The Northern Essex Community College Commencement and Executive Committees conferred with the school’s Student Government Association recently to address how NECC’s 2020 graduation proceedings and teaching rules will be affected by coronavirus-caused social distancing guidelines recently mandated by Mass. Governor Charlie Baker (R).

 Via the first-ever SGA public Zoom meeting, a communication format which will replace the student government’s usual in-person, weekly public meetings for an indefinite period of time. SGA members spoke with Commencement Committee chairs Ernie Greenslade, Susan Shain and Janice Rogers as well as with Executive Committee chair Sheila Muller, whose body oversees and facilitates processes related to NECC’s finances, academics and many other committees. The Commencement Committee chairs discussed with SGA members how to best execute what will almost certainly be a virtual 2020 graduation ceremony, and Muller detailed the college’s plans to avoid implementing an accommodating pass/fail grading system (in lieu of its usual letter grade methodology) despite NECC classes’ recent conversion to a new, totally online learning format.

She was, however, receptive to SGA President Samantha Cook’s suggestion to encourage professors to grade leniently and accommodatingly during a pandemic which has caused many students, especially parents who attend NECC, extra work (and consequent stress) like homeschooling children who usually go to school outside of the house. Overall, the cooperation between the SGA and college committee members seemed to confirm the SGA’s long-standing claim that it is the liaison between the student body and NECC higher-ups. With Greenslade even saying, “We’re working with the SGA and other students to finalize the details [of our plans].”

Greenslade said that the college’s scheduled May 16 graduation ceremony will almost definitely be cancelled and added that she and other commencement committee members feel skeptical about postponing the ceremony until later this year. She justified this skepticism by reasoning that when social distancing guidelines will be lifted remains unclear. So, instead of planning to hold a conventional ceremony this year, a gathering which Greenslade said usually attracts about 3,000 people, the college reported that Greenslade is entertaining the idea of a virtual commencement. She explained to student government members, “We were thinking of having a virtual, asynchronous celebration in August, and there would be different aspects to it. One would be a site. I don’t know if that would be a website or what it would be.” Editor’s Note: The college has since announced that it would hold a virtual graduation in August. 

Greenslade further detailed the possible attributes of the hypothetical webpage by saying, “[On it] we would have commencement highlights. We’d have remarks from [NECC President] Lane [Glenn]; we’d have remarks from our [student] speaker…And we’d have recognition of all the grads, you know, maybe a listing of the names, maybe a reading of all the names.”

In addition to the use of a website to deliver speaker remarks and important information to 2020 graduates, a virtual commencement would, according to Greenslade, also involve sending hard materials out to students: “The other big part would be that each graduate receives a celebration package that would have maybe their cap, hopefully their diploma, a gift from the alumni office…It would be a celebration in a box, kind of.”

This physical component and the website, said Greenslade, could together be used to replicate an in-person graduation ceremony, as students could take and send to the college via the commencement webpage some photos and videos of themselves holding their graduation gifts. These photos and videos would then be used by the Commencement Committee, claimed Greenslade: “We’ll share that on the site. And, at the end, we’d like to do a video that includes snippets from the speeches, includes all the content that we get submitted from students [with their package gifts]. It’s a celebration video.”

Commencement Committee chairs also reported that NECC President Lane Glenn is pushing to give 2020 graduates the option to walk in the 2021 graduation line, a move which would likely mean the appropriation of funds (to the 2021 commencement) larger than the usual amount of money dedicated to graduation ceremonies says  Greenslade.

However, SGA members and Muller pointed out that students need to provide outfit measurements in order to receive garments that fit them (students usually order and pay for their own gowns). Therefore, according to members and Muller, caps and gowns would be incompatible with a non-personalized, surprise-oriented graduation package. However, this observation was made after Greendale, Shain and Rogers had left the meeting. It is possible that Muller will, per the description of her occupation, reach out to the chairs to notify them of the conclusion reached by the student government. Whether or not students would be paying for caps and gowns they receive in the package (if they receive any garments at all) is also unknown at this time.

Greenslade repeatedly emphasized that the 2020 virtual commencement ceremony concept is still in its early planning stages and that no real finalizations to the plan have been made.

