Читать книгу The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College - Steve Volk - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPRELUDE
On March 11, 2020, at 8:12 p.m., as the State of Indiana began to perceive the magnitude of COVID-19, the members of the DePauw University community (like so many others) received an email announcing the suspension of in-class instruction. Over the next four days, the deadline for students to leave campus—with all of their belongings—was pushed forward several times, eventually landing on March 16, at 5:00 p.m. At that point, any student who had not been granted eligibility to remain on campus (235 students) had to be gone. As the news settled in, students scrambled to spend time with one another. Pop-up ensembles claimed the halls of the performing arts center. The local inn faced such a swarm of students that the owners stopped serving alcohol. Seniors were hit full in the face with the realization that their college experience, as they had known it up to this point, had just ended. All of those memory-making, pregraduation rituals they’d been dreaming about since freshman year were now gone.
Seven and a half hours before the email came, I (Beth) was teaching Waiting for Godot in my existential literature course. Wanting to breathe new energy into the class and give us a chance to inhabit and perform scenes from the play, we had relocated for the week to an auditorium in the oldest building on campus. The auditorium, which had formerly served as a chapel, had vaulted ceilings arching over wooden pews and a defunct pipe organ that was lofted in the corner. Now it housed more mundane events—lectures, the occasional faculty meeting, student recitals—and the walls were hung with portraits of DePauw’s presidents and (in a less-than-subtle jab at the patriarchal legacy of the place) a relatively recent series of portrait-sized photos by a faculty artist that represented women from various contingents of the DePauw community (though there were no students). Most of the class sat sprawled in a circle on the stage. The high-backed leather chairs reserved for esteemed visitors had been pushed aside. A handful of students, a buzzing lethargy in their collective and individual poses, had claimed seats in the window sills or on the stairs leading up to the stage.
The irony that we were slated that day to process Beckett’s absurdist classic was deafening: students had been alerted earlier that this email was coming, and that they would know by 3:00 p.m. whether or not face-to-face classes were going to be cancelled for the remainder of the semester. Now we were, literally, just waiting. In another class I had taught earlier that day, there was no less irony: that morning we were making our way through The Trial. None of us could escape the fact that the concept of “indefinite postponement,” one of three possible outcomes for the accused Joseph K., had just taken on real-life contours that were too surreal, even for Kafka. What else was there to talk about other than the ways the college’s imminent announcement stood to change everyone’s reality? Time was already carved into a “before” and “after,” though none of us knew what that “after” would look like.
The next few days were a blur. Some faculty cancelled the remaining two days of classes. Some doubled down on expectations, insisting scheduled exams be taken on those days rather than postponed until a less anxious time. Some just tried to stay the course, using the final two days as an opportunity to bring some semblance of closure to the chapter of in-person learning that, until that moment, we had all taken for granted. “Business as usual” vied with “panic” as the plan for the rest of the semester started to take shape. Faculty, the vast majority of whom had no experience whatsoever with “virtual,” “remote,” or “distance” learning, were being asked to quickly adapt their classes to an online platform, playing out in microcosm the same scenario that had become the subject of countless articles, chat rooms, special issues of academic journals, Facebook groups, and blogs. Those discussions—about contingency plan learning, makeshift learning, making-the-best-of-it-learning—grew no less virulently than the virus itself. It was “panic-gogy,” as Sean Michael Morris, director of the Digital Pedagogy Lab and senior instructor in Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado, Boulder, put it.
Toward the end of the last day of face-to-face classes at DePauw, a senior music student, who was working with me on their (this student’s preferred pronoun) honors thesis, came to my office, pulling with them a nearly empty suitcase that had been filled with their extraordinary signature handmade hats. They’d been giving the hats out to lucky recipients all day, a much-needed gesture of whimsy. They described the unexpected sweetness and vulnerability of the liminal space in which we’d all found ourselves. How suddenly it seemed we now stopped and listened when we asked others, “How are you?” How the myriad impromptu jam sessions that students formed reminded them of what they were most passionate about—being and playing and creating together. In this liminal space, this student told me, “we rediscovered our priorities … and going to class wasn’t one of them.”
“I’m just afraid it will all go back to the way it was before,” they said, “the way we’re spending time together now is so much more authentic, so much more real.”
