The Pandemic Essays
Connection Remains Recruitment’s Bedrock, by Ashley Armstrong
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted how college coaches recruit prospective student-athletes (PSAs). In a typical year, athletes being recruited have several opportunities to impress college coaches in person through tournaments, camps, showcases, home visits and trips to campuses. Traditional recruiting methods were disrupted in March 2020 when the NCAA suspended in-person recruiting and implemented a dead period for recruiting until April 2021, during which college coaches and athletes are prevented from traveling to see one another in person.
Instead of spending countless hours on the road attending tournaments and visiting recruits and their families in person, coaches have pivoted their traditional recruiting methods. Coaches shifted to recruiting digitally and virtually by communicating with PSAs over Zoom, FaceTime or other platforms in order to get to know recruits and share information about their own institutions and sport programs. Coaches created virtual tours to highlight campus, athletic facilities and the surrounding communities. During the dead period, they evaluate athletic talent through video footage and conversations with high school/club coaches and academic counselors.
Potential student-athletes have also adapted how they get recruited in order to meet coaches where they are. They have to take more initiative by connecting through email, texts, phone calls and social media platforms to share their interest and develop relationships. PSAs also post training sessions and skills and highlight on social media, attend livestream camps and use recruiting services to market their talents.
While the long-term effects on recruiting in the post pandemic world remain to be seen, virtual and digital recruiting will continue to be crucial tools for identifying future student-athletes. In the short term, thousands of student-athletes will meet their coaches in person and step foot on their new campuses for the first time when they arrive for the fall 2021 semester.
Ashley Armstrong, deputy athletic director and senior woman administrator, serves as chief operating officer for the Department of Athletics and oversees multiple sports programs as well as academics, mental health and strength and conditioning
The Entrepreneurial Challenge, by David Choi
I don’t want to sound overly optimistic about the future. I know that many people are hurting, especially those who’ve lost someone or been financially affected. The economic damage from COVID-19 is profound, and recovery will require more than medical breakthroughs. Currently, in the U.S., millions are out of work, more than half of the business closures are likely to be permanent, and we may be experiencing the worst recession since the Great Depression.
But I am 100 percent confident that when we look back a few years from now, we will find that hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs will have built successful businesses during these tough times and contributed to our economic recovery.
We know that great companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Square were built during the Great Recession of 2008–09. I know that great startups are being built now. I have seen them over the past 12 months when attending demo days, occasions where entrepreneurs pitch a new company, and I have seen them being launched among LMU students and alumni.
Moreover, there are tremendous changes occurring due to COVID. More than half of the businesses say that they will continue to offer remote work options in the long-term. Consumers have become used to the digital lifestyle. These drastic shifts over such a short time period have brought immense opportunities for new products and services.
COVID-19 is a deadly virus, but it has not sickened the entrepreneurial spirit. Being adaptable and resilient is the essence of entrepreneurship. I believe that entrepreneurial spirit will serve as the vaccine to revitalize our economies in the U.S. and elsewhere. While the medical vaccine will keep us healthy, entrepreneurial spirit and startups will put us back on a path to economic growth.
The economic recovery will not be a smooth ride. We will need heroic efforts from many of our leaders from all sectors of our society. But when it comes to entrepreneurs, I know that they are ready to go — as they have always been.
David Choi is professor management in the LMU College of Business Administration and the director of the Fred Kiesner Center for Entrepreneurship. He teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, social entrepreneurship and technology management.
Ingenuity Amid Crisis by Ernesto Colín
Brazilian education activist/philosopher Paulo Freire said, “Conflict is the midwife of consciousness.” Crisis breeds ingenuity and adaptation. The current pandemic has revealed plenty about what we misprized and how we persevere. We learned, for example, how difficult it is to provide support to new teachers who have never taught outside a physical classroom, and how hard it is for them to deliver constructive activities from a distance, especially to young, neuro-diverse, multilingual, housing insecure, disconnected and/or rural students. The pandemic revealed fissures in school funding mechanisms and chasms in the socioeconomics of home environments. We undervalued school provisions of nutrition, enrichment, physical space, teacher labor, physical and mental health support, child care and social cohesion.
