Uncertainty rules until school year plans are set
We’ll see how well Trump fares by pressuring schools from on high, but once again he’ll hit a core truth about power
The long, hot summer is getting longer by the day.
With apprehension — about the pandemic, the coming fall, K-12 schools, the colleges, the election — growing by the hour.
“Dear international students,” wrote Katherine A. Rowe, president of the College of William & Mary, “On Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced new restrictions that prevent international students from returning to or remaining in the U.S. for remote-only instruction.”
“These regulations are unfair, unfeasible, and threaten William & Mary’s teaching and research mission as a global university,” president Rowe declared in a Wednesday letter. “They compound the uncertainty and concern brought on by the pandemic and go against every value we hold as an institution.”
Rowe has effectively signed on to the “resistance,” and a number of leading American universities — Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — are filing suit to bar ICE enforcement efforts.
This is all due to President Donald Trump, of course, who wishes all schools, everywhere — K-12 and higher — open to feign normality for the sake of the national election.
The ICE action rings another bell in his political mentality
(who cares about those students, they’re not Americans anyway) but dings the schools badly because of lost revenue.
We’ll see how well Trump fares by pressuring the schools from on high, but once again he’ll hit a core truth about power in America: It’s often not there to be had. The U.S. Constitution was designed to trip you up.
Federalism. The multi-layered cake of authority that splits American political power up, down and sideways. The American presidency may more easily attack Bermuda than Baltimore and has limited influence on local education. Yes, the White House can cut off federal financial support, but even that will be hard to pull off.
America’s resistance to concentrated power is literally built into the national genetic code and it’s a bit amazing how often people, including officeholders at all levels, neither get it nor fully appreciate its effects.
Take, for instance, Virginia’s own preference for divided power. If you talk about the Virginia “system” of higher education, you’re not really talking about anything that actually exists. There is no “system.”
Such systems do exist in other states, where you have a “Board of Regents” or some such to lord over the state-supported colleges and universities. You can direct resources, set policy and do so on a broad statewide basis.
But not in Virginia. The State Council of Higher Education does first-rate analytical work and provides valuable service by saying, well, we ought to do this or that. But that’s it.
For authority, you have each school’s “Board of Visitors,” people appointed by the governor on a staggered term basis and approved by the General Assembly. The legislature may certainly exert influence (the commonwealth owns the land and buildings, subsidizes operations) but often finds it politically unattractive to be too aggressive on that front.
Some have tried, let us say; most have seen their tail feathers singed. Virginia has its own peculiar way of doing things.
A lack of a system, by the way, is inhibiting Virginia’s effort to manage COVID-19 for the fall semester. Present disadvantages are glaringly evident.
Especially when it comes to testing and tracing and all the rest of the admittedly imperfect techniques being deployed (or attempted) to shape and control the virus.
An interesting convergence quickly approaches: The planned August special session of the General Assembly will occur simultaneously with the opening of the fall semester at state colleges and universities.
Should the students arrive next month and preparations prove inadequate (a source of much current apprehension), should the students (or the faculty) revolt, head home and the whole situation devolve into a fiasco, the General Assembly, as an institution, will be convened in Richmond.
Therefore, the legislature’s opportunity, as an institution, to ignore the predicament, will be nil. Attention, then, will turn to Gov. Ralph Northam and likely put his administration on the defensive.
A well-considered, wellthought-out COVID-19 testing/ tracing proposal — proposed by Virginia’s leading universities and designed to cover all students on all campuses (public and private) and establish a statewide resource for the future — has yet to be embraced by Northam and his folks.
The price tag is steep, but it’s there to be done.
Absent a plan, absent funded, effective preparations, expect to see legislators, on their feet, in Richmond, next month, asking “why?” The governor may point to a lack of a “system,” but it won’t get him far.
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.