College leadership decisions and experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic: an elite interview study

Abstract

Objective

This study at a US Native American-serving Nontribal Institution (NASNTI) deeply analyzed collegiate leadership’s responses and experiences during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participants

Elite interviews were conducted between April and June 2021 with the college president, provost, dean of student engagement, human resources director, and chief of police. Interviewees were purposively selected due to their positions of authority.

Methods

Each one-hour interview used a semi-structured guide for standardization and was conducted either virtually or in-person while following COVID-19 protocols. The general inductive method was used to identify nodes and categories within the transcripts.

Results

Six nodes (conceptual domains) and 18 categories were identified. Though there was variability in interviewee emphasis, the respondents described the motivations, drivers, and sentiment behind their decision-making in a transparent way.

Conclusions

NASNTI leadership reported being able to navigate the pandemic by emphasizing transparency and engaging students, while working alongside the community.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• college
• leadership
• elite interviews
• pandemic response
• Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to profound changes in our society. Dialogue and debate have occurred across myriad topics like resource allocation and priority-setting,¹ vaccine development and access,² vaccination mandates,³ lockdowns,⁴ travel restrictions,⁵ and public health surveillance.⁶ Colleges and universities were not spared the need to make complex systemic decisions. On March 3, 2020, the American College Health Association (ACHA) published guidelines with preliminary recommendations for campus preparedness, including establishing a COVID-19 planning and response committee for each campus,⁷ though at that point in time the full scale of disruption from the pandemic was not yet known or anticipated. Additional guidance and information regularly was made available through various means, such as ACHA college surveys,⁸ guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),⁹ and recommendations in academic journals.¹⁰ When many students returned to campus in August 2020, campuses, researchers, and public health professionals began identifying and describing case clusters and responses.^11,12 Teams put together evaluation reports and feasibility studies describing strategies like university asymptomatic or mandatory testing and on-campus quarantine.^13–15

Some COVID-19 research has begun to examine the nature of communication between universities and parents/guardians¹⁶ and the language used in university-based communications.¹⁷ A rapidly growing international body of research and commentary has focused directly on college students, examining topics like depression and anxiety,¹⁸ remote learning,¹⁹ adherence to prevention strategies,²⁰ and access to mental health services (e.g. telemental health).²¹ Noticeably difficult to find, however, is investigation and analysis of how campus decision-makers themselves received information, made decisions, and informed policy. As noted, there has been a relatively robust cache of guidance for campus-level COVID-19 responses from leading agencies and entities, but such guidelines tend to be outcome or procedure focused (e.g. “convene a committee to do X”), do not (and perhaps could not) unpack the complexity that lies in these processes, have no legally binding force (e.g. are open to discretion) except in cases where federal, state, or local law has been implemented, and do not highlight the social dynamics involved in the introduction and effective uptake of COVID 19 prevention mechanisms.

Such information is important not only to provide context to others who might be in similar roles, but also to provide broader descriptive knowledge (e.g. via a campus-level case study) about the intricacies and details involved in determining college COVID-19 policies and procedures. After some discussion, we (the authors) concluded that the best way to understand these decision-making processes was through direct inquiries to the decision-makers themselves. The concept of “studying up” – or conducting interviews or research with “elites” or decision-makers – emerged from social anthropology, and often has focused on power dynamics.²² Here, although the methodology and interpretation were somewhat affected by status (i.e. the interviewer being an employee of those being interviewed),²³ our primary interest in such decisionmakers was their status as the only sources capable of providing first-hand information.

Study objectives

This qualitative study addressed the abovementioned gap in knowledge by analyzing executive leadership’s experiences and decisions during the first year of the pandemic at Fort Lewis College (FLC), a public liberal arts Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution (NASNTI)²⁴ in Durango, Colorado, a town of 19,500 residents.²⁵ A total of 185 Native American tribes and Alaska Native villages are represented in its student body, which is 41% Native American and Alaska Native.²⁴ The overall FLC student body consists of 58% students of color and 46% first-generation students, with 46% of students living on campus.²⁵ While FLC does not provide health insurance directly to students, it offers low-cost office visits ($25 for a nurse practitioner, $35 for a medical doctor) at the health center as well as up to 4 counseling center visits per academic year.²⁶

Study findings will help researchers and other university-involved individuals understand the decision-making processes that were involved in a campus-level COVID-19 response, such as developing virtual and in-person care environments, close monitoring of students who tested positive, innovating flexible teaching mechanisms, and rolling out new technology. This study also uniquely provides a picture of how a smaller, lesser-resourced NASNTI navigated challenges arising from COVID-19.

