Post-Pandemic Strategic Planning: Challenges and Approaches: Report of a CNI Executive Roundtable

Post-Pandemic Strategic Planning: Challenges and Approaches
Report of a CNI Executive Roundtable
Held March 2021; Published April 2021

14 page PDF

https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/CNI-Post-Pandemic-Planning-ER-Report-s21-Public-FINAL.pdf

Introduction

Representatives from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) member
organizations gathered online in spring 2021 to discuss institutional post-pandemic
strategies and planning. Three convenings of Executive Roundtable discussions, each
with different participants, took place as part of CNI’s Spring 2021 Virtual Membership
Meeting. Higher education members represented institutions from across the United
States and Canada, including public and private colleges and universities of varying
sizes (from small, private, liberal arts colleges to large, public, research universities).
Foundations, arts and library organizations, and funding entities also took part in the
discussions. Senior library administrators, chief information and research officers, and
faculty deans, among others, joined the conversations.
It is important to note that institutions are approaching the 2021-22 academic year from
wide-ranging points of departure. Some institutions never shut down or they closed
only briefly at the beginning of the crisis; teaching and learning at other schools have
been almost entirely remote since spring 2020 and many institutions have operated
somewhere between the two extremes. Institutions have taken a great variety of
approaches in terms of testing for and managing COVID infections. In our
conversations with member institutions, we noticed that there is a strong bias to
generalize from local experience to assumptions about patterns in higher education
broadly and we’d caution against doing so. The national picture is complex and diverse.
In the US, there is a broad assumption that students and faculty will be back on campus
in fall 2021 and that the vast majority of the campus community will be vaccinated;
many institutions are currently trying to navigate the challenges of requiring
vaccinations for students and perhaps faculty and staff. A vaccine requirement is
politically tricky (and has already been prohibited by law in some states), and it is
perhaps legally uncertain as well since the vaccines are currently authorized under a
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA), rather than
having undergone the more standard approval process. Institutions are also tracking
many potential wildcards: vaccination rates and projections (which also implicate
vaccine hesitancy), COVID-19 virus variants that may reduce vaccine effectiveness, the
possible need for additional vaccine boosters in the fall, overall infection rates and state
and county public health directives, enrollment rates and student preferences and
expectations about in-person vs. remote instruction, limitations on occupancy of
classroom and other spaces, and many more. There is a great deal of uncertainty in the
planning for the fall, almost certainly a bit more than US higher education institutions
are projecting in many of their current public pronouncements.
CNI Report: Post-Pandemic Strategic Planning
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The situation in the US is different from Canada, where vaccine rollout has been slower,
though, as with the US, there are enormous regional differences within Canada. Very
broadly speaking, it seems that in-person reopening in Canada will lag about a semester
behind the US, with very substantial remote instruction still taking place in Canadian
institutions in fall 2021. While several Canadian member institutions participated in the
discussions, we feel we have a more in-depth understanding of the US situation.
Despite having endured a very bad year, there is a certain sense of restrained optimism.
The pandemic and the response to it have brought forward opportunities historically
viewed as impossible, or, at best, far in the future, particularly in areas related to
instruction. Many participants in the roundtables were eager to engage these
opportunities. Furthermore, the crisis highlighted just how communications-challenged
organizations had been. Students, faculty and staff have demanded clear, timely
information and organizations have been under enormous pressure to deliver. There
will likely be an expectation that newly established channels remain open, if not further
expanded.
Budget uncertainties were an important factor in the discussions. Some organizations
were already experiencing financial stress which had led to institution-wide cuts prior
to the pandemic; many faced additional decreases of one sort or another once the crisis
hit. We heard reports of general institution-wide budget reductions from about 5% to
upwards of 30% over the course of three years. Funding fluctuations were also reported
at department and unit levels; here again, figures and impact vary widely. Several
libraries reported cuts to personnel and operating costs, but not to collections. Some
reported stable budgets; a number reported near-term surpluses during the past year of
closures, but are unclear what the future holds. Uncertainty reigns. We do not feel we
have a clear picture of the budgetary landscape; part of this depends on enrollments for
2021-22 and, particularly for public institutions, another part depends on federal
recovery legislation and state legislative decisions. At the same time, we did not come
away with the sense that budgetary constraints and cuts were the primary driving force
shaping planning for 2021-22 and beyond.
With this backdrop of challenges and uncertainties, participants shared how their
experiences of the past year are informing their planning for the months ahead. These
roundtables organically focused largely on instruction (and particularly undergraduate
instruction) and campus operations, and less on the research enterprise. This may itself
offer some insight into current institutional priorities.
Since April 2020, research has been slowly but systematically reopening, though with
many limitations: face-to-face fieldwork and lab occupancy levels are constrained, for
example. We will likely see slow and steady progress in this area; CNI has been
tracking developments related to the research enterprise specifically since spring 2020
and plans to revisit the question of research continuity, reopening and resilience in June
2021 with a series of additional roundtables focusing on those issues.”