The College Crisis Initiative (or C2i) is a student-centered research lab at Davidson College dedicated to examining how colleges and universities innovate in times of crisis. Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, C2i tracks college and university reopening plans of nearly 3,000 four-year and two-year, nonprofit and public community colleges, colleges, and universities in the United States and around 900 institutions abroad. With more than 30 student team members and 25 research affiliates at major universities, research organizations, and think tanks, C2i conducts research on how colleges are innovating in this time of crisis. Trusteeship asked Christopher R. Marsicano is an assistant professor of the practice of higher education and the founding director of the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, about the project.
What inspired the creation of C2i and how did you develop it?
In mid-March, I was meeting with my three undergraduate research assistants (in a socially distant manner, of course) lamenting the end to an in-person experience during the spring 2020 semester. At Davidson, our mission is to build “creative and disciplined minds for lives of leadership and service,” so, the three of us began to bounce around ideas about how we could lead and serve. Ever the liberal arts college professor and students, we talked about the story of the Italian city-state of Ferrara, which beat the Black Plague in the 17th century; when cities like Milan and Venice lost tens of thousands to the disease, Ferrara had zero deaths. Ferrara was able to pull of that miracle by controlling the flow of people and goods into the city, medieval levels of testing and tracing, and sharing information with its neighboring cities.
We decided to follow Ferrara’s example. While we couldn’t serve as bouncers to control the flow of people onto Davidson’s campus and didn’t have the medical know- how to develop a rapid COVID-19 test, we knew we could collect data. So, we got to work collecting data on how colleges were transitioning online in spring 2020. We wrote a quick paper and published it on the American Political Science Association’s pre-print website. The paper became the most downloaded manuscript in the website’s history in 72 hours. It was clear that there was an appetite for the kind of data collection we could contribute.
We were fortunate enough to be put into contact with the ECMC Foundation who generously funded the creation of our dashboard and the tools we use to collect our data, including “webcrawler” software that searches all 3,000 institutions in our domestic data set every night at midnight and flags potential changes. I should mention that undergraduate students working with one of our great collaborator programs at Davidson called Project PRONTO built both the dashboard and the webcrawler. PRONTO is a program led by a bioinformatics professor at Davidson, Laurie Heyer, that teaches students how to develop online tools.
What are C2i’s key findings?
Any plan to open a campus for in-person or hybrid instruction has a potential risk to the community. Research conducted with C2i research affiliates at Davidson College, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro shows that reopening in-person led to 3,000 additional cases of COVID-19 across the country per day at the beginning of the semester. That said, there are many reasons an institution may need to open in-person. While many campuses have tried and failed to open with low case counts, in general, we’ve found that institutions that follow the “Ferrara Model” have succeeded in keeping COVID-19 case counts down on campus. By that I mean that if institutions can control the flow of people on campus, have a robust testing regime for all students, and share information with public health officials they can successfully have an in-person semester. There are some institutions, however, that have succeeded without the resources for weekly asymptomatic testing or complete control of campus mobility. Those institutions have one thing in common—an incredible sense of community on campus. When students, faculty, and staff truly commit to working together to follow best practices—wearing masks, social distancing, etc.—institutions have been fairly successful. This sense of community is especially evident at HBCUs and liberal arts colleges—both of which have weathered the storm fairly well. In fact, HBCUs have been among the most innovative in their responses to the disease.
Visit www.collegecrisis.org/dashboard
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