What Pivoting Looks Like in a Pandemic

December 3, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed us from a nation that shunned discussions of death to one that receives daily mortality reports. In the face of unimaginable loss — of friends, family, jobs, and freedom — many have adopted a “hospice mentality,” a state of mind where our best days are behind us and the future is bleak.

This is also the case in higher education, where even choosing a college has become a matter of life and death. We have moved from a time when colleges were a community’s lifeblood — providing jobs, culture, and diversity of thought and experience — to a time when many college campuses have become Covid hotspots, bringing rising infection rates and fear to the communities they once enriched.

When I started my presidency at Champlain College in Burlington, VT on July 1, our students had been sent home and the pandemic ravaged the country. Leading a college through a pandemic during a time of economic upheaval, social unrest, racial injustice, a divisive political landscape, and a climate crisis, has been the greatest test of my professional career. Yet I believe the true test of a leader is finding ways to pivot in an uncertain world and meet challenges with innovation and creativity.

We have moved from a time when colleges were a community’s lifeblood — providing jobs, culture, and diversity of thought and experience — to a time when many college campuses have become Covid hotspots, bringing rising infection rates and fear to the communities they once enriched.

Even as we approach a year of the pandemic with no end in sight, I feel optimistic about the future. And, I am not alone. A survey commissioned by Champlain College Online about career prospects, Covid-19, and the election found 66% of responders felt positive about the future. That positivity also translated into action, with two out of three respondents taking steps to improve their career prospects.

There are lessons to be learned for organizations, leaders, and individuals. For Champlain College, all that we learned from the pandemic this fall helps to fuel our optimism about the future. The following lessons are ones we will take forward in defining what 2021 looks like on our campus:

• Rise above differences: The pandemic gave us new opportunities to break down silos and build connections. Our teamwork across our campus, and our collaboration with the state of Vermont, the city of Burlington, and other Vermont colleges have been key components in our safe return-to-campus this fall, resulting in remarkably low infection rates on campus.

• Respect science: Champlain used data and modeling from the CDC, the state of Vermont, and the Open Smart college planning tool to develop its reopening plan. Weekly surveillance testing has allowed us to keep our finger on the pulse of the health of our campus community. A leadership team, including members of the College’s medical facility, staff, and faculty, meets regularly to review current on-campus and external data to inform decision-making.

• Adhere to protocols: We instituted a strict behavior/health pledge for everyone on campus. In addition to committing to wearing masks and socially distancing, students who missed the weekly test twice were asked to leave campus. After more than 15,000 weekly tests for our students, faculty, and staff, we have had just six positive cases since we opened in August. Our positivity rate of .04% is well below that of Vermont’s rate, which is the lowest in the nation.

• Be transparent: A real-time dashboard keeps students, faculty, state, and city officials, parents, and the Burlington community apprised of the school’s Covid status in real time.

• Get buy-in: The entire Champlain community embraced and was involved in executing our plan. The marketing department created a #LetUsCare campaign playing off the school motto “Let Us Dare.” Students worked with local mask makers to design and produce masks that were gifted to first-year students.

• Encourage innovation: Just as the health care sector embraced telemedicine, we experimented with ways to take the distance out of distance learning. As we pivoted to virtual learning last spring, Champlain professors who were dissatisfied with the limitations of technology platforms for their classrooms invented InSpace, an innovative solution enabling students and teachers to interact and collaborate just as they do in physical spaces. Our faculty is now using InSpace for classes and we have incorporated InSpace into our Admissions events for prospective students.

• Be a good neighbor: The pandemic reinforced how much colleges are an integral part of their communities. We have worked to become better neighbors by collaborating with the state of Vermont to help businesses recover, and with the City of Burlington to provide classes to community members looking to acquire the skills to find new jobs. Our students rose to the occasion as well. Education students created Covid learning kits for the local community; and first-year students conducted a safe-distanced food drive that collected 1,200 pounds of food for Feeding Chittenden and the Champlain College Food Pantry.

We know we have a long road ahead, but our lessons create a road map for the future. As we face a rising Covid surge, we all have the opportunity to define what pivoting looks like in a post-pandemic era. We can get through this, and even change the world, if we take this challenge as an opportunity to shake the dust off, embrace change, and rise above limitations to find innovative solutions.

Connect the Dots: The Big One

Friends in Southern California had a big scare recently when that area experienced its most severe earthquakes in decades. Fortunately, despite all the jolts and aftershocks, no one was killed, and apparently, there was little major damage to the infrastructure.

When I heard the news about the quakes, I immediately thought back to October 17, 1989. That was the day the San Francisco Bay Area was hit with a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. As much of the rest of America watched on television – the quake hit just before the start of the third game of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics – bridges and highways collapsed, buildings crumbled, and lives were shattered. In only 15 seconds, 63 people died and nearly 4,000 others were injured.

Back then, I was a doctoral student in Oklahoma, far removed from the catastrophe in San Francisco. Yet that event affected me deeply. So many tragedies, no clear pattern, no consistent explanation for why some people lost everything, including their lives. It was just the work of nature, the melody of uncertainty, the song of change. Nature owed us no explanation, no rational understanding of why this time and this place. It was terrifying, frustrating and inexplicable.

