage for our virtual fall retreat.
Hello, Whitworth faculty. That was quite a week.
Officially, this email is an update on Fall Retreat. Unofficially (or maybe just exactly as officially), it’s also a followup to last week’s doings in faculty email. Several members of Faculty Executive suggested that these ought to be two different emails. I thought about that a lot, but I landed here: They are the same (too long) email. They belong together as one reflection on our spirit and our spirits as a Christian faculty facing down an unknown new academic year of many parts.
Every year is that, I think—a new occasion for this Christian faculty to take risks for our mission. Not every year has a pandemic in it, but we run toward serious risks of all sizes every time we open the campus to students. We make morally significant statements and take morally significant actions every day as teachers and advisors. We do great good sometimes when we hardly meant to do anything. We do harm sometimes when we intend the opposite. It’s a Romans 7 world, every day and all the time.
This 2020 meshugas is something else, of course, and in the interactions Exec has had in recent weeks, with each other and with faculty members from all over campus, it’s clear this faculty of many minds has just as many different takes on the year ahead and the meaning of opening our campus to students at this time. I’m not going to quote and parse last week’s emails, but I’m going to say that I was heartened by the spirit of careful explanation and engagement that showed through, and I was heartened by efforts both to call us to the good and to call us to healthy community as Christians.
Intentional Christian communities like ours sometimes begin to take their shared Christianity for granted and divide along other lines. That’s not so good. It’s easy to take for granted, too, when we’re all Christians together, that we somehow know all we need to know about being Christians together. We don’t. (Who does?) Annual and daily rituals—our Fall Retreat and installation services, obviously, but also things like quiet prayer before meetings and meals—help draw our hearts and minds back to our shared faith. But a moment like this shows us how ready we are (or aren’t) to speak together as Christians and solve problems together as we seek God’s will for our lives and for the institutions and resources we steward.
It’s not my place, or Exec’s place, in this context, to try to score what we did last week. Exec itself is of many minds, like the whole of the faculty, and I feel sure that each member would articulate something different about the season ahead. For my part, I think that we—this faculty—did okay. We didn’t agree, but we drew ourselves into a serious and tense conversation informed by our Christian faith. I’ve got some caveats, and so do you. We have some stuff to work on. But you can gauge that for yourself, and you should.
What Exec can do (and is doing) in this moment is looking for ways to support all faculty as we head into this year of challenges. We are taking it as a given that Whitworth is opening in a WhitworthFLEX stance, teaching as “in person” as we can teach. We are mindful that many of you are worried (or more than worried) about that. As you know, Exec initiated a survey a couple of weeks ago to check in on the state-of-play in our feelings about in-person teaching. At the same time (and partly inspired by those survey results), we have pushed for clarity (and faster clarity) about how folks can opt out of in-person teaching, and for what reasons. So far, it seems that since the request form was launched all requests have been approved, and quickly.
There’s much to praise in Whitworth’s summertime preparations for the fall, but the slowness to an answer on approval for distanced teaching was surely a stumble. So, too, has been a lack of clarity at times about how much freedom to “flex” there will be for individual instructors as the semester goes on. My hope, coming out of conversations with Gregor and other leaders over the last few weeks, is that we will soon arrive at a place where chairs can confidently help faculty members navigate those on-the-fly decisions, where concerns arise. I’m a little biased as a former chair, I guess, but I think empowering chairs to communicate and make decisions with their department members will do a lot of good. I’ve been pushing for that, and for mindful communication with chairs that will help them to do that job with confidence.
Exec hopes to see an answer very soon from the administration about how we can manage safety and wellness concerns around breaks. Exec has talked this over at great length, and we’ve passed on our advice to Gregor and Academic Affairs, who are working on the details. They hope to have a clear solution later this week. I’m encouraged that, barring the unforeseen, the solution will be amenable to most. And members of Exec have worked with School of Ed leaders and with HR over the last couple of weeks to gather names of potential local tutors and teachers-for-hire, and to find a way to distribute that to you. We hope this resource will help the parents of school-age children among us.
Above all, I think Exec’s mind is on how we respond to faculty concerns; it’s always the question, really, and, like so many things, that question is intensified in this season. How can our responses lead to empowered agency and flourishing at all levels? It’s a challenge every day. One of the excellent things about the construction of Exec is that it’s always full of people who know a lot about how things get done around here. Often our job is just to direct people toward the right resources or to make sure concerns land on the right desks. Sometimes we need to put together task forces to work on unsolved problems like the status of clinical faculty or the ways that our research approval processes work (coming attractions at your local faculty assembly). Sometimes our job is to carry concerns to the administration, as we’ve been doing so much this summer, and sometimes our job is to carry administrative concerns to the faculty. Needless to say, we’ll be doing all of those things in the year ahead, and we’ve started our weekly meetings several weeks early, with packed agendas. We’d all appreciate your prayers and support as we do this work, which is often invisible work. Please pray for us that we’ll be able to proceed with wit and wisdom and good spirits this year.
And, friends, let’s have a little bit of a Fall Retreat. Not as much as usual. But let’s come together around the essentials. Like I said above, this is one of those moments in the year where we remind ourselves who we are, and in this year of all years, we need it.
Thursday, September 3rd. (Look for Zoom links in your inbox on the day before the retreat itself.)
All Day: I want to challenge all of you to find some ways (whatever ways might work for you, at this time) to connect with some colleageus that you don’t usually connect with. You might eat together—in Zoom, if needed—before the devotion (8:30) or before the installation service (1:00). You might find some time between those events to walk with some folks, or to meet virtually. You might invite all the faculty gardeners you know to hang out with you in a WebEx room, or you might schedule a literary reading in a Google Hangout. Honestly, it doesn’t matter what. Let’s just find some ways to replace what we would get if we were walking through the food line at lunch together, or having a break out conversation at Camp Spalding. Casual moments where friendship can grow.
8:30 am: Devotion. Lee Anne Chaney will offer a devotion. We’ll pray together. Ben Brody will bring music. This will take about a half hour.
9:30 am: Finding the Hallway. This part is optional. It’s an open conversation on Zoom about how we can help our students connect with each other and with us, despite the distancing we’ll be doing. We can get all the pedagogy right, I think, and still be missing some of the liberal arts college magic that happens when we are gathered more comfortably together. How do we make up for missing conversations in the hallway? How do we make up for what’s lost from the five minutes before and after class, when we are “flexed” into online spaces? How do we help students—all of them—find study partners and communicate about what’s happening in their classes? And so on. I’d just really like to hear what you’re thinking, and for us all to trade ideas. So that’s what this piece will be. Low key. Black tie optional.
1:00 pm: The Installation Service. We’ll welcome our new faculty. We’ll recognize the newly tenured among us. We’ll hear a message from our new provost. We’ll pray. There will be music. It’s a quiet spot in the year, a stilling before the storm, and, I think, one of the most important things we do together.
That is, I think you’ll agree, quite enough from me, at this time. Thank you for the work you’re doing, the problems you’re solving, the challenges you’re facing, the fellowship and grace you’re offering your colleagues and students.
Fred
Whitworth University
8/24/2020