Methods

In February 2021, a mixed-methods study titled Understanding the Pulse for COVID-19 Vaccinations Among the Fort Lewis College Community was approved by FLC’s IRB (IRB-2021-2). A component of the study, and the focus of this manuscript, was elite interviews²⁷ with individuals representing leadership in various capacities at FLC. Given the paucity of extant knowledge, the interviews were designed to better understand collegiate leadership perspectives on how COVID was managed, how prevention and mitigation approaches were planned and communicated, and how they were implemented in the college regarding COVID testing, vaccination, and inculcation of preventive decision making among members of the FLC community. The Methods and Results are reported in accordance with the COnsolidated criteria for REporting Qualitative research (COREQ) guidelines.²⁸ COREQ is one of the primary reporting checklists recommended by the Equator Network for qualitative research and indicates the set of elements that should be described in a study write-up in order to facilitate understanding and replication, as well as improved health research quality and transparency.²⁹

Research team and reflexivity

The interviewer and lead study author (TD) was a female, doctorate-prepared, Assistant Professor of Public Health at FLC. She had substantive experience conducting elite interviews regarding public health and vaccination prior to this study.^30,31 She was a relatively new employee at the time the study was conducted, so she did not have a significant a priori relationship with any of the interviewees. However, she had interacted with several of them prior to the study either in her role as a faculty member or as a participant in a COVID-19 mitigation committee, which facilitated her access to the decisionmakers as well as her solicitation of their participation. While decisionmakers fully intended to contribute to this research, they indicated they had never served as qualitative research participants before. Thus, they needed TD to spend some time at the beginning of each interview to explain the research objectives. Further, because communities were (and are) looking for more answers regarding COVID-19 vaccines and related regulations, and considering politicized sensitivities, caution and patience were exercised by the interviewer in asking questions about topics such as ‘post vaccination plans for in-person classes, or requirement of PPEs or not in the forthcoming semester.’

Study design

Participant selection

For this study, ‘elites’ were defined as those who held positions of leadership and authority in the college, who were responsible for making regulatory decisions regarding COVID-19 prevention and control, and who provided strategic leadership in the areas of COVID-19-related PPE and vaccination, as well as program management and communication planning and implementation.

At the time of the study, FLC had approximately 630 faculty and staff members. Four decision making roles were purposively selected as being the most important to achieving a saturated understanding of leadership perspectives in the college. These were the university president, provost, dean of student engagement, and human resources director. One additional decisionmaker (the campus chief of police) was recommended for inclusion by the dean of student engagement.

An email was sent by TD to all the five decisionmakers in April 2021 explaining the study and requesting an interview (see Appendix 1). In cases where no response was received from prospective participants (or respective administrative office representatives), a follow up email was sent about five working days after the first email. At that point, all five participants had agreed to participate in the study, so no additional recruitment efforts were required.

Setting

Once the decisionmakers consented to participate via email, calendar invites were sent in accordance with the participants’ preferences for their interview settings: three in-person interviews and two Zoom interviews. Because participants were very busy preparing for the end of the semester, as well as real-time concerns related to COVID and normal job functions, TD was required to be flexible with interview timelines (e.g. late evening interviews, or delayed interviews until just after the end of the semester), which is a typical experience with elite interviews.^30,31

Informed consent was obtained from each interviewee prior to each interview using e-mail. The three in-person interviews were conducted in the decisionmakers’ offices while maintaining COVID preventive protocols. No other individuals were present during any of the interviews.

Data collection

A semi-structured interview guide was used to facilitate the elite interviews (see Appendix 2). The guide was adapted from an interview protocol for university campus executives in a study of a two-way interactive model of campus engagement,³² in combination with the authors’ elite interview guide used to explore community engagement by national-level decisionmakers for vaccination uptake in India.^30,31 The interview guide had eight open ended questions covering four broad topics: (1) decisionmakers’ conceptualization of community and engagement for COVID-19 prevention and control, including vaccination, (2) outreach and stakeholder engagement strategies and their resonance with the institution’s mission or strategic plan, (3) strategies to ensure that prevention messaging addressed diverse attitudes and beliefs among FLC community members, and (4) resources and partnerships to support and advance these strategies.

All interviews were conducted by TD in English and lasted around 60 min. The interviews were audio recorded; names (but not titles) were removed during transcription. The participants did not review the transcripts, though they were debriefed during campus-level committee meetings.

Data analysis

Undergraduate student volunteers in a public health research methodology class (n = 3) transcribed the interviews. This decision was driven by the participatory design of the overall study as well as literature highlighting the value of involving students in faculty research.³³ After students completed word-to-word transcription, the lead author [TD] listened to the recordings and matched them with the transcripts. During that phase, she removed extraneous words that did not add to meaning, such as repetitions or pause words (e.g. ‘um). She also removed all names from the transcripts (both interviewees and other personnel who were mentioned). Then, she conducted a final recording-to-transcript review to find any additional errors; none were found at that stage. Traditional member checking was made difficult by the ongoing complexity of pandemic management at the time of the interviews. However, full transcriptions were shared with the offices of the President and Provost to ensure that their interviews had been appropriately captured, and additional steps around triangulation were conducted after analysis.

