008 MU Talks With Dr. Craig Williford - Multnomah University's Response To Coronavirus and much more

I can't. I can't do it. I can't. Oh yeah.

I don't know if it's an oh yeah.

Yeah.

It's not that the world is. It's been tough.

It's been. Yeah. If you followed us, if you've been with us through episode, I'm pretty sure you've noticed that we went from our regular self of being on university to covering a subject that has to be covered and has to be talked a lot. Today I'm here in the studios of Monomer University with Reverend Dr. Robert J. Hildebrand. Greetings and also known as Rob by all his students. And with Dr. Craig Williford, who is the president of Multnomah University. Welcome back to MU Talks. Thank you, Dr. Williford. And today we're talking about coronavirus. We're talking about COVID 19. And this is framed as a pastoral conversation. I know Craig at heart, so outside of your heart you're a president, but at heart you might still be a pastor. Pastor. After so many years of working in pastoral ministry. We've had some interesting weeks. We've had some really interesting weeks. I'm going to do a little self reflection before we get into it. Leading through, through a pandemic is an excitement that I never want to feel again. Is. Is an excitement and adventure that I, I only want to have once in a lifetime. And walking with people through all the changes and everything that has happened and such an evolving thing. So no int, no nothing. Let's just talk about how you've experienced this, what's going on, how you've seen people, you worked with so many people and you came alongside them. So welcome.

Yeah. So many people are asking me questions that really indicate that they are feeling insecure, afraid, out of control. They want certain answers from me. They want answers that will guarantee when the new normal will return or they'll return back to their normal kind of life. Even this morning, multiple emails. Can you tell me what will happen on March 30th when the school comes back into session? Will you guarantee? Are you sure? You know, can you. We can't. And so in the midst of this, because I feel some of those same emotions, I fear for my family. I don't want my grandkids and my son and my daughter in law to have to experience the symptoms and the fear of COVID 19. And so these are all normal. There's nothing unusual here. But how do we process them, how do we talk about them? And how do we just really trust in the Lord. And I think that's the key part of our conversation here. First is how can we help people right now who are feeling these emotions?

Rob, no good words. I've been thinking about you guys in leadership and tough time to be a leader. You know, everybody's got opinions. Although I think. I think the school, and particularly you guys, have charted the perfect path through this. Hasn't been reactionary. It hasn't been panicked or anything like that, but good decisions, one after another, only as needed. You know, like not jumping the gun. And you do see that around the world, some folks are maybe jumping the gun, but it's a serious thing.

Yeah. I do want to let everybody know, listening to this podcast, we are also broadcasting live on. On social media. So reaching out to the people that are listening to us live. Feel free to jump in with questions. You know, feel free to. Do you have one over there?

Yeah, there's one here. So one of our actually MAAT students says, where's the line between respecting authority of God has placed over us and pushing back for the purpose of keeping our regular church gatherings going?

Oh, wow.

So kind of a loaded, interesting question.

No, it's not loaded at all. It's a question that I actually had numerous conversations with pastoral staff throughout the United States. How they were going to handle the church. Should they shut down for four weeks or not go virtual? How were they going to do that? And so I had multiple conversations like that. I think, for me, it came down to what is our social responsibility to others. I have a relative who their church decided to meet anyway, and their response was, you know, God's in control. God knows when we're going to die. We don't have to be afraid. We're just going to meet. And I reached out to that relative who was younger and said, are you going to then not see your parents for 14 days because they're over 70, they're high risk, and you and your children could actually cause them to get the virus. And she wrote back and said, well, I guess I never thought about that. And so this is what I tried to help pastors think through and even here for us was we do not have to give up our faith in God and believe that God controls our lives. At the same time, though, I think God wants us to be responsible and especially when it involves the lives of others, not just our lives.

Loving your neighbor, really? I mean, you're loving your neighbor.

You know, I. I reflected on this because I've seen on Saturday night, I have churches from all over the world that I'm, I follow on social media and all of them were doing live. But then I know a few that were not. And I heard a response that was, brought a little frustration a little bit just because of, I thought a little deeper. Somebody said I'm only going to close our church when bars and malls are closing.

Right.

