No Compliments Here

With the holiday season well underway and the strangest year in living memory almost behind us (we got this!), I wanted to take a moment to offer my salutations to the CASL family (students, staff, faculty, alumni, and supporters) and to wish you all the best new year ever. I hope that you are feeling well and that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. The college is, fortunately, finishing the fall term strongly, with few cases of COVID impacting our community. Certainly, the continued separation and isolation that we are experiencing are taking their toll on many of us, but in the main, our community has been fortunate in avoiding the worst effects of this pandemic and many are eyeing with great eagerness the vaccines that are now within our reach. Having said that, however, now is not the time to let down our guard. As we are all too aware, this pandemic has had a devastating impact on us as a nation and as a global community. Sadly, many of us know family members and friends who have been afflicted with COVID and far too many of us know someone who has succumbed to this terrible disease. So please, please, please continue your efforts to keep yourself and others safe. As Judy Garland reminds us in her beautiful 1944 rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Someday soon we all will be together, if the Fates allow.” “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” In the Eighteenth Century it was common for people to speak (in a sadly ironic way) of receiving “Christmas Compliments” from their friends and family members during the final weeks of the calendar year in recognition of the fact that the prevalence of diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis, and colds rose dramatically during the holiday season as families and acquaintances gathered together to celebrate the season. It is my fervent hope that all of my readers and the broader CASL community are spared “Christmas Compliments” during this COVID Christmas. Please accept in their stead my wishes for the Happiest of Holidays and a Healthy 2021!

Now More Than Ever

Recently, as I was running an errand and enjoying just being able to drive someplace in my car, I happened upon an old song by the Doors, Strange Days. The song begins with a lamentation, “Strange Days have found us. Strange Days have tracked us down. They’re going to destroy our casual joys. We shall go on playing or find a new town.” Though released in 1967, the words struck me as being especially relevant to our current circumstances. We are indeed living in Strange Days! The beginning of the new 2020-2021 academic year is like nothing that any of us have ever known. Our campus is largely dormant and still. Most faculty and staff are working remotely, the University Center is closed, there are no fall athletics, and only about 8% of our classes are actually meeting on campus—mostly labs and some specific courses tied to special equipment needs. For once, parking is not a problem at the Dearborn campus! All kidding aside, this new reality, is a trying one for many. The need to learn and master new technologies, erratic and/or no access to consistent internet, a lack of direct face-to-face contact and the isolation that can accompany virtual learning, the necessity of reimagining course curriculum and laboratory components, the demands on our community members resulting from the disruptions in our childcare and k-12 environments, the financial difficulties brought on by COVID, and the worries about the pandemic and the health and well being of one’s students, family and friends, are all weighing heavily on the minds of CASL community members. At the same time, however, the promise of a new academic year and the excitement of welcoming new students into the college offer us all a much-needed distraction from the worry and uncertainty. More important still in accounting for the enthusiasm I am seeing around the college, however, is the realization that, now more than ever, the things that the college has to offer in terms of curriculum and faculty scholarship, are of critical importance. Indeed, if one hopes to understand and really address the myriad problems confronting our state and our nation, one must begin with the arts, sciences, and humane letters. It is CASL that offers students the opportunity to understand the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which racism is stitched into the very fabric of our being. Likewise, CASL courses help to explain the gender and racial determinants of health disparities and give students the chance to connect these disparities to public policy and structural economic issues. As hundreds of thousands flee their homes in the American west in advance of unprecedented fires, as the gulf coast is being hammered by hurricane after hurricane, and as local weather patterns become more extreme, courses offered in the college facilitate student understanding of environmental change and how to prevent/counter this change. And, of course, the novel coronavirus itself (and other disease) and the ways that it spreads and impacts human health, is also a core area of study in the college. These and so many other critical contemporary issues (the psychological consequences of the pandemic, the best ways to balance economic security and public health, the use of data to better understand/predict the path of the pandemic, the tools necessary to critically understand/analyze the flood of information (both valid and not) washing over us on a daily basis, etc., etc.) are all areas of study and research here in the college. The consequences of this current pandemic are profound and far reaching but the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters is very well positioned to help both our students and the world outside of our classrooms make sense of what has happened and to inform our choices regarding what course to chart going forward. It is this realization that fuels much of the enthusiasm that I am seeing this September. CASL embraces the challenge we are facing and is eager to help our students and our broader community with the myriad problems that they are confronting. Here’s hoping that the next song I hear when I am driving (if it must be from the same era) is Here Comes the Sun!