Transcripts were analyzed using a combination of inductive content analysis³⁴ and a general coding framework informed by the authors’ prior community engagement research.^30,31,35 To improve credibility of the analysis, the second author [JA] reviewed the coded text to verify conceptual plausibility of findings and engaged in discussion with TD about any discrepancies.³⁶ Before proceeding beyond this step, the authors worked to achieve general consensus – for example, the sub-code “Doing prevention communication in the face of prevention fatigue” originally included “information gatekeepers” as well, but JA thought that inferred too far beyond the raw data, so the authors revisited the text and came to agreement that the shorter sub-code (e.g. the one used in this article) was more accurate.

The final set of codes consisted of the following broad domains, each of which had several interrelated sub-codes: (1) Rapid decision making amidst uncertainty; (2) Coping with uncertainty and fear; (3) Changes and additions to roles of personnel; (4) Participatory models of prevention communication; (5) Invigorating local partnerships; (6) Using multimedia communication approaches. Categories were not mutually exclusive. For example, some aspects of ‘Participatory models of prevention communication’ overlapped with ‘Using multimedia communication approaches’ (see Table 1: Coding Tree). Initial study findings were shared with all interviewees for review and comment before being submitted for external review by other academic entities (e.g., journals, conferences).

Table 1. Coding tree.

Nodes (main themes)	Sub-nodes and descriptions
Rapid decision making amidst uncertainty	Suddenness of the situation impacted prevention communication and planning
	Simultaneous, real-time planning and implementation
	Person-centric changes, comparing it with other higher ed institutions, setting example
Coping with uncertainty and fear	Lack of precedence; decentralized evidence informed planning
	Finance, enrollment affected
Changes and additions to personnel roles	Case-by-case handling of the issue
	Frontline workers’ flexibility, contributions and risk-taking
Participatory models of prevention communication	Communication through leadership’s conversational, student-centric, positive approach
	Non-authoritarian communication
	Communication through peer-led examples
	Mix of instructional and conversational approach, follow-ups in vaccination communication
	Demonstrating care for staff and faculty
Invigorating local partnerships	Effective CE for vaccine communication and rollout using FLC’s collaborations with NA/tribes/local stakeholders
	Effective prevention communication by FLC teams
Using strategic communication approaches	Effective CE for vaccine communication by FLC teams using social media
	Doing prevention communication in the face of prevention fatigue
	Continuous and transparent strategic communication through different media
	Addressing vaccine misinformation

Results

Context

As noted, the lead author (TD) is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at FLC and served on the campus health committee that was formed to discuss campus health protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. These statuses served to mitigate some potential issues related to trust and reflexivity. It allowed her to gain access to the participants and bear an emic and etic perspective through all the five interviews. Having conducted elite interviews in the past also provided TD with a personal toolkit of engagement techniques on which to rely. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing during the study, and none of the participants had been interviewed for a research study before. Some respondents hesitated to assert their knowledge, referring to other staff members. For example, “[you] might have to talk to XXX in Marketing, they might have done a different type of targeted outreach for students who are completely online.” However, those staff members were not part of the executive leadership team per se, so while they may have had specific information to share about particular elements of the response, they did not have the broad campus-level perspective and decision-making authority of the other interviewees, so were not included in this study.

As the discussions progressed, TD noted that inertia was built and participants answered all the questions with enthusiasm and apparent transparency, barring some cautiousness about making general statements extending beyond FLC (such as ‘vaccine misinformation’). Because of the perceived value of the data generated by the study, decisionmakers chose to share interim (e.g. first round) findings with the Campus Health Committee formed to respond to COVID at FLC. All study participants indicated that their COVID-related decision making, management, and implementation roles were performed in addition to their existing leadership roles in the college. Exemplar activities reflecting these new responsibilities are provided for each participant in Table 2. In reviewing the transcripts, both authors felt that an overarching context throughout the interviews was a focus on the students themselves, both in terms of outcomes and perceptions. At the same time, there was some hesitance throughout the interviews to make definitive statements because of the rapidly evolving nature of the situation and the substantial size and nature of the task: “I have always felt with COVID that it’s sort of never over till it’s over. So you don’t want to pre-maturely declare victory.”

Table 2. COVID-19 induced roles of decisionmakers in a NASNTI.

