Answers to questionnaire submitted by Kristy Wittman Howell July 20, 2020

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When and how did you become aware of the pandemic? What were your initial thoughts? Did your response change over time?

It's important to note at the top of this record (for your finding aids or other headers) that I was an NIU student in the Community College Leadership EdD - a hybrid program. I live in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, and work full time at Johnson County Community College as Education and Engagement Coordinator in the Center for Sustainability. The CCLP EdD was structured for working professionals to be able to complete their degrees while still employed - ideally in higher ed - and so only met face-to-face for a week in the summer, on the NIU-Naperville campus. All other coursework was completed online.
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I remember the day exactly, because I talked to my chair (Dean Brad Bond) late in the afternoon of 29 January 2020 before going to a meeting where I was presenting to faculty. My conversation with Brad was mostly about the last, annoying, chapter of my dissertation, and him trying to talk me out of panicking. But he mentioned some concerns about the epidemic then primarily in the news in Asia. He didn't /say/ he was worried about my timeline; I was scheduled to defend the last week of March, in DeKalb, but knowing his nightmarish schedule, it made me worry a bit. I mentioned my concerns to some of my faculty colleagues after my event ended, and mused that it might push me back to August. Everyone thought I was overreacting.

That was also when I started worrying about the events I had scheduled for the Spring. Working in sustainability means our spring semester is always full of events that are open to the community. I already had faculty professional development, tours, guest lectures, high school and home school visits, and performances scheduled from the end of January through the end of April, and with that one conversation, I started to wonder about travel for my speakers who would have been coming in from around the world. I hadn't yet started to think through what my non-event schedule would look like - the regular, day-to-day of guest lectures and classroom visits. It's worth noting, I guess, that I'm a worrier and a planner by nature, and all of this global news with local ramifications coming while I was also finishing my dissertation and getting ready to defend just really amplified, fed, and reinforced my anxiety. So I was, in a way, predisposed to be worried in a way others here on my campus in the KC area weren't. Yet, anyway.

I sat down with my boss not long after that - maybe the second week of February - and mentioned that we might want to reevaluate our spring events schedule and start shifting them to online offerings. He was adamant that I was overreacting to what would amount to a blip in our plans, and shut down the conversation pretty quickly. I took his comments in stride, but began talking with scheduled speakers and partners across campus to gauge others' plans. Pretty quickly - by the end of February - I had my first set of cancellations from speakers whose employers had cut international and domestic travel, and within a week we had campus plans in place to quarantine by the end of the second week of March. That's when the scrambling began - when others in our office started talking about how we would manage remote student leadership meetings, what online programming would look like for the rest of the semester, etc.

My last three "normal" days on campus involved two live theatre productions of a show on Monsanto's trials in Canada, called "Seeds" - one show was long sold out to high school students, and three campus tours with ~20 students each, plus faculty and chaperones. By Wednesday 11 March, the day of the evening performance, Brad deemed my dissertation ready to go to committee. I clicked send on it as I ate a quick pre-show dinner with a colleague and talked through the pre-show speech that would reference the funding from our campus' Student Sustainability Committee - the group I advise. We left campus that Friday, the 13th, and were quarantined in the KC area until June.

What is daily life like for you? In what ways has it changed?

During the strictest part of the quarantine (I'm writing now in mid-July, as rules have relaxed and case counts have skyrocketed in the Kansas City area) I had a pretty rigorous - and strict - schedule. Between the middle of March and the end of the school year in May, I saw nearly 400 students, faculty, and community members - K-12, our own, and regional higher education partners, in a variety of arrangements - from live zoom calls with three dozen high school AP students to discussion boards with environmental literature courses. I had to learn a lot of new platforms in a quick time, or become more proficient in platforms I knew, which meant most days involved me reviewing lecture/discussion material in the morning, cramming the technical information or playing with the new platform for a bit at lunch, and doing the talk, recording the lecture, or whatever I'd been asked to provide in the afternoon. Of course, that'd all be shifted around if I was scheduled for a morning event, so I spent a lot of sleepless nights after waking up from a nightmare of being zoombombed by climate change deniers making sure I'd put all the security measures I could in place.

