June Research Update

Amici et Amicae!

It is now July!

Looking back, June felt short and for a number of reasons was somewhat less productive than could have been hoped, but there is some progress to report.  I'm going to give my standard updates on what I've been doing and then chat a bit about how universities are preparing (or not preparing) for teaching in the fall.

On to the Updates!

Finishing the Helm's Deep series ate up a good chunk of the month.  It's easily my longest series and each post runs around 10,000 words.  The response to it was very positive, but I have to admit that it was probably too ambitious in scope given what else I needed to be doing.

That said, polish and revisions advance on Article 2.  After an initial copy-edit sweep, I sent it to a pair of close colleagues who provided some useful feedback for refining some of the writing (and catching some of the typos!).  A larger task was cutting it back to length; the target journal has a 15,000 word limit (including footnotes and bibliography) and the first draft was a hair over 17,000.  I tell my students to 'write long and cut short' meaning that it is better to overwrite a prompt and then cut down to the required length than to try to hit that length perfectly on the first draft.  I practice what I preach, but the 'cutting short' process took some time and involving reworking one section quite substantially.

I am still stuck on a handful of footnotes where I cannot add page numbers to citations until the library reopens.  The amount of things that have been made available digitally recently is truly impressive, but it's not everything.  In the meantime, I'm bouncing the revised draft off of a few friendly colleagues at other institutions who specialize in or near the the topic (all do the Roman Army or the archaeology of Roman weapons to some extent).  Their feedback, which should come some time in July, ought to provide the grounds for a last set of revisions before ::deep breath: submission for peer review.

That's not all I've been doing, of course.  In addition to the blog, I've also been preparing a paper for a panel some friends and I hope to hold through the Texas National Security Review; more information on that as I have it.  I also have a traditional media essay (like the previous Foreign Policy piece) in the queue, awaiting the greenlight to appear.

I'm also gearing up to teach my course at NCState in the fall.  I made the decision early to run it entirely online and - for reasons that we'll discuss - that seems to me to have been quite a good call.

Talking about Reopening Colleges

And that transitions pretty well into this topic: how universities and colleges in the USA are preparing for the fall semester.  For those of you who follow academic twitter more broadly (or are in higher education) you are doubtless already aware of this.

The major thing that you want to understand are the major sources of funding for most universities in the United States.  Unlike in, say, Europe, where most universities are government funded (a model, I should note, that has its limitations and benefits; I am actually not convinced the European model of higher education is actually *better*, just *different*), in the United States, nearly all universities, even public ones, have a number of funding streams.  We'll take a typical Big Public University (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flagship_universities_in_the_United_States ) as an example.

I promise this gets back to COVID-19 in a second.

So, as the name implies, a Public university gets a big chunk of funding from the state (state in the US sense, so like, a chunk of funding from North Carolina) that it is in.  That chunk is used in part to subsidize the tuition of students from that state, with the understood public purpose of making higher education more available to less wealthy residents.  That means that, by and large, in-state students attend these big universities for less than it costs to teach them, with the state making up the difference.  That money is then supplemented with a number of federal funding streams (research grants, pell grants, etc), but the state chunk is bigger than the federal chunk.

The other big chunk is tuition (and fees, but I'll treat them together), but not everyone pays the same freight!  As noted, in-state students pay substantially lower tuition.  So out-of-state students and international students make up the difference and are charged substantially higher tuition bills.  Finally, most universities have an endowment - that is a chunk of investments they've been given which throw off money via interest, etc.  For most public colleges, that endowment is quite small, but for the big, prestigious private schools (Harvard, Yale, etc) it is often *massive* and effectively replaced the 'state funding' chunk.

So here's the problem you have if you are a university administrator: all of your funding streams have collapsed at once.  State governments, trying to support essential operations, testing and so on during the pandemic are badly short on funds.  Those issues will be put off until those states begin making budgets for 2021-2022, but you *know* that there is a state-funding-apocalypse in the offing, even if it isn't here yet.