There was also a palpable antagonism in the air. That antagonism had generally been latent in the structure of top-down classroom dynamics, but now it was magnified and laid bare by the stress the structure was under. This dynamic led to a kind of standoff. The perceived defiance of these shifting (or crystallizing) student priorities was met by the draconian measures of some faculty members, an insistence that the students’ priorities should remain centered on the classroom, and in some cases, on course material entirely disconnected from the frightening and ever-shifting reality that was changing by the hour. Students described a refrain that they kept hearing in the plans that were evolving for their “online” learning: a need to devise strategies that would keep them from cheating. The default assumption from faculty seemed to be that students would resort to academic dishonesty. It was a stark either-or assumption writ large: either we (the faculty) keep them (the students) in line and focused on the task at hand, or everything will fall apart and the course material will go unlearned.
We include these idiosyncratic details to suggest that, in the small liberal arts colleges that the two of us call home, everything was already in the mix even before the semester was brought to a screeching halt by the coronavirus pandemic. The vestiges of tradition stubbornly asserted themselves on that chapel wall, in the pushback against that stubborn tradition in the form of the newer portraits, in the absence of student faces from the portrait collection of institutional representatives, in the expectations that students would cheat, in the students’ explicit naming of the fact that classes weren’t a priority, and in the profound ambivalence that something sweet and beautiful could happen even in the midst of the antagonism that always, always seemed to be humming in the background. Rebecca Barrett Fox’s blog post, “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online,” is a time-capsule-worthy artifact in this regard. Her post, and its intentionally provocative title (one angry reader called it “clickbait”), set off a slew of responses. The majority of readers found her advice to be a relief, practical and compassionate, but a vocal minority was clearly incensed by her charge to lower expectations and resist change. The post’s comment section is, unfortunately, a study in the lack of civility, full of accusatory, demeaning inflections and the zero-sum language and either-or thinking that too often mark the way faculty members talk to one another and to students, pandemic or not. It also points to how empty the term “student-centered” has become. Virtually every comment includes some version of the term, but these versions are often radically at odds with one another. This is a perfect example of the way that even though higher education may have come screeching to a halt, the nature of the conversations we were having in this “halted” moment mimicked the ones we had been having all along. And, along with the student of the extraordinary hats, both Steve and I share the fear that everything will go back to “the way it was before” once this is all over. This is not a place we want to go back to.
Adventures in Virtual Learning
The series of emails leading up to the closure of DePauw’s campus tell a story of tempered caution, a warding off of the seemingly not-terribly-present-danger of being blindsided by a pandemic. On January 24, the college’s office of communications sent a message to the entire community on “coronavirus awareness and prevention,” providing “key resources” and CDC recommendations (primarily with regard to “avoiding non-essential travel to Wuhan, China”). On March 2, there was a follow-up message, an update to CDC guidelines on prevention and travel, along with a message of calming assurance: “while the risk of coronavirus COVID-19 in the U.S. remains low at this time and there are no confirmed cases in Indiana or at DePauw University, we continue to prepare for a potential outbreak or pandemic.” Less than a week before the notification of the closing of campus, on March 7, faculty received an email from the vice president of academic affairs. The college was, as the email stated:
taking the cautionary and preparatory step of suspending in-person class instruction during the two days leading up to spring break (Thursday 3/19/20 and Friday 3/20/20). This suspension will provide faculty with the opportunity to develop, revise and/or test plans for online instruction should that be needed due to a future suspension of in-person class meetings (e.g., as a result of COVID-19 cases on campus, weather emergencies, etc.) or because some students cannot attend classes in-person due to illness.
Despite the tempered caution, and despite the best efforts of those tasked with devising preparations and a plan, we were blindsided. Four days before the unprecedented event of closing a residential campus for the duration of the semester and without an end in sight, the language was still entirely hypothetical, the pandemic just one emergency scenario among any number of hypothetical others. All of a sudden, we were unmoored. A week of incredulousness, denial, anger, fear—accelerated stages of mourning—slid into another, a week that had been originally scheduled to be our spring break. And then that week slid into a full-on plunge into a brave new world of teaching and learning that none of us had any clue how to navigate.