Muller stressed that even though some community and four-year colleges in Mass. have committed to using a lenient pass/fail grading system for the rest of the spring 2020 semester, NECC’s administration, namely Academic and Student Affairs Vice President Bill Heinemen, currently favors retention of a letter grade system. She explained this inclination by saying, “They are steering away from pass/fail only because it could affect financial aid and GPAs and how transfers work.”

Essentially, this means that NECC does not want to risk losing federal and state grants whose delivery to the college is contingent upon student recipients’ trying to maintain GPAs above a certain threshold. After all, the US and Mass. governments routinely, through methods such as reviewing professors’ roster reports and recipients’ grades, check on grant recipients’ academic statuses and progress. And it is unclear how pass/fail grades would be factored into a semester or cumulative GPA assessment paramount in determining whether or not aid should be delivered to a student. Furthermore, four-year institutions that 2020 graduations plan to transfer to in the fall of 2020 may not use or accept pass/fail grades So  the transfer of NECC credits from a pass/fail spring 2020 semester to a four year degree at a university which does not use pass/fail could be impossible.

But Muller, who is also a business professor at NECC, did express that leniency, just not in the form of pass/fail, should be adopted by the college. She added after Cook brought up how the pandemic has brought unforeseen stress into the lives of students, especially students whose children or siblings usually attend school away from home but must now be homeschooled by (or at least with the help of) their parents or siblings. Muller responded to Cook’s point by articulating, “Bill Heinemen has made it very, very clear to all faculty to think about the difficulties of what students are experiencing, lack of technology, lack of internet, loss of jobs and work. So all of that taken into consideration, to be lenient on deadlines, to really try to reach out to students and to try to engage them in different ways, find substitutions, or whatever it might be…I can’t promise that every faculty member is going to be doing that, but that’s something that Bill is very strongly encouraging.”

Muller recommended that students having trouble with a specific professor’s course requirements during the pandemic should contact other faculty, herself or other committee chairs and/or the dean of the department the professor teaches for. She said that these contacts could effectively communicate with a professor and inform them of a student’s concerns, while allowing any student who comes forward with complaints to remain anonymous.

Members of Northern Essex Community College Student Government Association and their college-employed advisor, who together hold weekly public SGA meetings at NECC, say that the indefinite closure of most NECC public services and operations due to the spread of novel coronavirus has plunged the college’s student government into unchartered, unfriendly territory but add that they think adaptation to the constantly escalating public health crisis will occur swiftly and efficiently.

The organization’s president, Samantha Cook, secretary/record-keeper, Chloe Upham, and advisor, Stephanie Haskell (who certifies student government votes and is also the coordinator of the NECC Student Life dept.), all say that meetings will move to a strictly digital format as long as the state of Massachusetts and NECC’s administration forbid the conducting of most public meetings, with Haskell saying digital meetings could begin as soon as Thu., April 2 (meetings are usually held on Thu.).

Meaning, the SGA plans to uphold statewide social distancing policies meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And while the SGA possesses the resources with which to convert in-person meetings to video conferences, members do worry that chief objectives of the SGA, like boosting low membership and bettering outreach between the organization and the student body, will be adversely affected by the cancelling of in-person SGA events. Such anxiety stems from members’ deeming in-person interaction paramount in attaining current top goals.

 The SGA usually conducts its meetings as in-person/teleconference hybrids, using the virtual platform Zoom, owned by Zoom Video Communications, to make up for the physical distance between members who, at the time of a given meeting, are at NECC Lawrence, NECC Haverhill or away from either campus. The fact that the organization already utilizes Zoom routinely means that transition to solely digital communication will likely occur without much trouble, reasons Cook. Speaking to the Observer, she said, “For my members, I think it will be a completely seamless transition.”

Cook did, however, express that she is uncertain about how guests will be figured into Zoom meetings, saying she does not know whether or not guests will contribute to the conferences by silently communicating in a chat bar or audibly speaking via video call.

  Haskell reports that the SGA also frequently uses other digital resources to execute its routine operations. Consequently, she thinks conforming to a remote setup will be a relatively painless process. She told the Observer, “This year we’ve been implementing different online tools and techniques. We have a Google Drive we’ve been saving stuff on. We’ve started a Blackboard [page]. We use Microsoft Teams so that all of our data from the past is actually digital now instead of being in a big folder sitting in our office. Since we were already moving that way, I don’t think we’ll run into that many difficult situations.”