Title	Elite interview method	COVID-19 induced roles of the decisionmaker
President	In-person interview	Transparent sharing of COVID-induced transitions (attrition, vaccination mandate, incentives to faculty and staff) through virtual town halls Motivational, participatory, and individualized communication in the face of crises Develop partnerships with local and tribal organizations for symbiotic COVID prevention programs
Provost	In-person interview	Virtual conversations with department on COVID-induced transitions (teaching methods, retention, etc.) Initiation of Hyflex teaching methods, technology bundles for students, integration of student organizations and faculties and promotion of peer- learning methods Motivational, participatory, and individualized communication in the face of crises
Human Resources Director	In-person interview	Oversight and management of the FLC app for tracking and reporting daily COVID symptoms Management and follow-up of mandatory COVID testing Conduct COVID-19 vaccination surveys and inform strategic plans for campus-wide equitable vaccination Engage with Public Health departments for students’ placement as contact tracers, especially for NA/AI communities Build strong communication chain and follow up management for students under ‘symptom watch,’ ‘quarantine,’ and ‘cleared for in-person class and/or work’ Manage partnerships in collaboration with Public Health departments with local and tribal organizations for symbiotic COVID prevention programs Facilitate strategic plans for equitable vaccination In collaboration with the communication department, facilitate social media-based external-facing communication
Dean of Student Engagement	Zoom interview	Head of the Campus Health Committee (CHC- formed post-COVID) and facilitator of CHC’s bi-weekly meetings Development, rollout, and management of the FLC app for tracking and reporting daily COVID symptoms Development, and database management of green/red health passes confirming eligibility to attend in-person classes Build strong communication chain and follow up management for students under ‘symptom watch,’ ‘quarantine,’ and ‘cleared for in-person class and/or work’ Facilitate strategic plans for equitable vaccination Manage and follow-up of mandatory COVID testing
Chief of Police	Zoom interview	Ensure seamless transfer of students from residence halls after COVID-19 emergency was declared Deliver food to needy students post-COVID Provide transportation to vaccination centers to students and their families who did not have it

Rapid decision making amidst uncertainty

Suddenness of the situation impacting planning and communication

Unsurprisingly, some participants emphasized that the rapid onset of the pandemic and speed at which the context changed often precluded both advance planning and communication.

One of the challenges… has been this has all happened so quickly… the speed at which we’ve had to make decisions has in some ways inhibited really strong communication around vaccines.

This also meant that when there were efforts at planning, there was a risk they would be obviated by changes in scientific knowledge or understanding. At the same time, there was an urgency behind attempts to manage the pandemic, resulting in the tacit acknowledgement that efforts needed to be made even when results were not predictable.

First it was, we thought… we had to clean surfaces, now we know that’s not very true.

I think we just sort of assumed that [we are] in a fight we just don’t understand but are kind of fighting for our lives. We didn’t know what we are doing, and we thought that if we don’t come up with plans that are correct… the students come back, we could look and [have financial difficulties], have to fire people.

Participants indicated the need to make rapid decisions when systems didn’t function as planned. In one example, a participant provided a lengthy description of the evolution of contact tracing on campus, where the local health system (outside of the campus) quickly became overwhelmed, and the university needed to rapidly stand up a COVID response team to identify cases and manage contact tracing and quarantine on campus.

Simultaneous, real-time planning and implementation

Study participants discussed the challenges of planning and implementing at the same time (what some program evaluators have called ‘building the plane while we fly it’). For example, the first COVID-19 vaccines were made available to college-age students in the middle of the spring 2021 semester, whereas by that point prevention and mitigation services had benefited from planning since summer 2020, suggesting differential lead-time in setting up plans. A different participant raised the example of COVID testing for students first returning to campus in August 2020, where they had to “take over and stand up a testing site… and make all that work,” only to realize that they “needed the infrastructure for [the testing site to] be operating throughout the year, not just a one-time thing.” That same participant articulated the real-time response to the first, unexpected case surge, “Everything was going better than expected, honestly, till we got about midway through the semester… we never saw a plateau… we went probably 10 days of increasing cases… so at that point, we determined that we would stop in-person instruction early.” But then they explained how that initial, unexpected implementation informed rapid planning in anticipation of future surges, “I spent a lot of the remaining time through December… trying to make sure that we had systems in place that could manage surges…”

The structure for such planning and implementation did not exist prior to the pandemic, however. That meant that leadership had to “establish some sort of higher structure” for planning and pandemic response. An Associate Vice President described how campus units had support from leadership to “make sure that their incidence plans kind of followed CDC guidance, local public health guidance, and make sure that we were doing everything we could to stay within those parameters.” The Director of HR explained the importance of multiple campus-level units pivoting rapidly, including information technology and staff at the FLC Student Health Center.

The Provost acknowledged that many of the planning and implementation steps described above were “just reaction.” But as these teams stood up, and expertise was developed, they began to “build better and better pieces onto what [they] thought they needed to do. If stuff didn’t work that well… we improved it.” One result is that although the pandemic remains unpredictable, there was a perception of a successful shift in orientation: “I think that we are moving away from reaction and more toward being very proactive.”

Person-centric changes, comparing itself to other institutions, setting an example

Amidst all the COVID-related changes, participants explained how their vision of FLC influenced how some of the changes occurred. For example, when discussing how to structure learning in Fall 2020, participants considered their vision of education,

We’re an educational institution that is hands-on experience for learning, personalized learning… that was really about our values too, about putting a stake in the ground to say we care about our students and the best thing for our students is in-person instruction.