As the adventure took hold, my students (with whom I was “meeting” in independent and small group sessions on Google Hangout—students chose which model they preferred) described their new realities and what it felt like to have entered into this strange learning space that none of us were prepared for. In the first week, the stress on some of their faces was hard to miss. One student in particular looked lost and drained; ten minutes into our conversation, she covered her face in her hands, tucked her legs underneath her with a jolting motion on the bed she was sitting on, and let out a despondent sigh. “I just wish this would all be over,” she said. Most students reported feeling bored, completely unable to focus, anxious, and sad.
The range of learning experiences varied widely from class to class. Some faculty members entirely missed the action, some created asynchronous video content that students could watch on their own, and others conducted synchronous Zoom meetings for twenty or more students that lasted an hour or more. Students reported various levels of success with these meetings. In some cases, the technology held up well and they were glad for the chance to see others and to think about something other than COVID-19. In others, the platform couldn’t sustain the traffic, people talked over each other without being able to hear what others were saying, or the professor lectured in real time to students who, zoning out, used the time to work on other projects. Some faculty, undeterred by the curveball the pandemic had thrown, continued to deliver their course content without any attempts to pare it down or make it relevant to the current situation. Others entirely revamped their classes to accommodate the new reality. In most cases that students described, this revamping meant an easing up on requirements that could no longer be fulfilled in this new setting. Some students, however, suggested that their professors were upping the ante, adding considerably more assignments than they had included in the course’s original iteration, assignments that felt to them like busywork or box-checking, designed primarily for the purpose of taking attendance rather than as a vehicle for learning the material.
A month into the online transition, a DePauw senior sent the following email to the vice president of academic affairs (VPAA) with the subject heading, “This isn’t working” (the following is excerpted and included with the student’s permission):
I really struggle to write this email. I had a horribly lonely freshman year here at DePauw. … I contemplated transferring every day. … Two things kept me at DePauw: First, I applied for and was offered a position [as an RA] for sophomore year. This effectively put me into a large caring community. … Secondly, I had great reverence for DePauw’s academics and embraced the liberal arts philosophy. Academics were challenging and from time to time I would resent certain assignments or readings … but I did get so much enjoyment from the product and from the work. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.
I know the circumstances of this pandemic and the extended, mandated period of social distancing is new for all of us. I know it was impossible to plan for and has been exceptionally difficult to reorient curriculum to work for the circumstances. While my current professors have been very accommodating and understanding, the plain fact is that reorienting the curriculum has been a disaster for me and every single peer I’ve communicated with. I can tell that the reorientation has had major consequences on faculty—some have admitted it—and I can only imagine the difficult decisions that administration is having to make throughout this precarious crisis.
I say all this to show that the expansive repercussions of COVID-19 are not lost on me—I’m not sending you this email because I’m having a hard time and I want some help; I’m sending this email because this isn’t working. This isn’t working for anybody. …
I’ve been ripped away from my home of the last four years. That was, obviously, the right call; however, I did almost everything for four years inside a one square mile plot of land. I lived, worked, slept, ate, felt every range of emotion, calibrated every facet of my academic life within that one square mile. All of my routine, all of my community which I rely on to stabilize me and help me be successful at DePauw is unavoidably gone. Seniors, like myself, have the added burden of never being able to regain that particular stability or get any semblance of closure for having lost it. One of DePauw’s defining characteristics is its status as a residential campus. The purpose of this residentiality, as stated on the DePauw website, is that “by living on campus, DePauw students engage in diverse communities that foster learning with & from others.” I’ve grown accustomed to this system, and it has completely fallen away, leaving me floundering.
I would be remiss not to address my privilege. My home life is stable, my parents have kept their jobs and aren’t currently worried about losing them, my family has remained healthy, systems in general are very much stacked in my favor, and yet the work I’m supposed to do feels impossible—the task seemingly insurmountable.
I wish I could offer a perfect solution—if there was one I’m sure I wouldn’t be feeling the way that I am. I don’t want to make a drastic recommendation that won’t be taken seriously, though I have some of those recommendations. I don’t want to make a milquetoast recommendation that won’t end up making me feel better. I don’t want you to not take this seriously because I don’t offer a solution. All I know for sure is that I can’t keep feeling like this, and that my peers can’t keep feeling like this, and that my professors can’t keep feeling like this. None of us deserve to be feeling like this, and this feeling is not simply an unavoidable consequence of the pandemic. The current demands on all of us, while designed to be less than usual, are breaking me.
