How Can Higher Ed Catalyze Innovation and Increase Resilience Post-Pandemic? A Conversation
Welcome to Part 2 of “The Morning After,” a conversation with longtime collaborators on strategic and communications work for higher education—Anthony (“Tony”) Knerr and John Braunstein of AKA|Strategy and Libby Morse of Lipman Hearne—on what institutions of higher education face and need to do when that first post-pandemic day dawns. The topic of this conversation is how to pull innovation out of the wreckage while building individual and institutional resilience.
LIBBY: The incredible changes that campuses underwent this spring and fall were largely forced upon them. But can higher ed turn this crisis into its moon shot with lasting impact—and what outcomes will be the equivalent of Teflon, Velcro, and Tang?
TONY: Many college and university leaders are captives of the current moment. They are exhausted by the multiple and overlapping challenges of the past nine months, pre-occupied about getting safely through the balance of this academic year, worried about what life will be like next academic year, and concerned about the longer-term institutional sustainability. This combination of pressures and concerns has not tended to generate, let alone encourage, new thinking or bold innovation.
That said, I think market forces, financial pressures, and changing mores are forcing institutional re-consideration of established approaches and structures. The world of higher education will certainly be different post-pandemic. It is highly likely that some institutions will emerge far stronger, stable, and vigorous because they understood how to balance institutional culture with changing circumstances, take thoughtful risks and experimentation with new approaches while being true to their core values.
There is wonderful experimentation currently going on as an increasing number of institutions begin to build on the flexibility of online instruction to consider more supple, fluid, and student-focused academic scheduling, discover alternative calendaring, and think about currently untapped markets. Some institutions are looking into the possibilities, and complexities, of precision education, individually tailored educational programming that takes advantage of superior technology to meet the specific interests and needs of students. Other institutions are considering alternatives to the traditional degree—stackable credentials, certificates, joint corporate-university programs, and, possibly, degrees.
There is a different, but hugely important focus in the new and quite serious attention being given to the mental and emotional health of faculty, students, and staff—not just during the pandemic, but a longer-term understanding that individual well-being is critical to institutional well-being and societal well-being. This is, admittedly, a different kind of innovation, but just like the seriousness with which DEI is now being taken, it would be a true moon shot.
JOHN: Disruption has been both a fear and a buzzword in higher ed for a while, but it’s tended to refer to human-made disruption. COVID, on the other hand, has been a natural disruption—one without intent, purpose, values, or discernable meaning. It’s created a dramatic and immediate need for alternatives to traditional educational pedagogies, delivery modes, assessment, which institutions have been forced to provide reactively—with a predictable number of failures and successes. (The former includes a heightening of the digital divide. The latter, greater faculty accessibility and improved guidance for students who find in-person office hours inconvenient or struggle with shyness about approaching their professors.)
So, I’ll be watching to see if these reactive changes create an appetite for proactive innovation, as well as how long-lasting and on what scale. Simply put, are we going to learn lessons from our response to the pandemic? My fear is that the tremendous pressure from students and families—not to mention certain governors and state legislatures—to “get back to normal” will crowd out efforts to innovate based on what institutions learned during the pandemic about engaging students better, building trust on campus, and of course, improving the educational experience.
LIBBY: I agree, the pent-up demand for “college” as we knew it is going to be big. But I think families are going to be scrutinizing colleges more closely than ever. After so much miscommunication and confusion this year, every institution should be able to articulate in the most direct language possible, “Here is our plan for you”—Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4—and how students will not have to jump through hoops to navigate it.
TONY: And getting back to normal does not by itself preclude innovation. The smartest institutions will be those that—even as they come back to their bucolic, residential, ivory-tower normal—intentionally create space to look disinterestedly at what occurred during the pandemic, how they reacted, what they can learn from it, and what they might choose to do differently pandemic or no pandemic.
LIBBY: Let’s move from innovation to the issue of institutional resilience. The schools that weathered COVID successfully—my son’s alma mater, Beloit College, comes to mind—involved students in becoming part of the solution—not as COVID “snitches” but as partners in designing and promoting workable, pragmatic safety policies and procedures. But this experience is likely to shape a new student-administration relationship, the equivalent of grassroots activation and mobilization. You can’t go back to a command-and-control model of doing things after you’ve activated that.
JOHN: It’s not going very far out on a limb to hypothesize that students who were informed about and brought into the protocols their schools used to reopen—as influencers, contact tracers, peer support—have become stronger from the experience. My guess is that students who were made part of successful campus COVID fighting have become more aware of their own resilience and adaptability. Their engaged experiences have essentially made them braver and more willing to take risks. And they’re going to have the same expectations from their institutions.
LIBBY: Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, has talked about the remarkable shift of power from organizations to individuals. He has used examples like athletes being more powerful than their teams and musicians circumventing their labels. When I think of how that power dynamic, and all the issues and opportunities that come with it, could end up transforming institutional brand and marketing—wow!
JOHN: The smartest schools will also learn from this how to build resilient, adaptable students without waiting around for a crisis. Work of this sort has been going on since before the pandemic—Florida State University’s “Student Resilience Project” is one successful example. But with research so fundamental a part of what universities do, I would hope that all institutions that reopened this fall take advantage of the “natural experiments” that have been run on their campuses and learn from them.
And that leads me to institutional resilience. With so many institutions doing so many different things to plan for and then reopen, this must be a research field day for those universities that want to learn from successes and failures—their own and those of their peers. Campus crises are nothing new. But rarely is their source something entirely unrelated to the campuses or higher education overall. So post-COVID, my hope is that institutions learn what will make them resilient to future exogenous crises that intrude—whether it’s a health crisis, an environmental crisis, or a social crisis.
TONY: I think institutional resiliency is going to be ever more important in a world increasingly confronted with, and defined by, unpredictability. It will surely take clarity of values, strength of institutional culture, comfort with change, and appreciation of difference—together with thoughtful leadership and continuous strategic thinking—to ensure resiliency that appropriately and imaginatively adapts to new circumstances, conditions, and situations.
LIBBY: I saved an article from this summer that ran in The New York Times “At Home” section on building resilience. Something one of the experts interviewed said has stayed with me: “Very few resilient people go it alone.” He was speaking about individuals, but I think it’s transferrable to higher ed institutions. The sector has been a cage fight for a long time. I’m hoping that institutions will learn that being resilient means joining forces, not trying to do everything themselves. Maybe the big lesson from the pandemic is that resilience is a team sport.
The last installment, Reimagining Leadership, will be published soon. Makes sure to read Part 1: Rebuilding Trust if you missed it.