Permanent Professor Colleagues,

I hope this message finds each of you healthy and thriving! We are rounding out Week 2 of what is shaping up to be a successful fall semester, and I owe all of you a long-overdue update (and fair warning: this is lengthy…so grab a cup of coffee!) In this update, I’ll share how we as a DF team have come together and faced COVID, how we’ve adapted and designed for our “new normal,” and how we’ve found silver linings in the midst of this global pandemic.

Through the leadership of our Permanent Professors, USAFA maintained our high standard of education…even in the wake of COVID. Back in early spring, snow days were the biggest disruption to teaching we could imagine. The world changed in the beginning of March, and on March 13th we made the decision to send home our 2, 3, and 4 degrees. We put a pause on academics, which gave us roughly seven working days to pivot this institution from 100% in-person teaching to 100% remote teaching. That shift should not be taken for granted; it took the dedication of our team to figure out how to move online and execute teaching and learning in a brand new environment.

On March 30th, after just three days back in the new “remote” classrooms, the Secretary of the Air Force, the Chief of Staff, the Chief of Space Operations, and the Chief Master Sergeants of both the Air Force and Space Force visited following the loss of two first class cadets. We decided to graduate our Firsties in 18 days, which required another amazing shift by faculty. We raced to finish the Class of 2020’s coursework in a manner that ensured accreditation of the degree and each major was not jeopardized. The rigor associated with this shift was eye-watering. We stopped core classes for most Firsties (and reduced corresponding credit hours)…except for those that needed a full-credit course (either for graduate school or simply to graduate). We dove into accelerated majors’ courses and ensured that our various accrediting bodies were satisfied with our approach. All the while we tracked curricular changes and caught up with the governance responsibilities through over 360 curriculum change proposals. On April 18th, we held graduation on the terrazzo with the Vice President of the United States and Air and Space Force leaders in attendance. We rejoiced with those 967 graduates and knew we had set the standard for the nation.

We didn’t pause to catch our breath and immediately went back into remote teaching for our 2, 3, and 4 degrees. Ever since mid-March, we’ve been innovating, laboring, and challenging ourselves to learn how to be better teachers and colleagues in this tough environment. We took a deliberate three-week reconstitution period in June to look at ourselves critically and determine how to design courses for this new environment (as opposed to the rapid adaptation we conducted in mid-March!) We published a transparent compilation of our lessons learned from extensive faculty and cadet engagement. Finally, we encouraged folks to take a week of leave!

The summer was filled with incredible opportunities for our cadets. Following our reconstitution period, we focused again on contributing to our shared USAFA mission. Thanks to DF faculty, a vast majority of the upper three classes had meaningful opportunities over the summer. First, we over doubled our normal summer academic offerings (over 1280 seats) with half the classes in person and the other half offered remotely. (This included enrolling over 300 cadets in Astro 310 in an effort to help cadets download their academics this fall!) Second, we sought out and created more summer research opportunities with a total of 458 cadets doing Summer Research projects, including first-ever virtual research with the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL). The innovative partnership with AFRL provided our cadets opportunities to work solutions to real-world and operational problems. Third, we launched a brand-new series provided by the Air Force Academy Foundation and the Institute for Future Conflict, bringing in world-class subject matter experts to present weeklong seminars on cutting-edge topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Cyber, UAVs, and Space Control. We engaged over 1700 cadets this summer across six seminars, helping our cadets learn and think critically about future conflict and the overlap of technology, policy, and strategy. These experiences propelled our cadets along their path to developing into leaders of character for our Air Force and Space Force! All the while we continued to design courses for the fall semester and incorporate the lessons we learned from spring.

We started a new program called One Book, One USAFA. The purpose of the program is to ignite conversations throughout the cadet wing and the larger USAFA community that continue during this academic year and beyond. Furthermore, we hope to increase the feeling of inclusion within our community by giving a shared reference point. All of the Basic Cadets (and many upperclassmen and permanent party) read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This fictional account of a post-pandemic world explores the connections between people, focusing on the values of community, culture, and art in an unknown and uncertain world. Station Eleven explores the relationship between survival and our shared need for humanity; it challenges us to think about what post-pandemic world we want to create.

