Crisis brings you closer
After a year as Carolina’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Amy Johnson said the highs outnumbered the lows.
After a year, it’s easier for Amy Johnson to joke about her first week as Carolina’s vice chancellor for student affairs, a week that began with a hurricane and ended with a pivot to all-remote instruction because of the pandemic.
“This is not the onboarding program that you would design for someone,” Johnson acknowledged.
But getting to know her new co-workers during a crisis also was a distinct advantage. “I feel closer to my colleagues at Carolina after just one year than I have in some other places where I worked for a number of years,” Johnson said.
The Well checked in with Johnson to see how that first year at Carolina went.
What were the highs and lows of your first year at Carolina?
The low definitely would be having to pivot to remote instruction for undergraduates a week after classes started last year. That was challenging and disappointing for everyone. There have been a lot of highs. Commencement being back in person — even though we staged it five times to allow for appropriate spacing — that was wonderful. Just a real celebration. And after a little bit of rain at the start, we were able to have convocation in person. That was also wonderful.
I’m also particularly proud and happy about the launch of our Multicultural Health Program in Counseling and Psychological Services this year. We have a total of six roles that are designed to support the needs of our students of color, especially with racially based trauma.
I enjoyed developing our Election Carolina website and working with Lynn Blanchard and my colleagues in the Carolina Center for Public Service to share resources and create a conversation about the 2020 elections and related civic issues. We hope to be able to do more of those types of projects with our academic partners in the coming months, to help connect the conversations that students are having in class — like what it means to be a global citizen — with their out-of-class learning.
How has this fall been different from last fall?
I would say we have a number of things in the plus column for us this fall. We are open in person, which is wonderful to support students’ learning and to address the serious mental health challenges presented by social distancing that many of our students faced. We know more about COVID-19 now and the protective factors that we can use to keep ourselves safe. And we have vaccines, which is one of those protective factors. We also have more students who are choosing to complete quarantine and isolation off campus, which is allowing us to have room on campus for those students who need it.
And we know much more about masking. Our medical advisers tell us that if you are wearing a good-fitting mask and are vaccinated, you are well-protected. The mere fact that you are vaccinated means that you are far less likely to end up in the ICU. But we also know that delta is more transmissible, even outdoors, so it requires us to be thoughtful about being in congested areas, when it’s important for us to put on a mask to keep one another safe.
What did you learn from changes made for the “pandemic year” and how are you incorporating that this year?
Before coming to Carolina, I had taught online for a number of years, so I had developed a real comfort with this technology. When we made the pivot to remote instruction, many people learned that they liked it and did well. We heard from many students that they got their best grades ever in an online environment.
There are some interactions and some relationships that have actually been as good, if not better, for students. Before the pandemic, many students had a real resistance to pursuing medical care, whether it was mental health care or physical health care, online. But we have heard from many students how much they actually like meeting with their counselors in this environment. And they like having office hours with faculty in this environment, too.
It can be intimidating for some students to go to a faculty member’s office or to have an appointment with a counselor. Being able to be in your own home made it more comfortable. We hope that this is one of the happy lessons learned from the pandemic — we have expanded the ways in which we can connect with students from an educational perspective, from a health perspective, from a support perspective. I think we will never entirely go back.
What are you looking forward to for the coming year?
I continue to be excited about the opportunity to work with our Carolina students in person — and online, of course. But it’s wonderful to walk through the Student Union and see people engaging and laughing, having fun and studying together. I look forward to visiting places on campus that, until now, felt very hypothetical, because I hadn’t been able to see them. And I enjoy continuing to meet and interact in-person with my colleagues. That camaraderie is important to me.
