Rollins president: Bravo to faculty, preparing for uncertain fall

As the president of Rollins College, I am acutely aware of the disruption to teaching and learning caused by COVID-19.

Across the nation, the mass migration to online learning last spring was an uncontrolled test on a vast scale of technology, human resiliency and ingenuity, and styles of teaching and learning.

We learned that some subjects lend themselves more readily to online learning than others, and that some, those subjects like laboratory science, theater arts, music, and studio arts, where experiential learning is the essence of the discipline, are especially ill-suited to virtual instruction.

Right now, as I write, there are over a million faculty of colleges and universities in our nation that are preparing for an uncertain fall. What are they doing? They are poring over every one of their courses, their lectures, their assignments, their lesson plans, scrutinizing the learning objectives of each one, and making plans for how to deliver their courses in the coming semester on campus and in person, or online in a virtual format, or in some mixture of the two.

The uncertainty wrought by the pandemic has inspired an unprecedented fine-grained reassessment and reconsideration of the entire body of the university curriculum, course by course, assignment by assignment, with the only driving question being: what approach to this material is going to produce the best learning outcomes for students?

As a society I think we underappreciate the passion, commitment, and motivations of our nation’s college and university faculty. I will tell you that they are driven by the passion they have for their disciplines and fields of inquiry, they are driven by their love of teaching, of creatively inviting their students to discover for themselves the knowledge and insights that comprise the subject areas of the curriculum, and they are driven by their unshakable belief in the fundamental value and purposes of higher education.

In the current context, our faculty are working relentlessly on their fall plans because they care so deeply that their teaching will be effective and that their students will learn, whatever the format. They know the opportunities are too precious, too hard-won, to be squandered. They care too much about what they are teaching to have their efforts go for naught.

The irony is that this pandemic has induced a comprehensive, probing scrutiny of the learning goals of higher education at a very granular level. There is every reason to think that the whole teaching and learning enterprise, across every discipline, will be better for it.

So, I say, bravo for our nation’s college and university faculty. And, I hasten to add, I am sure the same is true for our nation’s K-12 teachers, though I cannot speak to that with authority. The quality of our nation’s economy and civil society has always been nourished by their efforts — impossible without them, really — and this fall they will all once again return to their professional craft, prepared to advance student learning by any means necessary.