Faculty and administration have been vocally understanding, but it really doesn’t seem like you all understand. Again, I know this is equally as hard on you all, that’s why I write this email. This really isn’t working.
The rawness is striking, especially the capacity this student has to parse out his feelings of frustration from his sense of empathy. Even more striking is his assumption that the VPAA would lend a compassionate ear. From the outside, this assumption might look like entitlement, even as this student calls himself out for his privilege. It might look like melodrama, a catalog of relatively small losses to experience in the grand scheme of such a mammoth, global disruption. But what strikes us—from the inside—is the weight this student places on the community that he was forced to leave behind, and his contention that the loss of that community is at the center of his feelings of futility, paralysis, and inertia, feelings he suspects others share. What strikes us is his assurance that his assumption about the VPAA was anything but misplaced, but rather an intuitive guess that this figure who was in charge would respond in a manner consistent with the thoughtful, genuine, self-aware, and compassionate approach that had marked the student’s other interactions on campus.
The VPAA did. He thanked the student and went on to explicitly match the student’s “transparency” (as he describes it) with his own. He candidly expressed the admiration he felt for this student, his care for the student’s anxiety concerning his own experience and that of his peers, his sadness that this unprecedented moment has caused such disruption and pain for the student body, and his agreement with the contention that there were no good solutions to the situation in which DePauw found itself. He exhibited great humility in not having answers, and he provided the student with resources for self-care that he acknowledged “might not be helpful.”
There’s one line in the student’s email that we keep coming back to in the midst of it all, however: “this feeling is not simply an unavoidable consequence of the pandemic.” We zero in on the double negative—“not unavoidable”—a suggestion that there’s nothing necessary or given or inevitable about the toll the shutdown has taken on all of us. It could have gone another way, any number of other ways. For some of our students, it has gone another way. For some of our students, the shutdown has served as a source of relief and liberation, an escape from an increasingly exhausting and soul-sucking grind. For some, who struggle with social anxiety or depression, who are tired of a lusterless classroom dynamic, who question the worth of the education they’re paying so much for, the shutdown has provided a chance to finally pursue their learning on their own terms. And so we tend to read into this double negative something else: however aberrant and unprecedented the catalyst for this screeching halt may be, it was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.
The Hypocrisy-Cynicism Complex
Two weeks before DePauw’s campus closed, the student of the extraordinary hats came to talk with me about their thesis. The premise of the thesis now seems altogether prophetic, shedding light on our shared sense that SLACs have been plummeting headlong toward a point of no return. Steve and I thought it deserved some attention in this discussion.
Inspired by the complicated nuances of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, this student conjured up a fictional world in which to play: a small liberal arts college of the future that is debilitated by nihilism. The dean (worried mainly about dropping enrollments and the hit the endowment is taking) enlists a philosophy professor, Walter Picardy, to pull the student body out of the dumps and help them envision another perspective. Through the medium of a radio broadcast, Picardy calls on his love of Nietzsche to rally the students (and himself), but in the process, he becomes more and more unsure of the way out. Hilarity ensues (sort of), but also dread. The cast of characters featured in the broadcast’s different episodes are modeled loosely (and satirically) on various characters and elements from Voltaire’s Candide. The dean is a version of Pangloss; the larger-than-life, bombastic, and egotistical music professor that shows up in the second episode is named Maestro Tronkh; the featured guest of the third episode is a professor named Martin, an educator who was once enthusiastic about and inspired in his teaching, but who is now just marking time until his retirement.
The penultimate episode features a student named Mauve. She’s not named for any character from Candide, so we can’t mistake her for a caricature. She is a member of a student group (she refuses the term “leader,” insisting instead that the group is a “non-hierarchical society”) that describes itself like this on the radio broadcast:
“This is a message of warning. … We stand as a front united against the tyranny of all authority. Rise up, students, and weaponize your anger for a cause that doesn’t pretend to stand for anything. The ‘representation’ that is our student government is a patronizing façade. Skip your classes. Trash your dorms. Vandalize. We are more than collective bargaining. We are the end of all things as you know it. Meetings are held on Sundays at midnight at the Student Union. Free pizza.”
