Our presenter this week was Dr. Gerry Turcotte, President of St. Mary's University, who discussed the state of post-secondary education during the COVID-19 epidemic.
Thank you very much. I would like to talk a little bit about the coronavirus impact on our post-secondary institutions, and I am happy to put that in context using St. Mary's as a case study. However, I want to begin with a reflection partly moved by the opening poem that we heard today.
I have been writing a monthly column for several newspapers for the last six years, and writing columns is a challenge. You must overcome your writer's block when it happens, and you must keep things fresh. My column uses a lot of humour to talk about everyday issues, and I try to do my best to be clear and relevant, without being superficial. I always try to reference my institution as much as I can in those columns. I admit that I sometimes feel a bit like I am writing one of those product placement ads with the St. Mary's cereal box is placed strategically in a frame. Still, I think what I promote for St. Mary's is the position of all other post-secondary institutions in the province.
The great thing about the work we do is that we promote higher education and the way that it enables and expands opportunities for society. That is an important and noble task. The reason I mentioned these columns is that I swore that I would never write a COVID-19 column, and last night I was putting the finishing touches on such a column.
I love the way we cope with stress through humour in the face of this catastrophe. It can sound as if we are exaggerating, but COVID-19 is a game-changer. It is not just a respiratory bug: it is a game-changer. To me, it is an attack on the very things that make us human: our interconnection with each other. The most devastating image was all the sacred religious sites sitting vacant, from Mecca to the Holy Land. The image that most resonated with me was Pope Francis celebrating Mass in St. Peter's Square on his own.
I marvelled at the images of cities in India and China that are now visible from space due to reduced pollution. These images remind how we impact our planet, but also how quickly nature is prepared to reassert itself. I love how wildlife, usually shy of people, is starting to appear in all major population centers. These images remind us that we have a large but temporary footprint on our planet.
At St. Mary's University, we are trying to provide meaningful experiences to our students despite having had to move all our courses online. We were able to accomplish this in only three days with a small Information Technology department. Unlike the larger institutions that have dozens of IT staff, we only have three IT workers, all of whom are tired right now. We did not have systems designed to carry the required data volumes to support an entirely online instruction environment.
Our professors pride themselves on face-to-face delivery and on being available to work one-on-one with students in an environment where the average class size is twenty-one students. I tell people that one of the universities I taught at in Australia bragged about having small class sizes, but we meant our breakout seminars and tutorials. Otherwise, I taught over 450 students in one lecture hall and had the lectures broadcast to five satellite campuses. The requirement to go online had a much more significant impact on St. Mary's than would have been at a larger university. Our post-secondary institutions have performed miracles to deliver online instruction, and I think we have done as well as can be expected with the commitment of our faculty and support staff. Our students embraced the challenge.
Moving the last three weeks of a semester online is one thing, but starting a new academic year online is quite another, particularly when students must pay fees and purchase textbooks. The complications will be of a different order of magnitude, and I can tell you that this is the primary focus of all post-secondary institutions. Right now, we are all modelling three scenarios: face to face, fully online, and blended delivery. In the hybrid situation, which is arguably the most difficult, universities would start online, and slowly return to face to face instruction. We are all hoping for the crisis to be over, but we know the way we do things has probably changed permanently, even once we are back to face-to-face. I do not think we are going to go back to our old ways.
I think COVID-19 has already changed how we look at the configuration of our office spaces, and we all expect there could be further waves of infection. Planning is extraordinary right now, and we are making some of this up as we go along because nobody has tackled this ever before.
Another significant issue is the emotional toll that this is taking on our teams, but also on our students. The situation reminds me that we are all social beings and that human contact is what helps us to cope. It is what helps us to flourish and to hope, and we see more mental health issues on our campuses. We are seeing increased challenges from students who are concerned not just about learning this new way but are also worried about the loss of financial support arising from lost internships and summer employment. St. Mary's has ramped up our counselling services. We use our campus ministry office to reach out to students.
We are hard at work raising donations so we can provide bursaries and buy food for our students who are most in need. We offer a free Humanities 101 program to our most disadvantaged. We pay the childcare, we pay for their food and transportation, even while we cannot meet with them in person.
It is a struggle for St. Mary's as we are one of the fastest-growing Alberta universities. We have grown by 98 percent in the last eleven years, yet we remain the lowest-funded post-secondary institution in Alberta. Interestingly, we do not receive public funding from the federal government because they view us as a public university, and therefore the responsibility of the province, while the Government of Alberta sees us as a private university. To address this, we work on the margins to raise the funds our students need.
I would like to conclude my remarks with an idea to pull these thoughts together. I read an article by the astronomer Harlow Shapley, who realized that about 1 percent of the air that we breathe is argon. The remarkable thing about argon is that, unlike ozone and carbon dioxide, argon gas never disappears. Argon passes through the body untouched and re-enters the atmosphere. Shapley realized that your next breath would contain more than 400,000 argon atoms that Gandhi breathed in his long life. Argon atoms are here around us from the conversations at the Last Supper, from Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and from the volunteers who helped their neighbours during the Calgary flood. Unlike argon gas, COVID-19 will not be here forever. It will pass. However, it has shown the incredible power of our community to rise above our fear and vulnerability. I think the virus reminds us to look beyond ourselves.
I can't help but think of the hundreds of thousands of people in refugee camps displaced by wars that continue to rage and of those closer to home who are struggling to pay their rent, tuition and their food bills. COVID-19 has one valuable lesson for us, which is that our world is not so vast after all and that we are connected. I prefer to think of that connection to the reality of the argon gas example.
We share a breath that our brothers and sisters all over the world over have a part in shaping. It is a sobering thought that because we share that breath, we must work harder to support our neighbours near and far, even if it means that we must do this virtually. So again, I hope that this is something that we learned from this pandemic is that we bear responsibilities to each other and our world.
Service is the foundation of Rotary, and in this incredible time, I ask you to look out for each other, stay healthy, and stay connected, so we can all get together face-to-face soon. Thank you for the opportunity to share these words with you.