 How a transition to a remote framework will affect overall productivity seems uncertain to SGA associates, though. Haskell argues that a purely digital meeting medium would be less conducive to side conversations than in-person meetings and would, as a result, encourage unwavering focus on pro-student initiatives. But Upham’s thinking appears more conflicted. For while she has stated to the Observer that the SGA’s constitution allows for essential procedures like votes to take place during virtual meetings, she has also said, “We can’t really help students [as much as we would like to] because we can’t [physically] reach out to all of them.”

 Especially impacted by recent limitations on outreach is the SGA’s effort to recruit new members who would continue current SGA initiatives after the graduation of today’s members. SGA members like Cook and Upham have framed recruitment as the most important SGA concern, and have recently proposed replacing executive board (elected official) meetings with tabling events whose focus is recruitment of general (nonelected) members. But now that tabling events are impossible, expanding membership has become a more arduous endeavor. And members like Cook are forced to rush to new, perhaps ineffective methods of advertisement. Cook has said, “It’s honestly a really rough situation…It makes me really anxious about our upcoming elections process, because we do need new members to carry on the student government legacy. We’re gonna try our best with social media outreach, but that will only reach students who have access to social media and know about us in the first place.”

Cook’s nervousness is compounded by the fact that rules regarding the coronavirus will indefinitely prevent the SGA from running public events for students, events like Valentine’s Day gatherings earlier this year, at NECC Haverhill and Lawrence, during which SGA members held talks about sexual health and distributed condoms to students. Such events are a staple of SGA on-campus affairs.

Other solutions Cook proposed when talking with the Observer include requesting to use the front pages of NECC’s main website and the college’s Blackboard website as advertising space, as these destinations attract perhaps the most views of any NECC-based internet resources. Haskell is also considering utilizing the SGA’s Blackboard page for outreach but adds that using mass emails to communicate with the student body could constitute an effective communication strategy as well.

   Cook, Upham, and Haskell all say that SGA members have been contacting each-other mostly as friends concerned for each-other’s well being, and that spring break, which was scheduled to end on Mon., March 23, and the recent pandemic have diverted members’ attention from student government matters. Cook added in her interview that she has largely avoided discussing initiatives with her members in order to give them space to deal with the financial and family ramifications of the coronavirus: “I’ve been contacting them in the form of making sure that they’re OK and have the resources that they need, but I haven’t wanted them to stress about student government tasks.”

Cook, Upham, and Haskell all said in their interviews that students are encouraged to contact the SGA directly, via email, with their individual concerns about how the coronavirus will affect the SGA’s ability to push for student interests. Meaning, each of the three wishes to avoid sending out a reductive, disconfirming message and wants students to approach the SGA, an organization meant to serve as a liaison between faculty and students, individually with their unique worries so that said worries can be adequately addressed.

All three want students to think of the SGA as an active organization whose capacity has not at all been diminished by recent changes. Haskell perhaps delivered this message the most eloquently in saying, “Students should just know that the faculty, staff, and student leaders are all still here. We might not be physically right in front of you, but we’re all just a phone call, an email, or Zoom away. Nobody’s alone in this…Always reach out and ask.”

Higher-ups in Northern Essex Community College’s (NECC) administration are reporting that NECC is working to establish a chief diversity officer (CDO) position, an occupation whose primary functions are planned by higher-ups to mainly consist of bridging the seeming academic success gap between white students and students of ethnic minorities, ethnically diversifying the pool of applicants for various NECC positions and evaluating, and perhaps acting on, whether or not formal messages, like letters, sent to students and faculty of color exhibit unintended racial and/or ethnic microaggressions which can deter recipients from staying at NECC.

Addressing a Thu., March 5 public meeting of NECC Student Government Association (SGA) Executive Board members (elected officials who maintain oversight over SGA affairs) and general members (unelected officials without management obligations but who can still participate in discussions and votes), NECC President Lane Glenn and NECC Executive Committee Chair Sheila Muller, both of whom accepted a speaking invitation from SGA President Samantha Cook, together laid out a case for the incorporation of a CDO into NECC’s faculty. Glenn and Muller said that the creation of the position is still in its early, planning-based stages.

While no SGA members expressed skepticism of the possible value of trying to bolster the college’s racial conscientiousness via a CDO, one student guest, an audience to the meeting’s affairs, did object that he feared anti-white discrimination could result from an effort to aid minority groups in the hiring and learning processes on campus.

