Friday Focus: It is not about COVID
July 30, 2021
— by Dan White, chancellor
Let me start by saying that I am not writing about COVID. This is not about COVID. Not COVID. OK, that said, let’s talk a little about COVID. This has been a challenging year and one that has been dynamic, unpredictable and has forced us to make hard choices. Choices where the lesser of two evils was our top pick. It has been a year of separation. Physically and emotionally.
As a case in point, I sent out a COVID message a couple Tuesdays ago and asked for your opinions about requiring vaccinations for different sectors of the university, such as residential students. The results were roughly 50/50, inclusive of the “yes buts” and “no buts.” In statistics we talk about the central tendency of data. To digress just a little, if the results of an experiment or a survey have a strong central tendency, people pretty much agree. If the results do not have a strong central tendency, the answers are all over the place.
When I asked about vaccination, the answers were all over the place. In fact, the edges were very far apart. As a leader and a manager, the central tendency of our common understanding, opinion, feelings or perspectives makes a ton of difference. The “average” answer is not very satisfying if there is almost no agreement. In fact, the average really is just a statistical representation of an outcome that no one wants.
One of the things I found in this exercise came in the comments section. And that section revealed a level of distrust, mistrust or no trust. I think these are all different but I am no philosopher. The nut of it was that without proof, we cannot trust each other to tell the truth. This came in the form of our face covering policy as it relates to vaccination and proof thereof. But this is not about COVID.
I found myself asking why so little trust? We have consequences for breaking university policy up to and including termination for employees, suspension or expulsion for students, and trespass for visitors. It says so in the face covering policy. So why the lack of trust? That is what this Friday Focus is about. Trust (not COVID). Well, OK, I might postulate that the lack of trust is because of a year of separation, which, well, is because of COVID.
In a conversation I had earlier this week I brought this issue up and explained that we do not allow guns in our buildings. Yet we have no metal detectors or other devices to prove that you are not carrying a dangerous weapon in our facilities. No one has raised concern that violation of this policy is rampant and an imminent threat to our common well-being. Furthermore, I trust every person who gets behind the wheel of a car to not drive headlong into me. If I didn’t have that trust, how I could I even leave the house? My colleague’s response was that that is totally different. There are laws about driving without a license; you have to take a test to get a driver’s license. While that is all true, it is not different at all. When someone gets behind the wheel of a car they pose an imminent threat to our common well being unless they follow the laws, just like our policies, which for the most part, they do. No one proves to anyone anything before they jump in a car and turn the key. There are poor judgments and accidents for sure. But the vast majority of people follow the rules.
What has struck me is this historic opportunity for us to build trust. Build trust by extending it. I get up and come to work every day trusting that I will get here safely, that people, all of them, will protect my safety as I will protect theirs. That people will follow the policies of our university that are designed to protect them and their colleagues.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t reply to phishing emails, I lock my car, and before I cross the street I look left, right, and then left again. I am a double checker. But as a university, we have an essential, globally important role to play. UAF is indispensable to the thousands of students who receive our world-class education. We are a university with more than 2,500 employees who are working towards the single mission of providing teaching, research and service to those who seek it.
Our system of operation is built on trust. Education itself is built on trust. I trusted every student in my classes to do their own homework and to complete their own tests. UAF is the trusted authority in areas such as One Health, environmental change, domain awareness and microgrid technology. We are leaders in Alaska Native and Indigenous studies and we are sought out from around the world for our Arctic biology and climate downscaling skills. People trust the scientific papers we write and use them to make life-changing decisions. We are trusted by universities and agencies around the world to run the Poker Flat Research Range, the R/V Sikuliaq, Toolik Field Station, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program and more. We are trusted by close to 8,000 students and their families. We are trusted. We are built on trust. If we can’t extend trust, how can we expect it? Let’s extend each other the trust that is extended to us. I’ll be thanking you for that.
And thanks for choosing UAF.
Still not (really) about COVID.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week. On occasion, a guest writer is invited to contribute a column.