Human capital, loosely defined as, "skills, knowledge, and abilities of a workforce," is an intangible, yet powerful, asset for ever organization. Very few organizations have human capital as diverse as a university's. Here I focus on just one reservoir of that copious capital - that of our teaching faculty. The skills, knowledge and abilities of the teaching faculty are remarkably diverse, but with Covid-19 we face shared threats, several of which we drew attention to in this week's news digest. In what follows I sketch out some of the near- and long-term challenges to the human capital embedded in our teaching faculty.
In the near term, we continue to face a deadly health menace - a threat to you and I, as well as to our family, friends, and colleagues. This peril will become more pronounced for colleges and universities as we, at the start of the academic year, matriculate thousands of young, relatively healthy, minimally endangered students from throughout the world. We will then stir them up in our dorms, cafeterias, and classrooms. Into those classrooms we will sprinkle faculty, many of whom, due to age, or morbidity, are far more vulnerable than most of their students. The risk to health is multiplied when students and a professor are required to spend 50-90 minutes in a poorly-ventilated classroom, likely air-conditioned with recycled air, and where mask usage is politicized or even optional. Moreover, faculty may be required, or expected, to police, or at least monitor, the in-class student behavior and perhaps even the perceived health of students.
This classroom centric approach to restarting in the fall is, according to a report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, currently the method of choice in a majority of U.S. colleges, even as scientists become more fearful that the virus might be distributed through the air by far ranging and longer lasting aerosol transmission. This forced march back to the classroom is driven largely by political and/or economic forces with its success dependent on the shaky assumption that almost all students will behave - not just in class, but in their social lives as well. They will not go to bars or fraternity basements, they will not hook-up with strangers, they will not join bull sessions in crowded dorm spaces, they will not play basketball - in other words, they will not do the things they came to college to enjoy. We have all been around university's long enough to realize the absurdity of this assumption. Further fanning our pessimism, are the widespread stories of infections amongst athletes called back early for training, spring breakers, church goers, and birthday party attendees.
The back to classroom strategy also fails to recognize the inevitable problem of students attending class and then failing to report in a timely manner their subsequent illness to the proper authorities. Assuming they report, the university then has a responsibility to notify all students in each effected classroom and to recommend/require quarantining of anyone who may have been too near the infected student. Presumably, each faculty member will then be expected to continue providing an online education for quarantined students. In a classroom of twenty, even if widely distributed, how many would return to class? Would you, if you weren't required to? As a consequence, the back to classroom strategy will likely retrograde back to online - albeit, perhaps with the instructor still having to put him or herself at risk in front of a diminished group of the more risk-taking students.
The alternative strategy, faculty and students both online, brings its own challenges: a possibly inferior product, decreased social interaction, technical problems, mental health concerns, testing challenges, and, particularly for faculty with children at home, the conflation of work and home and the negative impact on faculty research productivity.
The human capital of teaching faculty is very much at risk. Older faculty may choose to retire early; those without the protection of tenure may, in the face of declining revenues, not be rehired; newly minted PhDs will find a diminished market for their skills.
The longer-term consequences for human capital are more difficult to predict and will depend on how long we stay out of the classroom and how well both professors and students adapt to, and become accepting of, and adept at, online learning. It will also depend on what institutions are left standing when we reach the new normal.
We are in the learning industry. Transferring useful knowledge to students and certifying them is, along with knowledge creation, our raison d'être. Historically, we have relied on classroom teaching to accomplish our knowledge dissemination mission, as we relied on malls to meet our retail needs, taxies to get to and from the airport, and, bank tellers to deposit our checks. But, as with those examples, digitalization can quite quickly transform services and destroy industries. The dissemination of digital technology into the learning industry has, thus far, been slow and, to use the words of Clayton Christiansen, sustaining rather than disruptive. With the pandemic catalyst, coupled with politics, the digitalization of the academy has been considerably expedited. Our geographically fragmented and labor-intensive industry may finally be nearing the tipping point of being supplanted by a more concentrated industry structure; one that relies less on human capital and far more on disruptive organizational capital (e.g., software and databases).
------------------------------
Blake Ives
bives@mac.com------------------------------