And the malls and shopping centers are closing. And I'm thinking, because why are not bars, you know, why are those not closed and why do we have to close churches? And I think there's a fundamental difference in the sense that if you, if you do not take a proactive measure to actually close down your church and say move into smaller groups or stay in your homes, what are you communicating to people is come. Like we here are like we, we have faith and we gather together and you not coming to this community, what does that communicate? If you're not coming, are you afraid you're not. A mall doesn't force me to go. Like, you know, if I want to go, I go, but if I not, they're not telling, they're not sending a message.

Right.

They're, they're motivated by a very different reason. So I don't think it's safe for us to come to compare those two. And I'll bring it back to why were you compelled to, to send students home early and to really lock, you know, the campus somehow for safety reasons and stuff. What we, we took quite active and proactive measures with this.

Yeah, I, I saw early on the research and listened to experts that were saying, don't be fooled by thinking this is a disease for 60 and over. And then I started watching young, healthy people get the virus and go within two, three days into critical condition. The 40 year old doctor, now the emergency room doctor who is in critical condition, the 32 year old person in New York that went from healthy to losing a lung in a couple of days. And I realized this is not a virus just for old folks like me. This is a virus for all of us and all of us will respond differently. And so I just felt like if we could teach remotely like we're doing, it would protect our community.

It makes sense. I heard a good line on the Internet, somebody was saying, you know, there's times to be courageous and stand up to things like against terrorism or in the fear of, you don't stand up to a virus like that. That's just not smart. It's not. The virus doesn't care.

Yeah.

I don't know how you cope with this. And everybody copes Differently with these, These challenges. I think my. The way I cope with this these days, a little bit, maybe I'm showing my millennial colors a little bit is memes. Some of them are good. Some of them are actually really good because they speak truth in a different way. Some of them, not really a little too early. But one meme that I saw was the difference between a regular flu and coronavirus is that the regular flu, the person was in bed, they had napkins. And the coronavirus, the person was with a. In an airport, thinking, where can I go? Where can I travel?

Right.

It's kind of like empowering people to be out there and, and travel, be reckless and be reckless. And I think, as in. As an university and I've seen you do this and I, I want us to talk about this. The. The burden of leadership, to actually make decisions ahead of time for people when they're not even. For example, I'm thinking of students. They're here to have, to have community and have time. And yet you are making some difficult decisions because they might not see the full pict. The number one carriers. And this is what. One of the times that you ask a question, I think Rob was like, why are you. Why are we stopping students from just going out there? But the number one carriers are the younger people, and so are we caring for those people having to make difficult decisions. Looking at the bigger picture of that meme of like, I have coronavirus, let me travel now, let me be out there, I might infect people. Let me just be out, out and about. So let's talk about making those difficult decisions a little bit.

In a situation like this, you have to make decisions with insufficient information. You have to be decisive. And so usually you have to start thinking through what's the greatest risk. Is the greatest risk to take more time, or is the greatest risk to decide now and keep people from getting. And this getting worse? And so decisive leadership in a time of crisis has to make decisions with insufficient information and analyze the risk. And then you're going to have to just stand up to that decision because you're going to be criticized by both parties. You're going to be criticized by those who think you shouldn't have done it. And you're going to be criticized by those who are saying you should have gone farther. It's just the nature of crisis. You've just got to stand and go, but you got to be prepared in advance. And I think that's one of the things that we did well here at Multnomah. Is the emergency prep team had us ready. We had the team. We knew what each person's roles and responsibilities were and we could move quickly. We didn't have to build a team. We knew exactly what to do and we could immediately do it. And those are some of the key things that were important to us at Multnomah.