In this satirical space, it’s easy to see the makings of the explosive campus dynamics that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. On the one side there are students who are exasperated with faculty and one another for their ham-fisted, archaic, and ineffective grasp of the intricate identity politics accosting these elite spaces. These students are responding to and reciprocating the antagonism and condescension that they feel on a gut level directed at them by faculty and administration. And on the other side is a faculty and administration that are too narrowly focused on their own pet interests and the college’s bottom line to create spaces of community and actual learning, too enamored of the sound of their own voices to listen to the voices of their students.
The thesis captures what we’d like to call the “hypocrisy-cynicism complex” that we fear forms the current culture of so many SLACs, the toxic distrust flowing from the top down and then all the way back up again. This complex includes the perceptions and biases with which people at SLACs too often approach one another: the suspicion (too often borne out) that administrators make decisions on a cost-cutting, rather than a pedagogical, basis, that time and resource-draining strategic plans are determined from the start, that the drastic and inhumane cuts across many college campuses are simply the result of the inscrutable visions of trustees, that students are just there for a piece of paper and don’t care about learning for its own sake. At a large number of campuses around the country, benefit of the doubt and goodwill are in rather short supply. SLACs say they want to be one kind of institution—places that nurture a love of learning, places that produce good and kind citizens, leaders, and entrepreneurs. They profess to value diversity and inclusion, equity, accessibility, risk-taking, and critical thinking. But they don’t enact these values. The students know it. We know it. And so, hypocrisy breeds cynicism, and it all undermines what we’re really here to do.
The thesis begins with this passage, the first of several reworkings of Nietzsche’s famous “eternal return” parable:
Imagine yourself in your loneliest loneliness. Aren’t you tired by now? Tired of bad faith? Tired of the same lies, repeated over and over? I’m not talking about lies like “‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it to class, I was feeling sick,” or, “Why yes, I am proficient in Microsoft Excel.” I’m talking about lies that kill truth. Lies that have existed forever and have been spoken so long that they’ve become the new reality. Maybe you’re aware of these lies; but actually realizing their exposure would be so devastating that you’d rather be complicit and miserable. It’d be nice if we could take up arms, wouldn’t it?
So many of us who teach at small liberal arts colleges are tired of bad faith, of the lies that have become the new reality. But we also share the extraordinary sense of loss that being ripped from our campuses represents. It’s a deeply ambivalent space, to feel both the promise of the residential model—to have experienced the magic that can and does happen on these campuses where people are living and learning together—and the profound disappointment that we’re not living up to our full potential. Not by a long shot.
Chain-Sickness
Before the shutdown, when this student came to talk with me about their thesis, it was because they were feeling a sense of resignation and dissatisfaction with the writing of the thing, a sense of being hemmed in by the conventions of the process to produce something that fit neatly into disciplinary boxes in ways they didn’t want to have to make them fit. They were right to feel this way. The thesis defense meeting made clear that the other members of the committee were expecting something far more conventional. They had trouble entering into the world this student had created, despite its bearing such a resemblance to our own, and despite its capacity to provide lessons for how we might address the toxic culture in which we find ourselves. On this side of the shutdown, through the lens of that push and pull between passion and its dampening, this student was more clearly able to articulate the source of that resignation and dissatisfaction. The student described it as the “apathetic masochism” of higher education. “We’re taught to be embarrassed about our love for our subject,” they protested:
We’re taught that we are supposed to put meaning and joy aside in the pursuit of ‘knowledge.’ What I most wish I had experienced in college was a full-on commitment to the mission. … I keep thinking about what will need to happen for everything to come to a stop. I don’t WANT school to end, I really don’t think most people should have another line cut off. It reminds me about Nietzsche’s chain-sickness. At this moment, I think chain-sickness is better for my authenticity than loneliness.