At the end of Basic, we held our second Convocation ever, with Station Eleven being at the forefront of the discussion to set the stage for our fall semester. I am excited to share with you the video of our 2nd annual Convocation – our welcoming of the Class of 2024 to their academic journey here at USAFA! You can view the event at the Convocation video link. The weather was beautiful for a COVID-compliant ceremony, and we enjoyed talking with our new fourth class cadets about thriving…not just surviving…at USAFA. I am inspired by their enthusiasm for diving into literature and applying themes and messages to their lives and our world’s current events! It was particularly helpful to have had the ceremony immediately on the heels of our first weeklong on-boarding program for our new Doolies. Our Academic Success Center hit a homerun in helping our newest cadets start their transition from high school to college through a series of developmental programs culminating in Convocation.

And this leads us to the fall semester. To be blunt: we have applied the intellectual horsepower of DF faculty to lead the nation. In the wake of COVID, we stood up the “Pandemic Math Team” or PMT, a multidisciplinary team made up of faculty modeling and simulation experts who created and validated mathematical models of COVID spread. Their work gave us predictive capabilities for planning and effective policy-making. More importantly, they developed a testing rate equation (affectionately known as the “fizzle equation”) that shows what level of random testing is required to keep COVID in check at USAFA. PMT’s work has been supported by our Department of Biology which partnered with the 10th Medical Group to establish pooled sentinel surveillance COVID testing. This collective work was briefed to DepSecDef and other DoD leadership, shared with scores of other universities, and reported on by national media such as NPR. Their monumental work has enabled us to plan the policy levers needed to promote the health and safety of the Cadet Wing, faculty, and staff…and to know when to pull those levers.

For fall semester, we developed a robust, layered COVID risk mitigation strategy. It is structured to keep our cadets and faculty as healthy as possible. Our fall semester guidance went out in early June and allowed instructors to choose whether to teach classes remotely, in a hybrid fashion, or in person. This allowed faculty members to make decisions best suited to their discipline and personal situations (e.g., immunocompromised dependents). This resulted in approximately half of courses being taught remotely and half in person. Generally speaking, more core courses went remote than academic majors courses; thus, first class cadets take approximately 70% of their courses in person, while fourth class cadets have a majority of their courses remote.

Our fall planning guidance also focused on personal protective measures, including limited classroom capacity and more physical spacing, wearing masks at all times in Fairchild Hall, and adding a lot of Plexiglas barriers! We assigned each cadet squadron a classroom in Fairchild to enable cadets to spread out for remote classes with multiple classrooms for the four squadrons whose healthy upperclassmen are staying off base in hotels. We gave each academic department an additional space to call their own and schedule at will (thereby allowing a remote class to occasionally meet in person if desired). Finally, we upgraded all of these classrooms with additional WiFi capacity to better enable remote course work.

The silver linings in this effort are many. We have bolstered the IT capability of DF faculty and our classrooms; we will have wide-spread lecture capture capability by spring semester allowing intercollegiate athletes to “never again” miss a class; we have learned pedagogical techniques that will last well beyond COVID; we have a plan to build outdoor classrooms in the Air Gardens; and…my personal favorite…we will never again have a snow day! I remain incredibly proud of our faculty, staff, and leadership for all they have done in helping us plan and getting us ready for this semester…and we are off to a great start!

Well, I warned you that this was a lengthy update! If you have made it this far, I’d greatly appreciate you dropping a note to your favorite PP or two and letting them know how impressed you are. Their institutional leadership has propelled USAFA forward in this challenging time!

V/r, Linell

LINELL A. LETENDRE

Brigadier General, USAF

Dean of the Faculty, U.S. Air Force Academy