While college students at campuses across the country were making headlines for reckless behavior amid the COVID-19 pandemic, students, faculty and staff at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg worked together to create a new norm, said Katherine A. Rowe, the university’s 28th president.
In a recent telephone interview, Rowe, who has been at the helm of the historic school since her inauguration in February of 2019, talked about her role as president during unprecedented times.
She arrived at William & Mary after serving as provost and dean of faculty at Smith College. Her biography is diverse and a testament to her commitment to cross-training: English literature professor at Bryn Mawr College and Yale University; author of three books; nationally competitive Ultimate Frisbee player and coach; and entrepreneur, as co-founder and CEO of Luminary Digital Media, a company that developed educational apps to help students learn Shakespearean texts.
“I’ve always had multiple passions in my life. A scholar, a teacher, a competitive athlete, a parent, and really importantly, an entrepreneur. I think of it as cross-training. Each part of my life sustains the others. I strengthen muscles in one area that are useful in another,” she said.
“That fits really well with the culture at William & Mary, where we have so many students who cross-train with different majors and minors and multiple passions in their lives. Artists and entrepreneurs. Where we do liberal arts undergraduate education and we do professional education. We do graduate programs. So cross-training is a hallmark of this place.”
Role models
Rowe’s career path and her breadth of experience on multiple platforms is a testament to the role models provided by her parents. Her mother helped develop the field of institutional ombudsman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her father was a lifelong educational entrepreneur.
“So, I grew up thinking about how to guide large systems in higher ed, how to be a systems thinker, how to help shape culture in inclusive ways and how to take a nonjudgmental and a curious approach to institutional conflict, to see conflict as a way to grow as an institution and strengthen an institution,” she said, adding that her father taught her “that every constraint enables creativity, every crisis is an opportunity.”
COVID AND VISION-MAKING
Rowe’s biography notes specialties including design thinking, entrepreneurship and the digital humanities. Design thinking, she explained, is a business approach based on curiosity and empathy that prompts fresh looks at processes, or products or services from the point of view of the user or the client to identify gaps that lead to innovation.
That methodology seems embedded the university’s response to COVID, evidenced by unique solutions developed for the problems presented during the pandemic.
“Every aspect of our COVID response has been focused on what we are learning that we want to roll forward. Where is something happening that is laying down a template for the future and that could be a simple as how we return to campus completely differently now,” she said.
“We invented the touch-free, drive-thru registration with students moving into dorms. It was super swift, and we’re always going to do that going forward.”
The university was in the second stage of strategic planning with Rowe’s Thinking Forward initiative when COVID hit. That process will resume next year, incorporating lessons learned over the past eight months.
“We’re still taking a longer view, recognizing that being nimble and flexible and agile is the name of the game. In higher ed we’re not known for how rapidly we transform ourselves. But I will say: my colleagues, my staff and faculty all stepped in remarkably well in how quickly we have transformed our curriculum and our operations under pandemic,” she said.
“So, the questions that we’re asking ourselves now are: What are the lessons we’ve learned and how can we use those lessons to guide the next three to four years when we know there will be rapid transformation?”
All in for the new norm
The college committed early to physical distancing and mask-wearing along with an aggressive approach to testing and contact tracing and quarantine and isolation of asymptomatic populations, she said.
“We worked really hard with our student leadership on developing those shared norms. We are in a small town and the City Council joined us and adopted our community commitment, which was an incredible boost. Within about three weeks of students arriving on campus, we went from no masks in Williamsburg to masks are the norm, and our neighbors joined us in an incredibly generous way. Students have been so all-in,” she said.
“It’s very rare that we see the kinds of flouting of those commitments to each other that we’ve seen at other campuses. That’s William & Mary. It’s a campus where the students see themselves as taking care of each other and really creating a community in an intentional way. I credit them with finding ways to socialize safely and creatively outdoors. We did start pretty strict. Our limit on social gathering is 10 and the students are finding ways to have a social life that are really satisfying despite those constraints. They are being incredibly creative.”
Following the science
The administration ardently followed the science throughout the pandemic using the best data to inform decision-making, she said. It started by only bringing in transfer students and freshmen at first, allowing the school to establish the culture of best practices with a smaller number of students.
Additionally, William & Mary worked to keep as many staff and faculty in their jobs, reassigning people to meet new needs. Specifically, it gave the special events planning staff — which had no special events to plan — quarantine and testing duties. She explained that the staff’s skills in running complex operations — moving people in efficient ways and hitting deadlines — was a perfect fit for the new jobs.
“When you shift people across units and into new jobs, and when they embrace that, you build trust across the organization. You build adaptability and you build social capital,” she said. “Human beings who would never have met each other or worked together have been doing that for months under intense pressure and learning to really appreciate each other’s skills.”
Outside of its efforts to combat COVID, the university continued to launch new programs such as a collaboration with the Posse Foundation, which serves as a conduit to college for high achieving young leaders from diverse backgrounds, and also added a new 14-credit data sciences minor to enhance the professional profiles of students.
Of the latter, Rowe said, “For any field that you go into, for any community that you work in, the ability to think through questions using data at scale, modeling those questions using computational modeling tools, those are going to be very, very powerful tools. We think they match beautifully with other liberal arts skills.”
Life in the president’s house
“We live right in the heart of campus. The best thing is being able to look outside and see that students have set up a spike ballgame right outside of my front door and I can sub in when the game is over. The hardest thing is that the house is often mistaken as tourist stop so there can be knocks during evening ghost tours — but that comes with the territory.”
A day in the life
“The life of a university president is pretty nonstop and that’s good for me because I’m super active and I like to live fast. A day is typically 7 a.m. until 8 or 9 p.m. Under COVID there are fewer events, of course, but there are a lot more meetings and Zoom calls and prepping for meetings. I’ll take a break for a walk or meditation, have dinner with my husband and go back to work after dinner until 8 or 9. It’s fun.”
