Are We Going to Play College Football?

Are We Going to Play College Football?

The titular question is one I’m hearing now, but this isn’t the first time. After I watched the devastation of 9/11 live on my TV I hurriedly got dressed and headed to work: at that time I was a production assistant at ESPN. The next few days were a whirlwind, but what stood out to me was the rush to get back to “normal.” I sat at work for days and the big question on everyone’s mind was “are they going to play college football this weekend.” Immediately after the tragedy, the SEC declared initially that they intended to have teams play. Fortunately, the National Football League, not wanting to make the same mistake they made after the Kennedy assassination, decided not to play, and college football followed.

And yet here we are again. This isn’t a national tragedy. It is a global event, and here we are, again, asking about college football.

It didn’t have to be this bad. Sure there are some wild things happening in the world this year. It seems like the fires in Australia were an entire lifetime ago, and that was January. No one knows where the murder hornets went, and now I’m surrounded by fire in California. A mess of literal Biblical proportions. And yet again we’re asking not about people, but about football.

I have been a full-time college administrator for nearly 15 years, and it’s appalling to me that so many of our campuses have no crisis management protocols. Initially, getting students off campuses wasn’t as bad as it could have been because my colleagues in residence life and deans of students office implemented their break protocols. Students that could leave were encouraged to do so, and those that couldn’t were consolidated into smaller residence halls.  However, beyond that it seems like higher education got itself stuck.

Administrators are supposed to be the experts of implementation. We plan. We budget. We orient. We admit. We advise. We financially award. And we’re supposed to be continually thinking of how to do this work better. And this time we didn’t despite all of the evidence that something like this was coming.

In 2005, I had just moved to Washington, D.C. and had done some part-time work in higher education, but hadn’t landed a full-time job yet. I sat in my apartment watching the 24-hour news cycle where news of Hurricane Katrina swept across the nation. The levees and our hearts broke as so many people were displaced – including the college students, staff and faculty. I remember signing up to take in displaced students should any of them get as far as D.C. I’m sure Houstonians remember well. Except despite watching Tulane, the University of New Orleans, Xavier and Dillard go through all of this it didn’t seem to signal to higher ed that maybe we should have contingency plans for our campuses. Some institutions digitized their records, but we didn’t prepare for extended periods of time away from campus with training or infrastructure shifts.

Fast forward to the Great Recession. This was my first experience with being furloughed. I was working at a small, private institution that was struggling as it was, and the lack of new students (i.e. new revenue) was devastating. And either we didn’t learn from that or we just assumed that when it happened again that furloughs and layoffs were the way to go instead of building capital campaigns to take care of the people that make the university go. Either way, here we are. Again.

Skip ahead to the election of 45. The ban on people from certain countries had us all scrambling to demonstrate our solidarity with international students. Buildings were wrapped in glorious banners declaring our support. Statements were made. We knew this president was not going to let up on trying to keep people out of the country, and yet the hammer of losing funding if we only hold online courses instead of having hybrid or face-to-face options caught us by surprise - again.

Back up to other natural disasters. In 2018 the University of North Carolina at Wilmington was decimated by Hurricane Florence and displaced students. Graduate students in the natural and physical sciences lost their work they needed to graduate. Around the same time wildfires ripped through California and threatened to close campuses as smoke engulfed cities. And yet we still did not plan for time away from our campuses.

Back up again to the encounters we’ve had with SARS (2002), MRSA (2005) H1N1 (2009), bird flu (2014), Zika (2016), and even a couple of cases of ebola on American soil. There was no reason to reason to believe that a large scale health crisis would not hit us too. Even though no plan would have been adequate for what we’re currently facing, it feels as though, as a profession, that we didn’t really plan at all.

We can be better.

We have to start talking to the folks on the ground who have been through crises whether they did it well or not. We have to be willing to tell the truth of what happened so that we all can learn from it. There are student affairs dissertations on Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters. These have to get dusted off and fast. Let’s invite (and pay) these folks to talk about what they did next after the news went away.

Overall, higher ed is terrible at using what it knows to inform what it does. I’m sure there is some epidemiologist out there who has written papers on a coming global pandemic and knew that we were due for one. I’m sure that a few political scientists could have told us to prepare for attacks on immigration. We have to be more mindful of listening to our faculty expertise on these large scale issues to inform the work that we do. This has to be a continual conversation.

Lastly, I hope that sports takes a backseat to all of the other work we have to do to protect students. I understand that some institutions are losing millions, and that says a whole lot about higher education finance, and less about the students whose labor is used to make those millions. It shouldn’t be on those students to save us, or anyone but themselves and their families. I hope that we’re not back here, again, asking about college football when some other thing eventually disrupts our campuses and lives.