Our Position

I hope that this missive finds everyone safe and well! If you are anything like me you have grown weary of the constraints that the COVID-19 pandemic imposed upon our lives. While I appreciate spending the time near my family along with my vastly reduced commute time and not having to play parking spot roulette if I venture out for a mid-day meeting, I also find myself spending no little time worrying about my faculty and staff colleagues and about our students. I also worry about the future of higher education in the United States and about the future of institutions like the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Public regional universities are not wealthy places. They always operate close to the bone, serving the overwhelming majority of the nation’s college students. They do not possess multi-billion-dollar endowments (UM-D’s, for instance, stands at around $60,000,000) and the bulk of their operating budgets are allocated toward faculty/staff salaries and benefits and student aid/support. They tend not to generate millions of sponsored research dollars nor are they supported the way that they once were by state tax dollars; they are tuition-driven institutions. And yet, it is in these very schools that the vast majority of American college students, many of them the first in their families to ever attend college and an increasing number from underrepresented populations, study, learn, and earn their degrees. These universities are, in short, the primary driver of American social mobility and equity. The COVID pandemic, while posing but the latest challenge to these schools, may be the most deadly. Indeed, the nation is already seeing small colleges and universities shuttering their doors as well as even the nation’s best known and well-funded colleges/universities adopting severe cost-cutting measures. Higher education as we knew it, will never look the same.

While prospects for schools like ours may look ominous, UM-Dearborn is better positioned than many to not only ride out this storm but to emerge stronger. First off, campuses like ours are well acquainted with environments of scarcity and finding ways to make due with less. Indeed, recent campus initiatives around digital education, student support, and careful stewardship of scarce resources enabled a relatively smooth transition to remote learning and for the campus to quickly establish the necessary reserves to cover its immediate needs. Likewise, the lack of university housing, dining, clinical medical programs, and a big time athletic program, also positions the university well to weather this latest shock. Our history as a primarily commuter campus also benefits us and may, in fact, entice new students to study with us as they wonder about the efficacy of spending more money for a residential experience further from their homes in this uncertain time. Finally, our connection to one of the world’s great universities also stands as reminder of both the power of a Michigan degree as well as the durability of the university granting those degrees.

Don’t get me wrong, the immediate future is filled with a great many challenges for both the university and the college but I firmly believe that if any regional public university can survive this storm, this one can. Will it look the same as it did back in March of this year? Undoubtedly not. Still, it will continue to do what it has done throughout its history; provide access to the very best public education available to a population that deserves exactly that. There is lots of work ahead and I look forward to sharing our progress with you as the university navigates this most challenging of times.

What's Old is New

As the aggressive spread of COVID-19 prompts detailed planning across our campus and across the country writ large, I have been struck by much of the emerging rhetoric connected to border control and the foreign origins of this threat (while not inaccurate) and its disturbing parallel with the xenophobic and nativist bombast that was commonplace in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. The American response to the evolving threat posed by COVID-19 (largely focused on travel restrictions aimed at foreign nations) and the resort to the old trope of associating disease and “foreignness” (the title “Wuhan” Coronavirus is widely used, for instance) should not surprise anyone. Indeed, recent national debates over the desirability of immigration (especially when it originates in non-European nations) are charged with claims that, “the race which has made our country great will pass away” and that our nation is faced with an, “invading hostile army” of “criminal immigrants” that are “mentally or physically defective” and all but ensured that such a response would emerge.

While the circumstances surrounding this recent association of foreigners and danger are new, the rhetoric itself (sadly) is deeply ingrained in the nation’s history. From Ben Franklin’s characterization of Pennsylvania Germans as “stupid” and “swarthy” to Prescott Hall’s (a founder of the Anti-Immigration League) early 20th century lamentations that, “You cannot make bad stock into good by changing its meridian, any more than you can turn a cart horse into a hunter by putting it into a fine stable, or make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks,” to the aforementioned comments of our current president, the stereotype of an immigrant horde imperiling the United States has been a constant and is one that jeopardizes the very values that this nation was founded upon.

If my experience on this campus has taught me anything, it is that a diverse and inclusive community is a far stronger one than one that is homogeneous and exclusive. I am encouraged by the university’s thoughtful planning and embrace of this ideal and encourage all of us not to forget the lessons of history and/or to allow ourselves to be swayed by the nativist thinking that has so long defined our nation’s history and that is now re-emerging during this time of stress.