Glenn and Muller both responded to the student’s remarks by saying that no discrimination against any group is intended by the college to be a part of diversifying staff and addressing the needs of students of color.

Glenn claimed that equalizing success among white and minority students has been a priority of NECC’s administration for a relatively long time: “In terms of student success, the one goal that is most important is…closing the gaps between student success, specifically between latino students and white students. We are better than most community colleges in Massachusetts at that already, but there’s still a gap. And that’s unacceptable.”

The “gap” Glenn referred to was one he said was caused by several variable discrepancies, namely differences between white and latino student retention rate and academic performance. Glenn added that a holistic analysis of overall academic performance by NECC students revealed that all these variables together constituted an approximately 6% gap between the academic success of white and latino students. He did not specify what the units for this percentage are or what party or parties conducted the analysis.

Glenn emphasized the need for administrative change by saying that NECC is, “as of 2017, what is sometimes referred to as a majority minority campus. More than half our students are students of color; that’s not the case with our employees.”

A possible solution to what Glenn deems an unhealthy lack of student ideology representation among NECC faculty is, as mentioned before, the hiring of a CDO. Glenn explained what a CDO might be tasked with by saying, “When colleges look to potentially hire a chief diversity officer, sometimes what they’re doing is trying to hire a person who will put the pressure on department chairs and deans and vice presidents and presidents, right, to be a conscience [mediator] in hiring decisions and in disagreements between students and faculty or between employees.”

He elaborated, “[We need to hire someone] to create an environment [friendly to] people who historically may be underserved or who do not have the advantages they would have if the playing field were levelled.”

Focusing more on the less general, more micro scale of a CDO’s responsibilities, Muller, speaking to the Observer, clarified what levelling the playing field could look like: “It could be, simply, a document…Say, for example, you’re getting a suspension letter. Is the wording of that letter done in such a way that a student of a particular minority group would have a better response to, would not feel threatened by?”

Words like “termination” and “suspension” often carry especially negative connotations in the minds of students of color, said Muller. She added that a CDO would screen letters sent to students and NECC employees of color in order to ensure said letters are free of microaggressions.

Discussing with the Observer the equalization of opportunities across the racial lines of prospective employees, Muller argued that the CDO should also oversee an overhaul of how the college looks for job applicants. She postulated, “When you write a description [for a job] that is so convoluted, that [the magnitude of tasks] doesn’t really match the amount of money you’re willing to pay certain individuals, it creates a certain gap due to which people are just not gonna even look at [the job]. It doesn’t allow us to have a larger pool of individuals to tap into.”

If simplification of job postings were conducted, Muller said, then perhaps NECC would begin to observe long-sought-after ideological and ethnic diversification of its faculty.

Yet the proposed position of a CDO was not without its criticism. When Glenn paused the presentation to invite questions from SGA members and guests, a student guest raised his hand to express personal concerns of his. The student said, “I’m all for diversity, but one concern for me is that I see a lot of other colleges rejecting [qualified, white] students and faculty trying to enter an organization because they’re trying to diversify their area more [with students of color not necessarily as qualified as rejected white students]…Credentials versus diversity, you know?”

Glenn, possibly referring to federal precedent set by the US Supreme Court, responded, “To be clear, quotas are illegal and wrong. We will not drive change that way. We will not drive change because of certain [demographic] numbers or percentages [in our faculty].”

He went on to specify that appointing a person of color to act as a representative of the problems of their own demographic would not only be ineffective but also racist. Glenn also, more broadly, indicated that a CDO would not be hired on the basis of their own race but by how willing they would be to help recruit people who, in some way, push the interests of “underserved” communities. Meaning, the CDO and the officials they help hire could, theoretically, be white people of racial conscientiousness. Muller, talking to the Observer, concurred with the substance of this assertion by arguing, “When you talk about diversity, it’s not just the hiring of staff whose demographics mimic [those of] the student body; [the principles must be] integrated into every fiber of our being.”

But Glenn does hold reservations of his own in regards to formally establishing a CDO position. He contended that hiring a CDO could lead to indolence among members of the NECC administration: “In my own experience, sometimes when you make [chief diversity officer] someone’s job, other people feel that it’s not their job. And, in my view, everyone should share that responsibility…there might be others that think, “Well, you know, they’ll take care of that, so I don’t have to think about it.” I want everybody to think about it.”

After Glenn said this, Muller silently nodded her head in agreement.