A Pandemic Lesson for Higher Education Administration: Promoting Inclusive Education

by Richard Ashford and Shampa Biswas

When institutions of higher education first confronted the COVID-19 pandemic, they were faced with a series of questions with which they had to grapple on very quick notice. For example, which, if any, students should be permitted to stay in residence with the transition to online teaching? How should one accommodate the needs of international students from varying backgrounds facing different kinds of travel restrictions and conditions of pandemic spread and healthcare infrastructures in their home countries? How should institutions attend to the needs of students that depend on college employment as a source of income? Should institutions prioritize asynchronous or synchronous online learning? Many of these questions were settled after extensive discussions, but often without a firm decision-making guiding principle.

A Decision-Making Principle

We offer the following principle as a way to ground institutional decision-making during crises, using a debate from the pandemic to illustrate its significance: Begin with, and center, the needs and experiences of those students who are most vulnerable, most precarious, and with access to the fewest resources. While vulnerability and precarity are always context-specific, they are conditions that most often apply to students who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,  from historically discriminated racial minority groups, and/or face serious disabilities. We believe that a lot of difficult decisions that institutions of higher education have grappled with during the pandemic, but also in more “normal” times, could be addressed more clearly and quickly by embracing this foundational principle.

Pandemic Grading

Let us use an example. A debate emerged among educators during Spring 2020 about whether or not to change existing grading practices to take stock of the unfolding condition. Institutions that embraced change adopted one of two models – either expanding the choice to students to take their classes as “pass/fail” (Grinnell College) instead of a regular grading scale or mandating that all courses be marked on a “pass/fail” basis (Smith College). There were some minor variations on these two models. All of them raised critical and vexing issues that are not easily resolved.

Grading, as most faculty already know, is an imprecise, imperfect metric to gauge the academic performance of students. It is a blunt assessment tool that misses much of the nuance, the struggles, and the labor that shape the intellectual journey of students. We also know that students begin this journey from profoundly unequal places, and all the support services institutions provide to mitigate the disadvantages that students from poorer backgrounds and the biases that students from many minority groups face are inadequate to close the huge “achievement gaps” in our societies. Achievement gaps are the statistically significant and temporally persistent disparities in academic achievement among students from different racial, gender, or socioeconomic groups. Faculty may work hard to make grades as “objective” as possible, but we know that the ordinal scales of our simple grading rubrics reflect all the disadvantages and prejudices that many of our students from disadvantaged groups face.

This disparity in grading systems is always the case, but the conditions of the pandemic put this reality into stark relief, perhaps even providing us an opportunity to rethink the reliance on grades as a metric of meritocracy. As colleges and institutions went online in the middle of the semester with little preparation for this enormous transition, one can imagine what this meant for our students, now spread out in locations all around the world, trying to engage with their courses in the middle of an existential crisis.

Who was likely to move up our ordinal scales, or choose the ordinal scale over the pass/fail option, if given the choice? Was it the student who lived in a cramped house that offered little opportunity for either social distancing or online learning, in a poor neighborhood in Chicago or a dense neighborhood in Dhaka, or the student with a room of her own in an affluent suburb of Seattle? Was it the student with a poor wifi connection or limited data on a phone, or one with easy and fluid access to the internet on a well-functioning device? Was it the student who had to take on childcare and sick care responsibilities in a thinly-stretched family struggling with healthcare costs, or the student with adequate access to medical care and more resources for a nutritious recovery, if ill? It may be the case that all students were confronting the question of their embodied fragility in these unusual times, but the terms of that confrontation were not equitably distributed across class, race, and nationality.

Institutions that value in-person instruction, and especially residential institutions, strive to create learning environments that can level the playing field. Frequently they fail, but they try. But every inequity that faces our students in more “normal” times were severely exacerbated during the pandemic pivot to online learning. Centering the needs of the most vulnerable, most precarious, and under-resourced students means realizing that a grading system that is imperfect in the best of circumstances will only further disadvantage the students who need support for academic success the most in a moment of crisis. Choice is always a matter of privilege, but the pandemic exposed the fiction of inclusion that choice suggests. If we adhere to the principle enunciated above, a mandatory rather than a choice-centered “pass/fail” system is a more responsible way to level the playing field.

Implications for the Future of Higher Education

This is not an argument for diminishing the quality of educational offerings, whose value and worth are even more necessary in a moment of crisis when the impulse is to foreclose critical inquiry, debate and dissension, informed creativity, and intellectual rigor in the name of other values. Health, well-being, and community are some of these other values, and while their importance cannot be undervalued, they can and should stand on par with the value of critical thinking, even during a pandemic. But it is a reminder that academic rigor is best pursued when we can equalize the terrain of learning opportunities for all our students, and that process will need to be adjusted as circumstances change. This applies not just to grading, which was an example used simply for illustrative purposes, but also all the pedagogic and academic support practices that drive the delivery of education.

Higher education faces many challenges in the future. The affordability of higher education, the need for institutions of higher education to adjust to the decline in the number of American high school graduates seeking a college education (the so-called “demographic cliff”), the uncertain future of the pandemic, the changing demographic composition of college students toward more racial and socioeconomic diversity, and the racial reckoning that has only just begun in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd murder will all pose serious questions with which higher education administrators will need to grapple as they consider how to create an inclusive educational environment that can serve all students in equitable ways. Using the needs of the most vulnerable and precarious as our guiding post will help us weather these storms in ways that help keep our sights on what we do best as educators. 

About the Writers

Shampa Biswas is Judge & Mrs. Timothy A. Paul Chair of Political Science and Professor of Politics at Whitman College. She currently serves as the Chair of the Division of Social Sciences. Her research and teaching interests are in the area of postcolonial theory and international relations. She has also published multiple essays on higher education.

A Senior Research Associate at Whitman College, Richard Ashford is an educational researcher and practitioner who has worked in the development field for several decades. Issues of equity and inclusion have remained part of his work and research during this time.