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Forbes featured President Marvin Krislov's latest column: "Lessons Learned From A Semester On Campus During The Pandemic"
Forbes featured President Marvin Krislov's latest column: "Lessons Learned From A Semester On Campus During The Pandemic"
We did it. We made it through the Fall 2020 semester.
In normal times, simply surviving is no great feat. But in this deeply unusual year, achieving something resembling normalcy is a real accomplishment. At Pace University, after a remote spring and a summer of planning, we welcomed students, faculty, and staff back to campus for the fall — and we’re completing the semester as planned.
How did we do it? With preparation, communication, and a commitment to success.
To start, we took seriously all the warnings we received. Back in March, we moved all our classes to remote before we were required to do so by the state, and soon thereafter we told all employees to work from home and students that they wouldn’t be able to continue living in our residence halls. (We made exceptions for students with extenuating circumstances who needed to continue in university-provided housing.)
Then we spent the spring and summer improving our operations and planning for a new kind of future.
Our faculty quickly pivoted to remote instruction in March, and then over the summer they worked hard to learn not only how to deliver classes online but how to leverage the advantages of digital technology for even better instruction. Our support services — counseling, tutoring, advising, Career Services — all moved quickly online in the spring, too, and then worked to optimize for digital delivery.
Our COVID-19 Task Force met every day through the spring and summer, coordinating efforts across the University. We upgraded air filters and purchased Plexiglass barriers. We prepared directional signage and brought in tents to create outdoor spaces. We rethought our academic calendar, moving up the start of the semester and eliminating all holidays, so we could have on-campus instruction finished by Thanksgiving and the anticipated new wave. We developed testing regimens, and, as New York State imposed a 14-quarantine for those arriving here from many parts of the country, we made arrangements to put up hundreds of students in area hotel rooms, and test them all, to make sure they were healthy when they arrived on campus. We made sure we were prepared for different scenarios, and we regularly updated our community on what we knew —and what we didn’t — and what we were planning.
Our students, our faculty, and our staff respected our guidelines. We offered classes in-person, online, and in some combination of the two, so that we could reduce density, maintain distance, and allow those classes that need to meet in person —like labs and performance studies — to do so. We required everyone in our community to complete a health questionnaire every day in order to come to campus, and we selected a random 25 percent of those coming to campus for testing each week.
