DEAN'S POSTSCRIPT LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD — SENSE-MAKING IN TURBULENT TIMES BY SCOTT FRITZEN Looking back over my first nine months as Dean at CIS, it is tempting to try to impose an order on my own, and the college’s, experience that isn’t necessarily there. Perhaps after the many months of slow-moving crisis we have lived through, we will all have this need, amid much unprocessed suffering, dislocation and general bewilderment. While any “sense-making” will necessarily be provisional and personal, allow me to share three insights that I take away from the stories I have read in this year’s edition of the Compass, and from our evolving context. First, the reality of global interdependence — taught every day in our seminars — has been brought powerfully home to us all. Through the pandemic — yes — but also in countless other ways: the regulatory environment that has affected international students; the painful confrontations with institutional racism that have defined these months; the accumulated political and economic dysfunctions we have witnessed . . . While such systemic stresses have been dramatic, they have taken their toll on us as individuals too, in ways both shared and particular. Looking around me, I can agree with Paul Simon (in “An American Tune”) that “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.”
A second insight is that the people of CIS have been resilient and resourceful through this turmoil. You can see this in some extraordinary achievements recounted in this Compass. Evacuating study abroad students. Adapting to online teaching and advising. Helping international students through regulatory mazes. And for the entire college, adapting so positively and productively (I must honestly say) to a whole new modality and rhythm of work, with a new dean (the fourth within two years), in the blur of zoom-land — while so many dealt with weighty personal and family challenges and misfortunes, sometimes in silence. The third insight is more forward-looking. As I write in April 2021, many of us in the U.S. are beginning to enjoy the first weeks of certain regained liberties post-vaccination. Yet is clear there is no “going back home” for us collectively. The virus in its new variants is presently burning uncontrollably through India and Brazil, among other places, causing unfathomable suffering. And the obscene inequities surrounding vaccine distribution globally will lock in this global threat for years longer than it otherwise would. In looking at the impact of the pandemic on international education (and much else), we must prepare for a long tail of pandemic-related impacts and contingencies.
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