This description resonates with us and serves as a touchstone for our manifesto. Nietzsche’s concept of chain-sickness—the collective paralysis and resentment, and the crystallization and reiteration of so many practices of our own devising that are making us sick—provides a perfect framework. Chain-sickness grows out of the self-deception that the values and institutions that we have created are somehow given and necessary, eternal and transcendent. It festers when we forget that we have the power to change our values, when we view ourselves as powerless beings subject to forces outside of our control. The fictitious dean of the thesis points to the symptoms, as she sees it, of this condition: “[The students] meander about campus like sedated livestock; they refuse to do their academics, they overindulge each and every weekend just to make it through the next slog of a week! The students are sick.” In true-to-character, one-dimensional fashion, the dean places full blame on the students, lacking the larger awareness of how these symptoms reflect the manifold ways in which the system has broken down. Even so, the multipronged accusation has more than a little merit, as those of us teaching in SLACs can attest. “Work hard, play hard” has become something of a mantra, a catchall phrase used to brush aside the insidious heavy-drinking culture and its fallout—deaths, assaults, sexual assaults, date rapes—so prevalent on these campuses (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism), not to mention the fatigue, that sense of slogging through, manifested increasingly in the classroom. Six months before the pandemic, a student described it this way:
I think this semester I have become particularly bored with the monotony of school. While I have found my courses to be engaging, I have found it to be increasingly more difficult to reach a level of eustress that allows me to be productive and motivated. … It is not that I am unhappy or sad, but rather I am disconnected from my emotions and have found it difficult to always keep in mind the reason for why I am doing this in the first place. I am 19 years old, and, although I have career goals, I have no idea if that is actually where I will end up or what I will end up loving. While it would be nice to be able to jump straight into a career and figure out right away if it is actually something I am passionate about, our societal structure has made it increasingly difficult to do that. Within today’s society, it is critical that I attain an undergraduate degree before I begin learning about what I truly believe myself to be interested in.
This insight is from a student who still managed to create a breathtaking final project, a “This I Believe” statement (modeled on the classic NPR program), built on Tilt Brush, a virtual reality platform, that explored the principles and individual and collective implications of universal design. And yet she captures so stoically this sense of disconnection, the disembodied quality of the thing, the just-going-through-the-motions essence of it all.
This is the chain-sickness. We know our students are engaged, we know that they want to learn, and we know that they have the capacity to produce extraordinary things. We suspect, à la Lukianoff and Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, that a portion of the growing sense of fatigue in the classroom can be chalked up to the substantial identity politics often provoked on predominantly white campuses with a heavy Greek presence, such as DePauw’s, and to the sharp rise in mental health issues so many of our students are facing. Certainly, too, a good bit of it has to do with the vast range of learning styles, learning goals, and intended paths for life after graduation that are represented in any given course.
But much of it, we’re convinced, has to be attributed to the ratcheting up of the high-stakes testing culture that our students have been subjected to since kindergarten and the data-driven, assessment-and-outcomes-crazed, “college and career readiness” mentality that has overtaken education as a whole. Our students are collectively burnt out. We have burned them out. So all this talk about “student-centeredness” means nothing if we don’t hear what our students are telling us, if we don’t listen to what it has felt like for them to have been told for thirteen years that they are primarily valuable as data points, as cogs in a wheel, as a means to a bottom line. We reiterate this message every time we sell their successes on our websites, every time we shape the narrative of success along normative lines, and every time we tell students how they need to master the narrow subset of knowledge we have deemed most important for them to know.
The title of the student’s thesis we keep returning to resonates particularly in this context: “Become What You Are: The Student Handbook to Fighting Nihilism.” From kindergarten on up, our students have been told who to be and how to be, how to learn and what to learn. It is so rare for us to say that the task of higher education is to help students become who they are. Authenticity. It’s a clichéd term, perhaps as empty as “student-centered” in this self-help-saturated cultural moment in which we live. But so much of the brokenness, so much of the toxicity of the culture we don’t want to return to, is, we believe, a function of students who are not being authentically encouraged to become who they are, and of institutions that do not have the vision to become what they truly are.
As this student describes it, overcoming chain-sickness involves committing fully to a mission rather than succumbing to the “apathetic masochism” that these institutions tend to breed, despite their stated intentions. We think so, too. And we return to the email exchange between the DePauw student and the VPAA, which demonstrates with a raw clarity the pain of this chain-sickness, this sense, fueled perhaps by resignation, that the system we have created must necessarily continue in the same fashion, even if there are no good solutions. It’s the sense of being locked in. And as we see it, the Janus-faced nature of this moment of crisis presents a call to action for SLACs: to turn that chain-sickness into health.
