COVID-19 First-Person Perspective: Dean Rich Leonard, Campbell
Candidly, the past six months have been the most difficult of my professional life. The nation is polarized, the pandemic is relentless, and systemic racism is rightfully coming under attack.
In mid-March, I oversaw moving an in-seat curriculum with a fabulous teaching faculty, who had little use for distance education, onto a virtual platform in 72 hours. Graduation was cancelled, which I replaced with 75 individual ceremonies, one student and family at a time. The Floyd murder generated peaceful protests that went violent. My innocent statement that our gorgeous law school was not damaged in the riots led to bitter complaints that I cared more about a building than Black lives. When I did issue my statement, alumni accused me of being an apologist for looters.
Whether the North Carolina bar exam could be given safely was a guerilla war. I took the view that it could. Many of my students are only truly in the job market when they have a law license, and are completely out of energy and resources by late July. I did not see that things would get better if we just postponed it. However, a loud and vehement minority of my students and faculty disagreed, and they made themselves heard. Luckily, it was given without incident and our pass rate was the highest since 2012.
I do not believe virtual instruction substitutes for in-seat teaching, particularly in the first year. We spent all summer, under the leadership of Deans Zeke Bridges and Dan Tilly, meticulously planning how to return to an in-person environment, but with options in every class for virtual attendance. It required leasing additional classroom space at the Episcopal Church next door to reduce the load on our building and adhering to spacing and room capacity requirements. My faculty have learned to teach in masks behind plexiglass shields, instructing simultaneously students in person and others virtual using multiple monitors. The podium looks more like the cockpit of a jet than a teaching platform.
With three weeks of class to go in the semester, it has largely worked. My terrific dean of students, Evin Grant, uses our mandatory notification rules and daily health checks to move students between in-seat and virtual platforms as quarantining and contact tracing require. Our number of active cases has been minimal. We are on course to safely leave the building at Thanksgiving (with the exception of first-year exams) and return in mid-January. But, much like the novel coronavirus itself, every day presents a set of new issues with which deans have never had to deal.
J. Rich Leonard serves as Dean of Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law.