They also considered how, despite limited resources (“we are a very small school; we don’t have a lot of money”), they could endeavor to provide a safe environment to students. They “[decided] they were going to manage [their] own testing site…” and then “determined that [they] would test every person that lived on campus to make sure that they didn’t have COVID when they moved into their residential buildings.” Leadership appears to have been quite aware that larger schools were conducting weekly testing or more intensive approaches, and the Provost described attempting to create as much flexibility and student-focused communication as possible with the resources available to FLC.

Separately, participants focused on ensuring that messaging was tailored to specific groups and contexts rather than providing a single type of message, differentiating, for example, “…campus health… campus life, and campus learning.” They also described working to ensure that different units on campus – especially staff members (in addition to faculty) felt valued, received additional vacation time, and were paid an unexpected stipend in December 2020 as a symbol of thanks for their efforts during the first year of the pandemic.

Coping with uncertainty and fear

Lack of precedence; decentralized evidence informed planning

Decisionmakers expressed frustration due to a lack of nationally planned systems, “…there was no national testing infrastructure in place, real testing was a mess” and “no support from the state or federal government beyond the CARES Act, for some of the testing.” In the absence of standardized guidance or procedures that could be followed, the leadership team needed to innovate amidst uncertainty. For example, the testing deficit was addressed by the college leadership by “[building] in next to no time a testing infrastructure that was returning results in 40 h which was incredible for a rural area like us.” Based on those lessons, and influenced by their own experiences, leadership found “the preparedness for a COVID 19 surge in the Fall helped to deal with things in a better way…” “…focusing more on vaccinations [than] testing and being more proactive than reactive.”

Study participants noted that the approaches to prevention varied considerably, considering “diversity initiatives, inclusivity, communication, and making sure vaccine rollout is equitable for all students, faculty and staff, especially as they’re coming from different areas.” Similarly, a community-engaged approach was perceived as crucial to successfully responding as a college. For instance, many preventive steps were new to people, and the Dean of Student Engagement described the importance of [emphasis ours], “…understanding the underserved populations and how it has impacted their communities and doing everything we can, to take care of those students while they’re here, versus just saying, ‘you know, you can do this online…’

Finance, enrollment affected

The pandemic at times seemed like an existential crisis, and decisions were made with the assumption that mistakes might have serious and long-lasting consequences for the college. Leaders recalled their “sheer terror” in the face of “the situation changing rapidly, things closing down, people going home and “the college scrambling to cut budgets and save money, because there was a forecast of a huge declining enrollment in the Fall [2021], even potentially not going back to school.” They believed they were “fighting for [their] lives… we thought that if we don’t come up with plans that are correct [so that] students come back, we could [encounter] financial difficulties [and] have to fire people.”

Changes and additions to personnel roles

Case-by-case handling of the issue

The complexity and scope of the situation was such that general procedures and policies developed by the leadership team did not necessarily address every contingency. Even within the university and community, there was a need to strategically approach guidelines at a micro-level. These included unique space-based action plans, such as for “the library. How is the library going to mitigate risk with all their operations and their employees and students that are coming in and out?” There were also sporadic situations requiring instantaneous decision making; for example, the Chief of Police mentioned, “we had a student who was going to take care of some plants or something in a lab and brought one of their parents into the lab. … and the next day the parent developed symptoms of COVID…”

This included “one-on-one communication with the completely online students, who constituted around 10% of the students,” regarding their vaccination requirements. “If they want to stay completely online and not participate in the vaccine requirement, that’s their choice, they can do that.” A public note from the President in preparation for the Fall 2020 semester outlined the variety of options that were made available to students in response to the pandemic. This included multiple different class types (e.g., in-person with a hybrid component, completely online, or “hyflex” classes with a remote access option), as well as broader accessibility options, including the flexibility to remain fully off-campus.³⁷

Frontline workers’ flexibility, contributions, and risk-taking

First responders and volunteers assumed both additional duties and risk. For example, “….there was a COVID team that was doing transports for students who didn’t have transportation, to isolation and quarantine and they quickly got overrun within a week of students that needed to go, so [the police] took that function over sometime in November [2020].” The Chief of Police suggested the officers had a sense of being “fortunate” because they already “had a lot of the personal protective equipment or PPEs, rubber gloves, and gas masks, which are better filtration than the N95 masks that… was getting sold out and disappearing.”

At the same time, there was still concern, especially prior to the vaccine rollout. As one of the participants explained, “…that didn’t make [police officers and volunteers] feel any better, they were still very apprehensive [because] they didn’t know if they were taking stuff home to their families. March, April, and end of May [2020] were a little unnerving for the officers…” Prioritizing vaccination of frontline workers “very early in 2021” was not only protective for them and their families but also “took a lot of the strain off of the [police officers].”

The Chief of Police reported that they “were doing a lot of stuff like distributing masks to departments like Housing who were still working on campus so that they had some sort of protection.”

