Architecture Schools and their Role as COVID-19 Transforms Higher Education
Michael Monti, ACSA, & Kenneth Schwartz, Tulane School of Architecture
May 7, 2020
Over the past two months most faculty have been forced to move their teaching online as campuses closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic. At many schools the disruption led directly into the harried weeks that end the semester, adding stress to everyone involved. Many are now focusing attention beyond the immediacy of the current academic term. The picture for higher education is daunting, especially when considered alongside other projections for the pandemic, such as Tomas Pueyo’s article “The Hammer and the Dance,” (March 19, 2020) which argues for immediate action to curb transmission of the virus and projects a future in which many conditions must change to prevent reoccurrence of a pandemic.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s April 18 Weekly Briefing newsletter, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez asked:
When will things go back to normal? Never. The fall semester could take shape in so many different ways. Colleges could partner with other institutions, keep courses entirely online, have students come to campus less often, and meet in smaller groups. Or colleges could push the fall semester to start in the spring of 2021. Whatever option an institution takes, it must also consider the transformed landscape of a post-pandemic world. State-budget cuts could force public colleges to scale back their course offerings. And who knows what accreditors and the federal government will let fly in the fall? The only certainty is that college administrators only have a few weeks left to make their decisions.
The reactions were already emerging. The previous day the University of Arizona announced furloughs and salary reductions of between 5% and 20% for all faculty and staff. The following week Cal State Fullerton announced it will begin the fall academic term online rather than in person. By contrast, just in the last week a number of schools announced their plans to return students to campuses.
There are already many other indications that the financial impacts on universities will be profound and unprecedented. Although states have reduced support for higher education and private institutions have reined in budgets many times, these have been minor in comparison with immediate reductions that have been announced and even more as institutions head into the next academic year. Fueling a good deal of the anxiety and playing into scenario planning is the uncertainties of student decisions about their enrollment in the near future.
If all instruction is online in the fall, will universities reduce their tuition rates? Students are already organizing against paying the same tuition for remote learning. Will class sizes increase to take advantage of the economy of scale that is possible with online instruction? Will more institutions furlough staff, cut salaries, or eliminate faculty and staff positions? Will course delivery be partially or fully outsourced to commercial entities (for-profit and nonprofit businesses) that can provide content?
Architecture schools are particularly vulnerable. These programs require significant space, equipment, digital resources, and more. Student-to-faculty ratios are often significantly lower than other disciplines within their university setting, and programs are often “unprofitable” compared with other majors on campus.
Pueyo’s article describes the “hammer” as strict measures to curb exponential transmission of the virus and the “dance” as the period in which societies work to contain the virus until a vaccine is widely available. If closing campuses were a specific example of “the hammer” deployed by universities in March, the next set of difficult decisions during “the dance” will have major implications for faculty, staff, and students.
In response to this uncertainty and the disconcerting prospects for the future of higher education, we can remind ourselves that design is crucial to “the dance.” Architecture and design schools, and the graduates we prepare, can play a central role in a post-pandemic world. As the public increasingly realizes the fragility and inequities of our current condition as a society, building a healthier and more resilient future will be even more obvious and important. Creative problem solving that draws deeply from architecture’s basis as a social art could combine with the field of public health and concerns for the local and global environmental condition more fully, to advance a more integrated, cross-disciplinary approach for solving systemic problems.
Yet the opportunity is only best realized with changes. The traditional model for the design studio premised on creating controlled conditions where students can mine creativity without distraction from the outside world is an example of an area that should be challenged given the urgency of environmental, social, and indeed health issues confronting society. Fortunately, many architecture schools are already doing this in various ways with design/build, community engagement initiatives, research studios and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Some justifications for such studios center on the way they present real-world projects while giving students direct experience with clients and colleagues from other disciplines. These progressive and creative examples model professional practice in some ways, and they demonstrate the relevance of architecture as a socially engaged practice.
How do we go further?
A post-pandemic world is an opportunity to expressly remake higher education to apply itself to the problems of society. Problem-based learning, which has roots in John Dewey’s writing, is familiar in architecture where faculty can create design projects not around a building type or specific program but around issues facing clients, whether the client is a business or a community support organization.
A related area of transformative action through design involves ways to rethink the campus in an era of social distancing. Does the campus (or the architecture building) serve a different purpose in an era of social distancing? In architecture, if we are becoming comfortable with the design studio being distributed away from the architecture building, can we do something more than “studio from home”? Instead, should we think more broadly about studio in the field? With traditional campus life and instruction operating in a relatively dense environment, how should the university campus evolve to address the best ways to be nimble or flexible when bringing students, faculty, and staff together (when it is safe) while allowing dispersal and transition to on-line delivery when disease or other natural disasters occur? What would alternatives look like for both physical and systems design beyond a reactive approach to crises while supporting new models of faculty and student engagement and instruction?
As noted earlier, amid these speculations, we should not ignore the momentous challenges that architecture programs will face given the high cost of delivering a traditional educational experience in our field in terms of space, personnel, and operations. These are certainly occupying a great deal of attention among deans, chairs, and university leaders at the moment. While faculty, students, alumni, and professionals in the field can and will contribute creative solutions, the challenges for higher education and architectural education are likely to be greater than our field has ever experienced. It is our hope that educators, students, and researchers in the design fields will collaborate within and beyond their disciplines in responding to the current crisis.