Though instructional technology tools may have allowed a certain (and important) degree of instructional continuity, all relationships in schools have been interrupted, for good and bad. These effects will ripple for years. Loved ones have been lost. Interrupted are our relationships with standardized testing, school policing, grades and other forms of tracking. Conversely, student-teacher relationships and meaningful daily engagement in curricular activities have been interrupted. Many worry about “learning loss” and other deficits. Student mental health and social development are impeded. All of our relationships have been encumbered.
So, what will change? In “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform,” David Tyack and Larry Cuban discuss ways the U.S. incessantly tinkers with schooling while the essential “grammar” of schooling persists. Unfortunately, we, too, often suffer from inertia and amnesia. While I hope we act upon new understandings about the essentials in education, the importance of relationships, our capacity for adaptation, and the inequities we have institutionalized, I fear the desire for a return to “normal” arrangements might override durable reforms. Nevertheless, I am heartened by calls to dismantle barriers to equity, and we just might resist staying on an old trajectory.
Ernesto Colín is a former public high school teacher and associate professor of teaching and learning in the LMU School of Education. Colín teaches courses about school reform, diversity, anthropology, teacher education and research methods in education. He is also a school board member (trustee) for Semillas Community Schools in East Los Angeles. His article on technology and education appeared in the summer 2016 (Vol. 6, No. 2) issue of LMU Magazine.
COVID and Careers, by Branden Grimmett
“The past is not the future.” This is what employers who recruit LMU students are telling us. With the move to online learning and remote work, college recruiters are now conducting campus interviews virtually, and employers are discovering the benefits of this shift. Recruiters engage more students — especially underrepresented students — and connect prospective hires to company executives and mentors earlier in the process. Virtual interviews take place on platforms like HireVue or Google Hangouts, reducing the overhead associated with traveling to college campuses each year.
The Career and Professional Development office also transitioned services to support LMU students in this new reality. Students utilize VMock, a 24/7 artificial intelligence résumé review tool that compares their document to all other LMU student résumés and thousands of student résumés across the country. Prior to interviewing, students schedule virtual mock interviews with CPD career coaches on Zoom. Our office works with over 30,000 companies — including 100 percent of Fortune 500 companies — who post their internship and job opportunities in Handshake where students can apply, communicate with current and former employees at their dream company and attend virtual employer events.
Despite the incredible challenges posed by COVID-19 and the trauma of racial justice, LMU students remain resilient. Ninety-six percent of the undergraduate class of 2020 successfully landed a job or enrolled in graduate school within six months of completing their degrees — an incredible feat given the depressed job market. But we know many recent grads and alumni from all class years are struggling with job loss, underemployment or unmanageable workloads.
While the past is not the future, the future does remain bright. The pandemic has forced changes on all of us, voluntarily or not. Yet, the experience has taught us much about how we support and prepare our students and alumni for an ever-changing business environment, now and in the future, and that is very exciting. Career and Professional Development stands ready to ensure LMU students and alumni leverage their Jesuit education to achieve their full potential.
Branden Grimmett is associate provost for Career and Professional Development. He earned a Ed.D. in higher education administration from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard University. His work in higher education has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The Career and Professional Development office is prepared to support alumni at any stage in their career: https://careers.lmu.edu/alumni.
The Laws of Dance, by Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo
Those of us fortunate not to have to face the mortality of self or loved ones during this pandemic have been given these other parameters to consider for the past 10 months — time, space and movement. These three elements also happen to make up the very DNA of dance. Ironically, the pandemic that has halted live dance, rendering it down to the pixilation and latency of Zoom, actually operates according to similar values.
In our pre-COVID 21st century, live dance was happening, but it was not necessarily safe. Innovation in the digital age has been fueled by the quest to live beyond the reach of such anachronistic lugs as time and space. Zip. File. RAM. Paralleling digital innovation, we were becoming ever more stationary beings, unconscious of embodiment, momentum and proximity. Our denial of time and space — elemental laws of physics — could only yield our denial of motion.
Then COVID came along, forcing us to feel the empty hours of canceled activity, to widen our personal spaces, and to see the choreography of ourselves in relation to others in the grocery line. While we have struggled through this all too real performance of living, live performance took refuge in the simulacrum. “Alone together” performances have been thrilling to watch, perhaps, in part, because they push us dangerously close to those questions: Is this the future of live performance? Why go to the theater when this can come to my screen at home? Why risk the infection of touch when we can so gorgeously simulate union?