Participatory models of prevention communication

Communication through leadership’s conversational, student-centric, positive approach

FLC decisionmakers perceived culturally responsive approaches to decision-making, especially given their NASNTI status, as being effective. This included infusing elements of local languages into communication materials. Two participants mentioned, “The use of the word K’é (pronounced ‘keh,’ meaning ‘system of kinship’) that made a big impression that we were trying to, even if it is not a whole quote or in the whole language, use of the Native philosophy, …people appreciated that.”

All the elite interviews revealed discursive, bottom-up, and tailored communication with faculty, staff, students, and in some cases with the broader FLC community such as parents.

…we decided that the best way was to just keep all those lines of communication open, give all information and to hold lot of town halls… trying to get them ask as many questions as possible that they would help in their decision making.

It was clear in the interviews that the decisionmakers preferred to utilize collaborative discussions and empathetic communication to develop a sense of relationship within the pandemic between the college and students.

going back through the whole arch, I think that the main elements I would emphasize is that we always were trying to think of everything through the student…like, the students’ safety, perception, and what was going to be the students’ experience.

Similar to how college leadership itself was making decisions in the face of great uncertainty, interviewees perceived that students were making difficult choices and attempted to maintain equanimity in encouraging COVID-19 preventive behaviors. For example, as part of a back-and-forth exchange with TD, the University President described, “… meeting people where they are, answering their questions and not using scare tactics and not wagging a finger on [students’] faces.” Similarly, another participant mentioned “…even though we had [a] mask mandate on campus we weren’t running around yelling at people who didn’t wear masks.”

Non-authoritarian communication

Even while under stress, leadership strove to be role models and to communicate in their capacity as members of a community who were experiencing a difficult crisis together rather than as authorities attempting to dictate specific behavior:

With faculty and staff… it was more for me to be human in my email… to be a bit like we’re a community, we’re a campus, like I know you’re working so hard, this is difficult let’s try to keep our energy up… even though sometimes I was writing emails that had like lots of information.

They also focused on empathy in communication, even when students did not adhere to guidelines. “We’d say, “Hi… oh, you know masks on campus are mandatory so here’s why… We never blamed students, when we had cases we didn’t say because the students are partying, we tried to take responsibility for that.”

Communication through peer-led examples

Leadership also perceived that peer-to-peer communication of health information was better received, and tried to use that approach where possible:

…what we found is peer-to-peer is much better received… for students to hear it from their peers. So, we really like to use our ambassadors across campus to promote what good COVID-19 behaviors look like.

Mix of instructional and conversational approach, follow-ups in vaccination communication

While emphasizing student-centered, participatory communication, study participants also noted the importance of clear, directive messaging. One of the participants recalled “offering training to integrate health messaging into classrooms.” Leadership described a sense that “…we can’t overwhelm the students with too many different messages. We have to be sharp and clear and do it across our website, Instagram…and like sometimes we’d put tables outside the Student Union and give out masks, just trying to keep it clear and consistent, but then trying to say this is a larger value of doing it for each other.”

Once vaccinations were available to students, FLC staff worked to emphasize clarity and minimize barriers while being clear about expectations. “If we tell students, you can’t move in until you comply with this vaccination policy, then we can front load all of that communication and when you show up to campus you either need to have your exemption approved or be vaccinated and be able to prove that or we will vaccinate you right then.”

Additionally, leadership reported “a pledge to be signed by every student before they register for the Fall 2021 semester, that included language around mandatory testing, vaccine, or vaccine policy…”

Demonstrating care for staff and faculty

Notably, the leadership viewed the concept of diversity beyond the categories typically used in equity-driven analyses and acknowledged the social determinants of health, such as economic well-being.³⁸ For example, they focused on “…staff getting some extra days off like the faculties. So, we gave them an extra week of vacation time.” At the same time, they acknowledged a whole-of-campus effort to serve students, remarking, “we realize you are working so hard …and give everyone a stipend before Christmas [2020] just as a symbolic token of our appreciation and trying to give people a sense of reward.”

Invigorating local partnerships

Effective community engagement for vaccine communication and rollout using FLC’s collaborations with NA/tribes/local stakeholders

Campus leadership described intentional outreach to Native American students who were eligible for vaccination through the Indian Health Service, including “…Native American students, and then it went to Native American community, [and] households of the Native Americans…” All the study participants gave examples of “reaching out to community partners.” Their responses reflected valuing and advancing local and rural connections, and a perception that “in a small rural community the more partners you have who are helping on the same issue, the better.” From among multiple examples, the university President noted:

…the collaboration with Southern Ute is probably the one I’m most proud of. They were incredible stewards of our region. They took the standpoint that the extra vaccines that they had, to make them available- first for Indian Health Services students, but then more broadly to roommates or our faculties. So we had many of our faculties vaccinated well ahead of the governor’s list. That’s an example of how rural community really came together to address the issue.

