Graduating from “Wrong-Call College”

Four years ago this month, I made a decision that proved not to have been the right one. It related to COVID-19’s onset and my family. Since that time, I have made many mistakes like that one and have learned a lot. As we all prepare to graduate from COVID College — four years of learning that which we didn’t want to know — these moments beg for reflection and insist we transform accrued experiences into knowledge and wisdom.

Our family needed a vacation in March of 2020. A lot of families need vacations, which are a tremendous privilege, I know. Our specific reasons related in large part to my job. I’d spent the previous three years “deaning” students and faculty in two locations as the school I have the honor to lead was gradually relocating from Greater Boston to New Haven, CT. Two of those years, I commuted weekly. The third involved less travel, but students finishing their degrees through our Boston consortium required a great deal of my time and attention.

All the while, my husband and daughter settled into a new school. I was installed as our newly relocated institution’s head in the fall of 2019, and our family never caught a break. A minute after my inauguration, I caught something else: a respiratory illness (not COVID… probably?) that had me in and out of doctor’s offices all fall and winter looking for relief. Spring Break 2020 was going to have to work hard to provide us with fun, togetherness, and rest, and I was loath to give it up.

So is it any wonder that I watched the news about an illness spreading around the world with dread? That I ignored my colleague, whose husband works for the CDC, when she said we’d be smart to cancel our trip? That I convened a conference call (remember those?) of my college besties to get their advice, and then only listened to those who said, “Screw it! Go!” To the Dominican Republic, indeed, we went. And in retrospect, that was a mistake.

We arrived at the resort and learned the news that cases of COVID-19 had been reported within the same day in the DR. That the resort seemed relatively empty during spring break attested to the fact that many families had made calls different from ours. The restaurants required a sacramental anointing of hand sanitizer when we made our way inside each of them. The setting was beautiful, but the ironies overlain on the beauty by vigilance and fear gave the setting a certain glare that I remember now as slightly sinister.

After one day, my phone started ringing. A group of students from my school, along with their chaplain, were on a travel seminar to the US-Mexico border to learn about our partner churches’ ministries for migrants. They were getting olly-olly-in-come-free messages from our university — “get back to New Haven, hasta pronto,” with love from Peter Salovey — and weren’t sure if they should heed them.

I had gotten the same message. It was, in fact, waiting in my email inbox when our plane touched down in the DR. But since I was on vacation rather than on a school-sponsored trip, I convinced myself the admonition didn’t apply to me. Such was my desire to show my family a good time after years of, first, dragging them to a new city, and then proceeding to work my tail off for lots of people who were not them.

The third day of our trip, my daughter and I decided to lay out in the sun near the beach and get a tan. Although we had 100 SPF sunscreen on, the wind concealed how hotly the sun was bearing down, and we both got sunburns to end all sunburns. I still have evidence of it on my skin now. We woke up the next day miserable: she and I both because of the physical pain of a burn, and I because the pandemic news was getting worse and worse and worse. We were going to have to go home.

We paid through the nose to change our flights and were out that same afternoon. I cried actual tears when checking out of our resort. The staff was very nice about it. When we landed at JFK that evening, we learned that, just 30 minutes earlier, then-President Trump had ordered all travelers in Europe to come home because he was going to close borders. Had we waited another day, we’d have been trapped in an hours-long, infection-ridden throng. Even that night, our cab had to drive all the way around New Rochelle, which was entirely closed to traffic in or out, with Patient Zero dying somewhere inside the perimeter. “Surreal” doesn’t capture it.

After returning home, our family came down with a mild fever and GI symptoms, along with stuffy noses. Since we didn’t have coughs and weren’t that sick, it never occurred to us we had COVID, but in retrospect, we probably did. We went into lockdown with the rest of the world and didn’t come out for months and months. Fast forward four years. What have we learned, and how have we been changed?

• We should not have gone on that trip.
• I should have recognized the extent to which my feelings of guilt about not being the perfect picture of mother- and spouse-hood — 100% committed to family, forsaking all others — were causing me to skew my analysis of information coming my way.
• Finally — and here’s the one I can take to the bank — I learned that we have to think differently in the face of that which have never experienced before, especially when no one else has ever experienced it, either.

Time and time again during the pandemic, I tried to use old tools to fix new systems, and when they didn’t work, I didn’t give up fast enough. In discerning over the trip to the DR, I used the tried and true practices of conducting research and gathering advice, and they didn’t work. Later on, I many times tried to simulate teaching, deaning, and advising practices online that had worked in-person, only to learn that the in-person part couldn’t be replicated, and tweaking wasn’t going to be enough.

The advice I now offer to 2020 Sarah: Change more and change faster when the world around us changes. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you can outsmart your own denial. Be nice to yourself when you didn’t know what you didn’t know because it couldn’t have been known.

I am consolidating these lessons now, especially insofar as I’m recommitting to teaching our seminary students at Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School that they need to be ready for anything. And I mean, Anything. Because God means, Anything. The most interesting and important leadership challenges they will face are likely to be those we couldn’t, at this moment, anticipate. As a graduate of the school of “Couldn’t have possibly guessed,” a.k.a. higher education amidst COVID, I can invest my newfound knowledge in my leadership and theirs.