New choices
April 29, 2021
It’s been a year of new constraints. What we must wear. How we cannot gather. What we may not risk.And now this! “If you are fully vaccinated you can start doing many things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”
Liberating. And — to be honest — also a bit discomfiting.
I haven’t yet brought myself to walking maskless outside on campus, despite being convinced by the evidence.
But what comes next won’t merely involve restarting what we stopped.
We’ll emerge from the pandemic — stepwise, somewhat awkwardly — to face new choices.
Should we have this conversation in person, by phone, or over Zoom? What about office hours? When should we travel to meet together? Where should I work today? Which newly acquired pedagogical tools and techniques are worth retaining – and under which circumstances? Which new student requests should we accommodate?
After a year of uncertainty and constraints, in other words, we face a future of uncertainty and new choices.
Not all the answers will be obvious. And we won’t all agree.
Here’s a suggestion: before we start offering new answers, let’s pause to be intentional. Let's think together about how we will evaluate our new choices – big and small, individual and collective. How will we balance trade-offs? How might we choose among different good options?
Ignatius Loyola would recognize such questions, which he considered in the Spiritual Exercises.
These considerations will send us back to our common mission and commitments. Which is where we will begin, when our Academic Leadership Group reflects on these questions during our May 13 retreat (to be held virtually, if you were wondering).