Our quantitative data from a different study appear to affirm the President’s perception; we identified that nearly 40% of the 283 students responding to a FLC-wide survey reported having at least 1 dose of a COVID-19 vaccine prior to formal statewide availability for their age group.³⁹

Effective prevention communication by FLC teams

For FLC leadership, effective communication was perceived as being conducted conjointly and with an eye toward consistency. Participants described how the “collegiate leadership worked as a team” while creating response taskforces like “campus health, campus life, and campus learning teams” who worked relentlessly and consistently to “return calls for contact tracers, doing the daily FLC App, Green Pass etc.” Leadership also ensured uniformity in messaging, such as by developing,

…a list of 35-40 questions about what’s going to happen in the Fall developed by the Admissions and Skyhawk Station. Thereafter each team looked at those questions and responded, and then we went through the leadership team to make sure we were all on the same page, and in alignment.

Using strategic communication approaches

Effective CE for vaccine communication by FLC teams using social media

Members of the FLC leadership described “…trying to work with students to figure out what messaging they hear and see the most, Instagram, Facebook, email?….or is it Canvas messaging? This was done because, “[students] might not always read the jam packed one-email-a-week that provides a lot of detailed information, [rather] they look at Instagram, and it is very hard to know what students are paying attention to?”

Participants mentioned that while they “still send emails,” the Marketing Team is responsible for publishing updates on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms. There was an intensive effort on the part of the Marketing Team to engage the community in message development.

Students like to look at social media and see what their friends are saying on social media, or what other people are doing across the world, across our campus, and things like that. Our marketing team has really delved deep in interviewing students and posting those interviews on our social media networks to connect with all students, whether they’re part of an in-person class setting or an online class setting.

At the same time, leadership acknowledged that the Marketing Team was not originally “…design[ed] to be a pandemic response team.” There were also concerns related to students who were in online learning only.

Honestly, I think it’s been really difficult to identify which students are online… maybe it was the way the system was set up because it was in such a hurried mode. We’ve started to narrow that down within the last couple of months, but it’s still not as accurate as it should be. And there wasn’t any intentional communication [with students that were completely online] from our teams…

Doing prevention communication in the face of prevention fatigue

Much as was the case with their approach to staff and faculty, FLC leadership acknowledged the fatigue and effort inherent in the overall response process. For example, “while the contact tracing teams were amazing….as the semester ended students became fatigued, and then their level of participation and compliance decreased from where it was in November 2020.” To address this, leadership expressed thoughts of creative approaches such as “we are going to try in the Spring one day off from classes and have little celebratory things…. like ‘FLC Together’ event one day and one day it was a Career Fair and the Research Symposium…and in the Fall we are going to try and have a FLC Week where classes are not canceled but every afternoon there will be something unique.”

Continuous and transparent strategic communication through different media

Amidst these diverse approaches, the participants expressed being sensitive so that they “…wouldn’t overwhelm the students with too many different messages.” At the same time, with the volume of information needing to be transferred, the President also mentioned, “So I think with communications it has always being a challenge…and thus just relentlessly communicate through many different mechanisms.” One key piece mentioned was the Fort Lewis App, a smartphone app that is used by everyone to track symptoms, get the daily Health Pass (Green or Red), and schedule free COVID-19 tests. This App provides transparency about student and faculty status in a uniform way.

Addressing vaccine misinformation

Study participants shared their experience with a virtual town hall that was organized to discuss COVID-19 vaccines and vaccinations. The town hall was open to all and its link was posted on FLC webpage. Panelists were public health faculty members and medical doctors, so that the discussion points were delivered “in a scientific way, intellectual way and logical way.”

Overall, though they expressed, “that it was handled well,” they had to face some challenging questions that “were not coming just from students but more from anti-vaxxers” who did not appear to be part of the study body. That said, one of the participants provided some outlier feedback about the vaccine mandate, that they “probably should have involved more people and inform students a little differently. I think if we could go back, [having] town halls before that message [about the mandate] came out versus town halls after that message came out.”

Discussion

For many universities and colleges across the US, the COVID-19 pandemic posed an existential crisis in which there were significant pressures on leadership teams from numerous, and sometimes oppositional, directions.⁴⁰ Critical decisions about learning modalities, quarantine procedures, campus access, vaccination policies, testing facilitation, and other factors needed to be made extremely quickly, and without some of the templated guidance that now exists and is regularly updated via entities like ACHA,⁴¹ or resources developed through initiatives like the National Institutes of Health Community Engagement Alliance (NIH CEAL).⁴² A recent article by Krishnamoorthy and Keating borrowed a phrase for this phenomenon (“figure-it-out world”) from a blog, and described it thusly: “A ‘figure-it-out’ world is generative; it relies on experimentation, co-creation, improvization, and adaptability.”⁴³ Many of FLC’s responses emerged through this paradigm, including procedures for drive-through testing sites, protocols for campus access using a color-coded app, and form letters informing professors and students about test positivity (see Appendix 3).