Can I move us in a direction of how do we care for people during this time? How do we care for them better? One thing that we've done at Multoma is the first caring thing is to have all our meetings remote. Right. So we're getting. I'm giving a shout out to Zoom, not because of their stock market just going crazy, but really because it's a. It's a great tool. So we've, we've moved our meetings to remote. We've limited. We stayed maybe two steps ahead of our governor with the decisions that they've made, which I think they're already made great decisions. But we want it to be two steps ahead of that. Not to, you know, to do the bare minimum. But how else do we care for people?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, the obvious things like the social distancing and the washing of the hands and all those, those make sense, you know, protect each other, follow rules that are set down by leaders. That just makes good sense. On the other side, also, not being so consumed with fear, like, we've made a decision to try to try to order out a little bit just so that the businesses don't all fail. And if I can go, like, if I can be a little controversial just a little bit, there's room for that. I think that human beings have a real difficult time living in the tension, as our friend Brad Harper talks about. And so on one hand, do you want to react strongly to viruses? Absolutely. You want to be prudent, you make careful decisions. On the other hand, overreacting is a dangerous danger, too. Like I would like, if we're going to do. I'll do predictions here. You've heard some of the stats about number of deaths, and I follow that all the time. And we're at, I think 97 or something. And that'll skyrocket, no doubt in the States over the next bit, but it'll be fascinating to see when this is all done. I don't think it'll take cancer or heart disease or car accidents. I'll be surprised if it kills more than suicides. And so it occurs to me, man, if stock markets crash everywhere and people are all losing their Businesses. Yeah, we got to think about those guys too. Come back, you guys. What do you think? Like, I'm not saying we shouldn't be prudent.

Yeah, no.

What do you think? Come back.

Well, I see a number of comparisons that don't make sense to me. Okay. I hear the look at the flu and what the flu does, but that's over a 12 month period. The coronavirus has only been over a few months. And right now we're trying to flatten the curve, you know, the curve of how this thing goes. So hopefully we will have less deaths. So what we are doing is going to lessen the impact. And so I think that's really important. There are possibly some things that might be overreaction. Sheltering down a whole city with the counties all around, it might be extreme. But in Italy.

Yeah.

The problem, it appears, is that when the virus started up in Milan, they didn't keep people there. They went south. They went up into other areas of Europe and they spread the coronavirus quicker than we could shelter. They sheltered them in place in South Korea and other countries where they got ahead of it. They flattened the curve. So it's hard to know what the real impact would have been without some of these. However, $850 billion incentive package that the House and the Senate and the President are considering. Where's that coming from? So, yes, there are some things indeed where we overreact in this day. I wonder if an abundance of caution is the right thing because we know so little.

Would you want to be patient 31 in South Korea in the sense that. And maybe this is going to bring a strong echo because I don't disagree with you. I think there's some new things about this, this coronavirus that should give us pause.

Sure.

Is how fast we don't have community resistance to it. It's a new. It's a new virus. We really don't know it that well. Right. So we're learning about it. But patient 31 in Korea decided to go to church. And 80% of South Korea. Right. Percent right. Is infected because of the patient 31. So I think it just puts that responsibility. I would never ever in my entire life. And if they went to a movie theater, you know, but they went to church. So I, I think it just brings that, that. How do you care for people even more? How do we care for. How do we care for people that are, are afraid these days? What, what can we do? What can we put in place? Even, even this, this podcast, I mean, you get to see Us, you get to see our reaction to it. We're here, we are keep distance. If there's anybody from Oregon, from the mayor's office and the governor watching this, Rob wanted to bring a measuring.

I thought about it, he thought at.

The last minute, so we can measure the distance, but how else can we care for you? I mean, especially on the campus, you're dealing with students, staff, faculty.

Well, what we've done, Aleen, is the Student Success center is continuing to offer all of their services remotely. So people who need help with academics and tutoring and those types of things, all that's continuing remotely. We're using zoom, we're using so many different means, as well as our student Wellness Department. We are trying to do student counseling by Zoom and remotely as well. So we're trying to keep many of those services in place. I think the way we help people most is to stay calm ourselves and to realistically embrace what people are feeling while at the same time talking about God is present in that. And we can trust God. And this is not a mistake. This is not something that surprised him. He is faithful. He's true. He's going to accomplish his will, and we can trust him. And the other thing I'm doing just practical things. I have some friends who have been. They've been with people who have the virus. So we're just checking in with them every day. How you doing? Do you have any symptoms? We're praying for you. We're encouraging. So it goes to the big issues, down to the little or the big strategies? Down to the little strategies. Just care for people one on one, as you care for others.