One year later, residents throughout the Mississippi Valley waited in fear that “the big one” was about to happen along the New Madrid Seismic Zone – roughly 170 miles southeast of Ladue – thanks to a prediction by a since-discredited self-styled climatologist named Iben Browning. Thankfully, it never came to pass.

What these events did, however, was raise our collective consciousness about Mother Nature and the fragility of our existence. In the blink of an eye, life can change for so many people, leaving physical and emotional scars that may last a lifetime. People, myself included, began to realize that this could happen to us, and now, 30 years later, we have made significant improvements in building codes and infrastructure reinforcements. The fact that the damage from a 6.9-level earthquake in Southern California was limited suggests that we are paying attention and responding in positive ways.

Even more important are the human stories that events like these bring to the front. Thirty years ago, I saw people coming together, helping each other in times of need. Black youths in Oakland peering into 18-inch gaps between the layers of concrete to help mostly white commuters climb to safety. People in expensive business suits munching chicken wings with homeless people in tattered clothes. It was a unique display of the haves and the have-nots together sharing.

I was encouraged to read about Los Angeles neighborhoods organizing to check on one another’s safety and help when disaster strikes. It made me realize that in times of tragedy, we realize how much we really need each other, how much we really have in common.

One of the most popular new musicals on Broadway today, Come From Away, also played in St. Louis in May at The Fabulous Fox Theatre. It tells the tale of the residents of Gander, Newfoundland, who opened their town, their homes and their hearts to more than 7,000 airline travelers who were grounded there following the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001. Like the people by the Bay, they leaned on one another and pulled together. For five days, the Newfoundlanders showed that love and compassion can always triumph over tragedy and disaster.

Like the weather, life often can be a thing of beauty, a thing to enjoy – but it also can change unexpectedly, suddenly. Its impact can be devastating, even deadly. But after every storm comes a calm, a time to reflect on change.

Whether because of a natural disaster or a manmade catastrophe – an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado, a flood or a terrorist act – we may stagger and fall, but we always find a way to regain our balance. We find comfort in our common humanity. 

Dr. Benjamin Ola. Akande is assistant chancellor of International Programs-Africa, director of Africa Initiative and associate director of the Global Health Center at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a former president of Westminster College and served as dean at the Walker School of Business & Technology at Webster University. He has a Ph.D. in economics.

Connect the Dots: Change: the Familiar Versus the Future

In January, we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who debunked the notion that change involving justice and equality must start at the top to take us all to the future.

Perhaps King’s greatest public statement came on Aug. 28, 1963, at Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial: his “I Have a Dream.” Deeply rooted in the American dream, King’s speech that day centered on change by extolling fundamental values, cultural tradition and personal conviction.

A testimonial to how change happens, that speech displayed emotion and powerfully depicted the value of moving people to action. For me, it still showcases the profound ability of one person to ignite a revolution through a message that speaks to change, a successful attempt to disrupt history through passion, not naked power.

In reality, though, change remains difficult because it generally sidelines comfort. It creates inconvenience, challenges the status quo, demands setting aside the conventional wisdom.

In The New York Times, U.S. political journalist/commentator Michael Kinsley once observed: “Americans say they want change, but there is room for doubt. Change is scary.” Kinsley found nothing contemptible about reluctance to change; he did, however, affirm that if we want only happy change, we really don’t want change at all.

The 20th-century civil rights movement called for a different kind of change, one that challenges people to rise above wrongs like racism and inequality. King used powerful rhetoric to depict that era and offered an alternative route to the future that people could recognize.

This century demands passion equal to King’s to convey an identical message focused on today’s issues – war, peace, the environment, access to necessities. America needs leadership with the vision to awaken change and create a new hope – the kind of change convincing enough that we can readily become part of it. Change must become more than just a word; it must become a covenant that begins and ends with you, and empowers people to team to ensure it happens.

King stood for change – transformative, compelling, a complete interruption in the thoughts and actions of the time. He sought the sort of change that moves people to a new plane, a synthesis to take this nation from ideas to ideals. Change demands the audacity to question what exists and what doesn’t work. King, in his day, succeeded because so many people saw themselves as enablers of change. Many, of course, had difficulty envisioning King’s change so he did what great leaders do – presented a glimpse of the future with his words.

Still, change embraces no real comfort. In fact, a general absence of comfort makes change so meaningful and rewarding when it’s attained.

As we celebrate King’s legacy, I charge area residents to reflect on the issues that have long divided us – race, crime, justice, education and that ever-elusive thing called trust – and to visualize a future we all want and need. That future will demand compromises, seeing things anew and willingly feeling uncomfortable. It also will demand the selflessness that change requires.

So how do you move people to embrace change? Try these three strategies:

• Appeal to a common purpose.

• Communicate expressively by giving life to the vision so people can see themselves in the future.

• Be sincere and believable through transparency and personal conviction.

It doesn’t matter where you’re trying to mobilize change. Whether at worship, in school, in politics or at work, these three strategies remain essential to manifest change.

The ultimate measure of change, of course, depends on whether America feels more comfortable with the familiar than with the future. Which will it be for you?

Dr. Benjamin Ola. Akande is the senior advisor to the chancellor and director of the Africa Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as former president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He has a Ph.D. in economics and previously served as dean of the George Herbert Walker School of Business & Technology at Webster University.