Regulatory Paroxysms or How to Control the Uncontrollable

Universities have largely been successful in transitioning to the online environment, much more than almost any other industry. Victims of their own success, university leaders have been asked to stay online in the fall to reduce the overall rate of infections. The other industries had to bу allowed to reopen sooner, because they suffered relatively more. K-12 schools got the worst possible deal, where they were allowed to half-reopen. That is what I was afraid was going to happen to us. It did not, but it happened to schools, and let us all empathize. From the logistical point of view, it is the most complex and daunting task. Our K-12 partners deal with three sets of contradicting guidelines AND with enormous pressure from parents. As a colleague put it today, “Where will that kindergartner go twice a week, if both parents work?” This half-reopening for K-12 creates significant problems for teacher training programs, but does not affect the rest of the university.

OK, we got it relatively easy, with mostly online instruction. All we need to do is figure out how to deliver online instruction a little better, and create a health and safety plan for the campus while letting a small percentage of classes to be f2f. The latter part turned out to be more difficult than we all expected, and to be completely honest, is not working out that well. The paradox of the situation is that the campus requires some staff, students and faculty to be on campus, and at the same time forbids others to be here. How do you require and forbid something at the same time? Normally, a thing is either a good people want, or an obligation people don’t want, but must do. It is rare that the same thing could be a good and an obligation.

The only thing burecracies know how to do is regulate. We have developed an application process, that treats f2f presence as a scarce quasi-good, as something you can get only if you ask nicely. But if you create a barrier, a scarcity, you encourage people who really need to be here to do their job better to NOT apply, and stay home, while damaging the quality of their work. At the same time, people who need to get out of the house must now prove they are deserving this great privilege of coming to campus. For example, program faculty as a group have decided that a certain class will really be damaged if taught online, because it trains students to read body language and non-verbal cues. However, one of the faculty members has personal health concerns and still wants to teach it online. That’s creates a weird tension – we just begged for a permission to teach f2f, and argued it was impossible to teach online, but now we still want to offer one section f2f. Awkward! The bottom line is – people need different things, and making the application process equitable and fair is very hard. You may be concerned about getting infected. But I may have a home full of kids, and may go crazy if I have to teach another class from home. For me the quiet of the office is an equally compelling health need.

In general, do not regulate anything you don’t have to regulate. We saw over the course of the quarantine, that voluntary compliance along with strong messaging gives results comparable to strictly enforced rules. If there is enough trust and understanding of the dangers, people tend to make mostly reasonable choices. I think it will work with us as well. Give faculty and staff general guidelines, establish a set of norms, but trust people to figure out what is it they need to do and how to do it without endangering others. We have the most educated and reasonable workforce in the country. If anyone can do it, they can do it.

Th issue with over-regulation is that it is (a) very expensive, and (b) has a lot of side effects. It is expensive because of the transaction cost for all the applications, reviews at multiple levels, the cost of time for highly paid managers, etc. The side effects may include, paradoxically LOWER levels of compliance in comparison to voluntary regimes. Establishing a rigorous procedure remove the internal locus of control, and encourages cheating, hoarding, and other undesirable behaviors. Once you signal people that they cannot make good decisions, you undermine the power of conscience. We do not have police cameras to check who is and who is not in their offices. We have to rely on self-policing anyway, and that can only start with trust.