An IAD Approach to COVID-19 on Campus

Abstract

"In the wake of the coronavirus, many institutions have been forced to implement new policies, goals, and rules in promotion of public health and safety. Chief among these institutions, with varying degrees of success, are universities. The question administrators and students alike are left wondering is which features of a university might contribute to a successful response? Answering this question requires acknowledging how different success may be imagined by these occasionally disagreeing groups. As a student of Yale College, I will be grounding this exploration in our own unique residential college system, and more specifically, my own residential college, Grace Hopper. Unlike other college dormitories, residential colleges have their own administration and constitute their own institution, as well as community, within the university. The institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) offers a strategy with a small arsenal of strategies to observe and explain institutions, like universities, as well as the consequences of different institutional choices. This IAD arsenal contains tools for formulating and connecting questions, research agendas, and research itself that guide the curious to valid understandings of the important problems. With this framework, I hope to explore the institution of Grace Hopper’s residential college and ultimately find an explanation for compliance and consent to coronavirus response measures in this residential college."