Preventive Medicine
I finished John M. Barry’s history of the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, The Great Influenza, feeling angry. Barry spent almost ten years conducting research for the book, and it came out more than 15 years ago. His final pages are dedicated to what we need to do now — namely, back then, in the early aughts — to be prepared for an inevitable next global scourge. Reading them now, his words sound like eerie prophesy: we need hospital capacity, ventilators, contact-tracing systems, and public health policies ready to roll.
Why angry, you might ask? Because I thought to myself as I read, “We knew this would happen! Or at least someone did! Why didn’t anyone listen?” Because my bile had a familiar taste, I stopped to ask myself why I reacted so strongly to Barry’s prescription for preventive medicine. I realized it was reminding me of another experience, one that was painful at the time and tender to the touch of my remembering.
Five years ago, I and four other senior administrators at the school I serve, Andover Newton Seminary, came up against a painful truth. Our institution was not sustainable in its form, but our mission — to educate inspiring religious leaders — was no less important than it had been at our founding over 200 years earlier. Push was coming to shove. Although numbers only tell part of the story, there was no angle from which we could regard those numbers and not see a cliff at the end of our current road. We needed to turn immediately, or we would not have time to avoid plunging over it.
The summer after that realization came into clear resolution, these same senior leaders investigated a number of different options and landed on one where our mission could be fulfilled in a new setting for a new day. The news was good, really: we found a historically and theologically aligned partner in Yale Divinity School, who had a history of embedding tradition-specific schools and providing them with both a broad base and distinctiveness within an ecumenical whole. Our trustees, the stewards of our mission, were 100% on-board, and we made good plans to weather the transition while honoring commitments to students. One of the sad side-effects was that we had to sell our campus, whose location and bucolic beauty we loved.
Although many were supportive and encouraging of our work, despite the grief, others were, and even remain, angry. That particular flavor of anger was the sour taste in my mouth when I finished Barry’s book on the Great Influenza. In my school, I was part of an endeavor that used data to project a future for which we needed to be prepared, and that future was bleak. I participated in taking dramatic action to replace that unsatisfactory future with a better option, but since we dodged the cliff in time, many constituents found it hard to believe we’d been heading for it in the first place.
We live in a culture more likely to react to disasters than prepare for or prevent them. I have heard much talk about how the coronavirus crisis might lead us to think differently about preventing further global warming. But between here and there, something on a deeper cultural level will need to change. What are the leadership lessons I take from Barry’s disturbing, prophetic, and ultimately ignored epilogue? What did I learn from the scorn that was at times directed at me when participating in what is now generally understood to have been a necessary institutional reboot? The following three actions could put us on a path to a better place:
First, we need to take advantage of this crisis to engage in preventive medicine in the leadership roles in which we serve. At this moment, our constituents are primed to hear that we need to change now to prevent disaster down the line. They will forget this urgency when we get back to normal. Given the impatience of our capitalistic, freedom-loving(-when-it-suits-me) culture, we need to assume this moment will be brief.
Second, we need to extend grace, actively and vocally, to leaders who are making tough choices based on a future that hasn’t happened yet. Rather than accuse them of overreacting, we need to applaud them. Rather than complaining about how their preparations are inconveniencing us, we should thank them. These counter-cultural gestures of support might encourage our leaders to think ever-more faithfully about the future, with a big-picture in mind that their constituents can’t always see.
Third, we have to pick good leaders. But before that can happen, we have to be respectful toward our leaders so that good people will want to answer the call to service. We must over time create an ecology where good and effective leaders can expect that, even though the work won’t be easy, it will be possible. No efficacious person would set themselves up to fail. If we want our leaders looking out for our best interests, we need to support them when they actually do so, rather than vilifying them for telling the truth and looking out for our best interests.
None of these three prescriptions are fast-acting, yet none is expensive, either. If, during the hardest times of my school’s major institutional change, I had gotten just one email that said something like this: “Sarah, I know how much you love Andover Newton, and I suspect that you would never support a change this drastic if it wasn’t totally necessary,” it would have made a big difference. So taking a dose of my own medicine, here goes:
Dear Governor Lamont,
I know you love Connecticut. I suspect you would never order us to stay at home, wear masks, avoid gatherings, and take other actions that hurt our economy in the short- and maybe even the long-term, if it wasn’t totally necessary. Thank you for trying to protect us.
In this with you, together,
Sarah
