2020 blows! I keep thinking how could this get any worse and then it does. This week was very difficult on so many different levels. It was my first week of my first fully-online summer class.

It was fun in many ways: lots of learning and experimentation. Lots of work. I love to get to the know the new students. I already have an awesome bunch of folks coming to office hours regularly.

But of course the stressful parts of the week were the news cycle and the planning for a possible sort of in-person next semester. What happened to George Floyd in Minnesota was absolutely disgusting. As bad as it was, the systematic racism and police brutality against Americans is even worse. I was really angry about it all this week. I tried to write about it but I couldn’t find the words.

So I am going to write about the other thing that is bothering me: getting ready for the fall semester – because there are no discrimination issues there, right?

I was in a meeting this week when I made a tactical vs. strategic argument. I commented that getting the campus ready over the next few months is going to be relatively easier than addressing the more strategic issues that continue to linger at my university, at every university. We had to think about the bigger picture and look to ways to pivot toward a better future.

Academics are doing what academics do, stress out over every possible detail but miss the target completely. Arranging the campus in an optimal way is a difficult optimization problem, but it is doable. I have a lot of experience thinking about arranging and moving stuff around with my experience in physics and logistics. On the classroom front, how much different is it than what the local Stop-n-Shop successfully does? Yes, each discipline is going to have their own issues, but let them figure that out for themselves and move on. Some classes are going to need to be online. Some will be in person. Some in between. Things are going to need to be cleaned more regularly.

The big question is what the university will look like in five years. These are the questions we should be asking and discussing! How does the university thrive in this time? How does the university use this as an opportunity to make sure students that come from disenfranchised communities get the extra support they need to be successful? How do we build a sustainable higher education that doesn’t take advantage of students and their parents pocketbook? How do we redefine the structure of the university so it is nimble so it can deal with natural disasters, pandemics, etc? Because climate change is on us. And as the population of the world increases and the available land mass decreases due climate change, the density of people will continue to rise, which will lead to more pandemics.

We have to stop! STOP THINKING ABOUT THE IMMEDIATE SOLUTION! We have to think through the problem and ask how we want to thrive in five to ten years. Develop an out-of-the-box plan. AND ATTACK!

I was watching Rachel Maddow this week. She spoke about how the police department in Minneapolis had a long history of bad behavior by police. The city has been working on cleaning it up, however the police union was complacent and unwilling to make the changes that needed to be made. The culture remained mostly unchanged, which ultimately led to tragedy!

There is a lesson there. We have to stop being complacent and unwilling to change. We need to STOP putting band-aids on things. We need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. The problem is I am not sure if I am talking about higher education or America.