On the whole, I'm incredibly fortunate not only to still have my job and to be able to do what I love, but to be able - for the most part - to do it from home without an impossible degree of adjustment. One new-to-me platform that was a particularly nerve-wracking learning process was Teams (not because it was especially difficult or technical, but because of its context). I defended my dissertation on 26 March via Teams, and it was surreal. I think because I've taken so many friends and colleagues to their defenses, and/or attended them, the virtual option will never feel quite real to me. Even though I have the paperwork and the sheepskin to prove it happened, it really was just another remote meeting that day: I had an 0800 zoom meeting with a couple of my student leaders to talk about officer elections, and a quick on-the-fly call with a consultant we were supposed to have had on campus in a few weeks' time, then my defense at 1000, then time for a quick lunch at my desk while I prepped for a 1230 podcast episode zoom call-in on sustainability work during the pandemic. In that zoom, when we were asked to introduce ourselves, my colleagues gave me a hard time about not mentioning my defense and 're-introduced' me as Dr. Howell... so I guess that moment of realizing it was all real is permanently enshrined in recorded form.

At first, I really missed seeing my students face-to-face, and I struggled with that. Now that we're into summer, where I wouldn't typically see my students in a regular year, that's dulled a bit. But, since we have so many cases in the community, I worry about them and their health, obviously, and I'm profoundly concerned for what our Fall will bring as so many are on campus.

Probably the most gratifying part of the work from home situation was that I did have the time and flexibility to do some things I'd missed. I could get up at 6, and without a commute, I was able to read, go for a run, shower, and prep for the day before my first call or meeting at 0830 or 0900. It was lovely to have the time and space for "life" in amongst all the work. I recognized early on how privileged I was to have that experience, and increased my donations to area food banks, restaurant workers' support funds, mental health/counseling funds, and intimate partner violence shelters.

It has been an anxious time for everyone. What has inspired you or given you hope during this period? What are you most worried about or what have been your biggest stressors? What has been the most difficult thing for you personally about the crisis?

As always, my students give me hope for the future. They're why I work in higher education. I have the great good fortune of not teaching in a traditional classroom sense but of supporting the work of an outstanding group of student leaders, so together we do a lot of one-on-one and small group work to advance conversations about campus sustainability initiatives. Working with them to shift all of that online during Earth Week last April was ... exhilarating. The shifting conversations on social justice have also given me a lot of hope. I'm currently doing a professional development series with student life leaders in which we're talking about issues of privilege, equity, race, and identity at our PWI, in our historically restricted community, a conversation that likely wouldn't have happened without the international protests surrounding police violence, Black Lives Matter, and commemoration/memory of confederate and colonizer symbols. Critical reevaluation of our carceral state, new scholarship on intersectional environmentalism and what sustainability - an inherently privileged area of study and practice - can and must do to address its blind spots also gives me much hope for the future of my field. In a practical sense, some of the virtual programming produced by NIU has also given me hope - the STEAM Cafe early during quarantine about managing working from home (with Suzanne Degges-White and the Ombuds office, along with a counselor) was incredibly useful.

Stressors: I'm probably most worried about my family. My mother is high-risk in Mississippi, a state that hasn't really taken any of this seriously, and not being able to see her or convince her of the seriousness of all of this is terrifying. I'm also mourning a bit the loss of all the experiences that were supposed to be part of this spring - defending, my 40th birthday, graduating, getting to show my Mom Chicago for the very first time after commencement... were all things we planned but scuttled. I haven't been home in three years thanks in part to the grueling pace of coursework and working full-time, so we were really looking forward to seeing each other for commencement. And of course now, I'm not comfortable visiting, period.

Personally? In addition to the general worry about... humanity... and lost momentum on climate change, etc? I'm obviously - and rather selfishly - disappointed about not getting the 'end-of-a-degree' experiences of joy and relief that you sort of build yourself up to while you're in a program. I've joked with my husband that I'd planned, damnit, on NOT being at my desk 10 hours a day after I defended, and here I am, working twice as hard to create new online content, without any real end in sight (though I truly do love my job and am staggeringly relieved that I can do it from home).

I also miss being alone. I would have had the KC-to-DeKalb trip for my defense, and I'd planned on being a friend's chauffeur as she went to Naperville for her last face-to-face summer in the same program. I was going to take that week to be selfish and read/knit while tooling around and visiting friends in the area, but now my only real alone time is when I run.

What else would you like us to know?

While I work in sustainability, my first field - my first love, really, is history. My work at NIU focused generally on the history of the community college, meaning I've spent the better part of the past two years in community college archives. So: as a historian, and as someone who's particularly interested and invested in higher education history and the history of the academy and how it's enmeshed with the community surrounding it, this project makes me giddy. Thank you for taking the time to pull together the resources. I wish I could be alive 50 years from now to read them for the first time.

Affiliation

Alumni

Year in School

Graduate

Major

Community College Leadership EdD

Graduation Date

9 May 2020

Posting Consent

Yes

Contributor

Kristy Wittman Howell

Creator

Kristy Wittman Howell

Date Created

July 20, 2020

Documenting the NIU Experience to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Answers to questionnaire submitted by Kristy Wittman Howell July 20, 2020

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