It Has to be Different After This

This pandemic has completely exposed the kind of inequity colleges like mine have been trying to mitigate since their creation. But even for practitioners like me, the reality of all of this has been hard to see. I think sometimes we work so hard trying to make a difference, we blind ourselves to the simple unfairness of the situation. The unfair Horatio Alger myths we assign to our students and staff overcoming obstacles to increase social mobility are being tested and exposed in ways they never have during my career. Now, make no mistake, there are remarkable things happening at colleges across the country, and there are students doing amazing things in difficult to impossible situations, but should they have to? Does it need to be that way? I always remember the quote from Rhodes Scholar Hazim Hardeman “Don’t be happy for me that I overcame these barriers,” he says. “Be mad as hell that they exist in the first place.” I think we can choose wisely, on the other side of this pandemic, I really do. I think we must. Let me try to explain the contrast. It starts just down the hall from me.

I know a college student quite well who had to leave her state university residential campus and not return this spring. She lives in my house actually. Now, before you assume I'm taking in wayward students, you should know it's my daughter, and she moved back to her childhood bedroom from her dorm in the middle of her second semester. I suppose it's been inconvenient for her, and I'm sure she's sad because her college experience was interrupted, but here is the reality, she's mostly fine. She's living in the house she grew up in, and her bedroom is larger than the dorm room she shared at her university. She has a new Surface tablet she purchased this fall because her laptop wasn't making the grade, and she has the fastest internet the local provider has. She always has by the way. The refrigerator is full of food, the semester is paid for, and she doesn't need to get a job right now to help with costs. She's anxious because all of her classes are suddenly online, and her teachers aren't really prepared either, but in all honesty... She's fine.

The contrast to other students I know is striking. I've spent most of the last month trying to make the best of this bad situation for the students I serve. Of course, my college also serves students like my daughter, but the stories I'm hearing are of adult students with children and trying to do online courses and home-school on the one device in their home or on their phones. Or the stories are of homes with poor or no internet access. At Minnesota State College Southeast we know who we serve, so we have kept our computer labs open and as safe as possible, but the comparison to the student who lives in my house is bothering me every day. Our small college with limited resources does everything it can to provide access to physically distanced computers for students who are able to travel to campus. I know some colleges have given devices to students who are without, we did not have the resources to do so. It's a bit of cliche to say community and technical colleges lack necessary funding, but it's become even more clear in recent weeks. I think of students who are home-bound and alone, and the contrast to my daughter runs deeper. I listen to stories of students who are working more hours during this pandemic because they don't know what the future holds. I've met multiple students this year who were living in cars at some point, what is happening to them? Did they stay in class... can they? How do we even pretend their opportunities are equitable in any way to the young person living in her bedroom in my house?

For the record, I love my daughter, and I'm glad she has the things she has, and the opportunities those things bring. Where it falls apart for me is if anyone has any sense that she "deserves" this, and the other students I know don't. It just isn't true. My daughter has what she has simply through an accident of birth and a pile of privilege. She's talented and bright, but no more bright and talented than students I've been meeting for years, who have much less. We must acknowledge the inequity of where they start, and if we are interested in bringing out the potential in everyone, we need to start leveling the playing field. These are choices. We like to pretend they aren't, but they are. I truly believe there is enough to provide opportunity for all, we just have to decide there is and act accordingly. If not, we need to openly acknowledge that we choose to have different levels of opportunity for people based on who they were born to and where. We know this is true, but I believe if we force people to see it and say it, we will be motivated to change it.

My college returned in full distance learning mode two weeks ago, and faculty are telling me of students they cannot make contact with no matter how they try. It hurts my soul to know we might lose some of our most vulnerable students when they need us most. It hurts my soul when the best solution for students is to boost the WiFi so it is accessible outside of buildings and in parking ramps, so they can do work in their cars. I'm proud of all of us for finding these "solutions" but we cannot celebrate them and pretend they create equity. They are a band aid on a system that feels irretrievably broken to me. We cannot let charity be a substitute for justice, or a "moral safety valve" as noted in the image above. We must do the best we can, while acknowledging as my friend and hero Dr. Russell Lowery Hart says "We aren't doing enough, we have to do more..." So, I'm not a lot of fun when I see social media posts of families like mine celebrating the joy in "simple things" and the "opportunity" this quarantine has given us to connect to "what matters." I understand where the sentiment comes from, but please don't let isolation cause you to look inward only. I wonder how different all this would look if we shifted from protecting what we have to worrying about those who have nothing? All the inequity this pandemic has laid bare was caused by choices we make about how we run our society. That means we can choose differently. We have to choose differently, don't we?