The human, personal touch of Wake Forest is something we greatly value, and it has been a point of pride that our communications with our parents and families are warm, personal, and that they reflect our desire to have you engaged as vital members of our university ecosystem.
Right now, many of us on campus are engaged with coronavirus planning and preparedness; we have multiple meetings every day. This is probably the most complex thing I have worked on in my 20 year career at Wake. This coronavirus work is fast paced, it requires a lot of collaboration across the university, and information changes quickly.
Because coronavirus is a health concern, there are – understandably – a lot of parent and family questions coming in: What is WF doing to plan? What would we do if X or Y happened? Did you know that School X has canceled classes/gone to online delivery – will Wake do that? What about [insert question]? etc. This leads us to a situation where it is increasingly difficult to sustain the kind of high-touch, responsive communications you have come to know from Wake.
So I want to lay the groundwork for a “new normal” that comes with a significant increase in parent/family questions before the coronavirus impacts Winston-Salem or our campus. What does this new normal look like?
Response to emails might not be as long, warm or personal as you may have come to expect from Wake Forest. We’d ask you to help us triage serious concerns by putting “URGENT” in the subject line so we could attend to the most urgent needs.
Similarly, phone conversations may need to be shorter than normal; we may refer you to our coronavirus web site (coronavirus.wfu.edu), where we are placing all relevant information, messages to campus, and FAQs.
Requests to speak with/receive an email from/meet with a particular person may be more challenging than usual.
We may have days where there are no Daily Deac blogs, or they may be very brief and only link to the newest campuswide email.
Please know that our commitment to parents and families remains unchanged. The only thing that may change is that we simply do not have enough human resources to be as responsive as you are accustomed to us being :) And know that we are on this. A small army of our best crisis management and operations people are working tirelessly on planning and contingencies. We all share the same goals of keeping our campus community safe and healthy.
So I ask your patience and understanding in advance. Once our critically busy period ends, we would resume normal operations and do our best to return to the kind of warm, personal communications and interactions that you knew before.