To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the decision-making processes of a campus leadership team as they figured out their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The information we gathered extended beyond procedures – it addresses motivations, innovations, context, and even philosophical orientation (e.g. student-centeredness, trustworthiness, and cultural sensitivities) that may be useful for other colleges and universities to consider. For COVID-19, or for similar emergencies affecting colleges (e.g. outbreaks of infectious disease), the aforementioned resources from entities like APHA and CEAL, developed since these interviews were conducted, will provide touchpoints for campus leaders. The added value of this work is that it provides a transparent look at how campus executive leadership operated in response to an unprecedented emergency. For example, we took note of the descriptions of “sheer terror” and “fighting for their lives,” reinforcing that this was not just another set of abstract or even serious decisions to be made, but rather was perceived as a pivotal moment in the very existence of the college. Despite that fear, the leadership team was able to move from “just reaction” to the creation of adaptive solutions to problems like testing and positivity status (e.g. the Fort Lewis App). We propose that there is value in sharing these stories from amidst the “figure-it-out world” of early COVID-19 as a broader exploration of collegiate emergency response; there is no guarantee that the next major challenge faced by colleges will be a pandemic. As author Spencer Holst alludes to in his short fiction The Zebra Storyteller, such information may allow an improved adaptive response to an unanticipated future threat of any kind.⁴⁴

The role of the community was consistently highlighted; often, this took the form of collaborative efforts, such as the “collaboration with Southern Ute” to facilitate vaccination. Their approach to crisis response and mitigation also reflected principles of indigenized communication that drew on the strengths of the school’s indigenous students, such as adoption of local cultural language to foster participatory engagement in prevention activities.⁴⁵ Indeed, small language modifications may affect people’s responses to information about pandemic policy.⁴⁶ It also involved front-line workers and first responders, such as law enforcement officers, who performed many higher-risk tasks for the university (e.g. delivering food to COVID-positive students, transport to quarantine). At the same time, crises in the community had the potential to bleed into collegiate decision-making, such as community testing sites being overwhelmed at times and requiring the college to facilitate their own testing for campus reentry.

Interestingly, there was an emphasis by the FLC leadership on community-engaged and equitable procedures in managing the crisis. This included ensuring that staff members had the same opportunities for time off as the faculty members, being transparent in communications around preventive measures, leveraging student voices, and redirecting rather than correcting behavior (e.g. explaining why the mask mandate was important rather than yelling at students who were seen violating the mandate). This may, to some degree, reflect the core belief systems of the FLC leadership team.⁴⁷

Limitations

This qualitative study was not intended to produce information that broadly can be generalized to other settings. To some degree, though, it may be reasonable to infer applicability to other small colleges in the US, especially NASNTIs. As with much qualitative work, this research was intended to be descriptive – to facilitate new ideas, new directions for research, and new perspectives. The primary focus of this study was on the thought processes and perceptions of the highest-level leadership on the campus; as a result, some individuals who may have had insights about the campus response from a narrower lens (e.g. health department leadership, technology staff members) were not interviewed for this project.

In addition, the interviewer was an employee of FLC, the unit at which the interviewees held positions of authority, which may have influenced findings in some way. At the same time, all elite interviews involve differences in authority and power dynamics, and it has been argued that having authority, like any other status, is subject to positional and reflexive nuance in the context of the interviews, and an experienced interviewer can navigate that context.⁴⁸ Further, scholars have noted that many people in authority are used to being asked questions in a semi-structured format as a function of their role, and are used to sharing their thoughts.⁴⁹ In the case of this study, the information shared as part of the interviews did not contradict public-facing communication by leadership, increasing our confidence in its likely veracity. As a further point of triangulation, we note that many of the concepts that were discussed in these elite interviews were later reflected in some form or capacity in student-based research conducted around the same topics at FLC.³⁹

Conclusion

There has been little exploration of the thought processes behind collegiate COVID-19 decision-making. This paper focused on the key ‘elite’ decisionmakers at a US NASNTI as they navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. In this case, a smaller NASNTI reported being able to navigate the pandemic by emphasizing transparency while working alongside the community. Through the process of collecting and coding data for this study, we began considering the utility that a larger, similar study across many colleges and universities of different types might provide. This information might include different decision-making frameworks, plans to prepare for emergencies (broadly), changes to internal leadership dynamics, and related “behind the scenes” components of the COVID-19 response. For instance, a Delphi study of collegiate crisis leadership decision-making would likely be valuable for current and future crises.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the Fort Lewis College Institutional Review Board.

Data availability statement

Qualitative data will be made available on reasonable request to the lead author (Tapati Dutta; [email protected]). These data will be made available in redacted transcript form only; for reasons of privacy, video and audio recordings will not be shared.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was used to support this research and/or the preparation of the manuscript.