A free digital publication exploring the impact of the unprecedented events of 2020 and the potential for transformation in higher education—produced collaboratively by graduate students and faculty in Georgetown’s Program in Learning, Design and Technology. 

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, the idea of “opening” has loomed large and led to many challenges and questions. The crisis also has generated a set of transformational openings:

• The pivot to remote instruction opened higher education’s eyes to the inequitable circumstances surrounding students and technology.

• The violent deaths of Black men and women, and subsequent protests, opened an unprecedented conversation about systemic racism and racial justice at colleges and universities everywhere.

• The consequential emerging demands for educational adaptation, as well as the call for racial justice on campuses, gives higher education new openings for creating and sustaining meaningful change.

Harvested and edited from a series of interviews with higher education leaders, Openings lays out the landscape of challenges arising from the events of 2020, and offers the foundations for a transformative agenda emerging from the COVID-19 crisis and events related to racial justice.