At the same time, the possibility of another all-online semester threatens to cause enrollments to decline, which means tuition declines.  The university has big fixed costs - big expensive buildings, academics you don't want to fire, and so on.  A 10% drop in enrollment is a *catastrophe.*  And you can't dip into your endowment, because the economy is frozen up; selling off the assets now would mean locking in huge losses.

Compounding the problem, travel restrictions means that making up funding gap with out-of-state students is a lot harder.  And further compounding *that,* straight up travel *bans* have placed many of those juicy international students entirely out of reach.  So the highest paying groups of students aren't available to make up the shortfall.  *And,* with an administration generally hostile to higher education, there is no hope of the Department of Education or the federal government more generally riding over the hill to save the day.

So if you are a university administrator, you are facing a massive financial catastrophe - make no mistake, universities are going to *close* as a result of this.  Probably not the big ones you've heard of, but smaller schools are just going to fade away out there.  For the bigger schools, the question is getting through to the other side of the pandemic (and the state-budget-crisis) in one piece, without having to disband departments, fire tenured faculty, and so on.

To do that, enrollments must *must* remain normal.  Remember, the university mostly has fixed costs - workers who are hard to fire (and hard to rehire again later), buildings and facilities that are expensive.  UNC Chapel Hill has about 30k students normally and about 12,000 faculty and staff, more than 700 acres of campus.  It's a big bill to pay.

So to the administrator, who is facing the budget sheet, the solution - the only solution - is clear: the students need to show up and they need to pay their on-campus-fees (especially dorm fees, 'room and board' money - because the dorms have to be maintained whether anyone lives there or not!).  And they are all making the same calculation: only the promise of a significant number of in-person, face-to-face classes can get that to happen.  Since that's the only option that doesn't involve financial catastrophe, the question is just "making that work."

But for the *faculty* the situation looks different: the administrators are effectively asking teachers to walk into a hurricane.  Even with precautions, all of the modeling suggests that campus outbreaks aren't a question of 'if' but 'when.'  Compounding that, many professors are in at-risk groups, or have partners who are.  I have colleagues who have turned down jobs because they assessed (correctly, I think) that the risk of getting themselves or their partners (who are immuno-compromised due to health issues) killed was too high.

Moreover, even if COVID infections aren't fatal, they're still debilitating.  I think many people are still laboring under the assumption that getting COVID and having a 'mild' case is like a nasty cold, but it's not.  It takes people out for *weeks*, and can be absolutely debilitating, even when it doesn't require hospitalization.  I've chatted with a few people who got hit by it, 'mild' cases that didn't require medical treatment, and it made working functionally impossible.  That's a risk for teachers - and students!  

Finally, there's the complication of being potentially asked to go all-online midstream again.  Many academics - fairly or otherwise - suspect that the administration plans to do this the moment they've secured everyone's tuition and fees (and thus saved the university from financial oblivion), but simply can't say so outloud (which means they can't say so to the faculty).  I don't know that this is true, but anyone teaching face-to-face needs to already have a contingency plan to teach online.  Having done both, that's basically demanding everyone to design and plan two completely different courses.

It's a mess and there is no easy 'fix' because that budget crunch is *real.*  In an ideal world, this is precisely the sort of crisis the Federal government would be supposed to deal with, but that's not happening, so we're left to muddle through.  And I have no doubt we will muddle through, but higher education is going to have rough sailing for the next few years as a result.

For my part, the disruption right now is minimal.  I was asked if I would be willing to teach face-to-face instead of all-online and I said no and my department chair supported that decision.  But it's clear that the upper-level university administration basically everywhere is scrambling to try to find people to teach face-to-face and that the faculty basically everywhere is incensed by it.

In the meantime, as my article is now in the revise-and-polish stage, I'm turning to finishing course-design for my class in the fall, working on this panel paper for TNSR and finally, at long last, beginning the bookification process of the dissertation in earnest.  More on that last project, I hope, in future months!