I believe live dance will come back strong, flowing along the very fissure the pandemic made to our values of compressing time and space. Now that we have been forced to acknowledge time, we have an opportunity to respect the artisanship of the dancer. Now that we draw meaning again from physical relationship, we have an opportunity to appreciate the craft of the choreographer. Now that we have been forced to widen our personal boundaries, we have an opportunity to view sprawling studios and cavernous theaters not as wasted spaces, but as life-saving ones.
Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo is associate professor and chair of the Department of Dance in the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts. She has spent more than two decades in dance as a performer, choreographer and educator, and was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
The Spirit in the Pandemic, by Jason Sexton
The American religious experience has been an expression of individualism from the beginning. What the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted is how individual religious experiences of spirituality are mediated in time and space. Not that religious experience wasn’t mediated before, expressed materially through buildings, ministers and rituals, but during the pandemic these traditional loci of worship have become elusive.
Zoom gatherings became all. For some, this cultivated strong longings to be back physically with the gathered community, leading some to recklessly disavow government health orders and common decency. For others, this meant accepting being an “absent” community, having emptied the gathered community of its physical presence. For others still, even virtual gatherings proved “essentially insufficient.”
But these approaches view religion as largely human-centered. Churches had always gathered locally, physically. But now believers had the expansively diffuse gatherings and how they impacted both desires and expressions of faith — connected to church while simultaneously scattered in a range of places. God is in all.
Creative clergy arose to unanticipated challenges — whether pandemic-related illness and loss, or matters around racial injustice — keeping interested believers and seekers engaged while meeting tangible needs in their wider communities. The church showed up as a real agent of countercultural healing in the world, enabling believers and nonbelievers to engage the church’s message in new and open ways.
The church as a public actor has rarely had such a porous openness to the watching world, where affective religious feelings and impulses exist in “the gathering” while having an immediate connection to the real world. The church dissolved in a new form in the world, enabling and affirming many new ways of being Christian in the world, in the everyday, as a way of life. Believers have always wanted this, and the Holy Spirit gave it at a most unusual time, and will also lead into the next season.
Jason Sexton is a lecturer in theological studies in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. He has been a visiting fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for the Study of Law & Society. He is a past president of the American Academy of Religions, Western Region and was the editor of Boom California magazine. His essay on pride, in our feature story on the Seven Deadly Sins, appeared in the summer 2017 (Vol. 7, No. 2) issue of LMU Magazine.
Losing Touch, by Brian Treanor
This fall, after driving cross-country to Boston, I dropped my daughter off for her first year of college. We stayed with her godmother and, since we had all been recently tested, after about five minutes we decided to remove the masks and join the same ‘bubble.’ When my daughter and I left the next morning to swim at Walden Pond before her move-in, I hugged Kerry goodbye. I’m not an excessively demonstrative person, but I started to tear up, realizing that, except for my wife and my daughters, this was the first person I’d touched in six months. I was profoundly moved by the experience.
When the first round of “lockdowns” began in March, one of the things that changed was our experience of our own embodiment. Suddenly, we lost contact, literally, with the richness of the tactile world: handshakes, embracing friends, shared meals. Even mundane objects like mail, groceries, currency and doorknobs became objects of suspicion. Aristotle tells us that touch is the most fundamental of the senses; as long as we are alive it is “on,” even while we sleep. But, if so, the past year has been one of not-quite-life.
Even prior to the pandemic, our sensuous engagement with the world was under threat from ‘reality’ television, ‘social’ media and a thousand other abstractions. Author Richard Louv wrote of “nature deficit disorder” affecting both individual health and social well-being. However, as is often the case, we appreciate things most acutely when they are taken from us. It’s difficult to know what the future will be like. But I hopethat one long-lasting change wrought by the pandemic will be a renewed appreciation of and gratitude for the simple fact of being alive, bodily, in the material world, for community with each other, and for the Earth.
Brian Treanor is a professor of philosophy in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and the holder of the Charles S. Casassa Chair. He is the author of eight books including “Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living.” His expertise is in environmental philosophy, ethics and the philosophy of religion.