You know, I lived in my neighborhood for almost five years now. Two, I mean, three neighbors that I have around me are over the age of 85. Oh, right. So three of them. And. But I've only. We have a great relationship with the neighbor across the street, and she's 94, I think the most active person I've ever known. And actually, so I went and knocked their doors. They were a great opportunity for me to actually go and talk to them. And I talked to the distance and I said, hey, I'm here. I just want to give you my phone number. If you want me to do some shopping, pick up some stuff, I want to encourage you to do that. There are two things that happened. One is from one of the neighbors. I came back with the banana bread. They had it. They were like, hey, I want to give you something. So I came back and Diana was like, you went to help him and you're coming up with.

With.

But it was. It was such a moment. I could actually sense that we've connected in a way that we've never in five years connected. And they saw my genuine care for them, and it was not about, like, anything else, but can I buy you something? Can I get you something? Right. It might be a time for us to do acts of kindness that you've never had an opportunity to. And I will always go back to Martin Luther's words that, you know, during the plague, he said, I trust in God and I pray to God, but then I fumigate. I do all this. I will never put myself in a position where, you know, to do all that, but I will serve the other as God wants me to serve. So, yeah, this is an opportunity, maybe for those acts of kindness.

Yeah.

And I want to go back to one thing that Rob said. Carol and I have decided that at least twice a week we're going to do takeout delivery.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the reason we're doing that is because we want the people at the restaurants that we enjoy to continue to have a job, livelihood.

Yeah, exactly. And you've heard also people suggest on the Internet a great time to buy gift certificates or coupons. You know, if you really want to take a real safe track, but you still want to get them some money, that's a great way. Or even order online things that don't necessarily need to be delivered right away.

Yes. If there are any questions online, please, I'm just opening up. We have quite a few people that are listening to us right now. We want to open the conversation. Do you have anything, Rob? We have much to cover here, but I just want to make sure that.

Let's talk directly to our students. Students of Multnomah, current students, please know that decisions we made were made with prayer and careful, careful attempts to really understand what the governor and the public health officials were saying to us. We plan to reopen on March 30th. I can't promise that we plan to reopen March 30th with normal hours for the gym, the library, the dining hall, those types of things. But if the governor and public health officials require us to stay closed, we'll let you know as soon as possible. We will be sending daily updates during the work week, just giving you the latest information that we have. We want to care for you. Let us know if the. If you're having some challenges in this, learning to study remotely and in other types of things, let us know and we'll Try and help the best we can.

Yeah, and I've seen that too. Like, I think that's definitely true here at Multnomah and even some of the businesses around, you know, people do care for each other and you know, folks over offering things free. Mulearn. I've heard a lot of love for that, going free, which is I think a great move, other companies doing that because, you know, ultimately we're all in this together and, and yeah, and to, yes, go ahead.

And we're going to take care of our employees.

Right.

You know, we're doing a longer shutdown, but we are going to continue to pay them and care for them as much as we can in the next couple of weeks and in the weeks ahead. That's something that we didn't necessarily have to do, but we felt like as part of a community, we needed to commit to all members of our community.

So loving your neighbor right now means not hoarding. It means showing kindness with your money. If you have some money, buy some stuff, keep it in circulation. You know, keep people having a job. That's, that's important.

It does.

And to the students, I, I really appreciate that you reached out to the students. I want to join that exhortation and say, you don't have to do this by yourself. And it's actually okay to have questions and to have fears. So I know in one of the addresses that we've had, Dr. Williford said, I have some conditions that would make me pause and think about this. I can tell you I have a brand new baby born at home. And every time I go out I think, am I, you know, is there? So I have questions too. But you don't have to do this by yourself. Reach out to the person next to you. You're meeting with faculty in classes, there are student services in place. Our one. Our people are wonderful in the, in the counseling services and all that. I really, I'm not saying this to, to do them an empty service or lip service here. We know them, we work with them every day. But reach out. You're in, you're in classes with professors now remotely. Just open up and say, can we pray for this? Can we just, can we pause a little bit and, and pray together? Feel free to do that. Feel free to do that in the classrooms. I think it's going to help maybe show other people that, that you're going through something and you don't have to do it by yourself at all. You don't have to be brave during this time. Bravery can can be translated differently than you living this by yourself.

No, that's great.

And remember that Carolyn and I pray faithfully and regularly. And we do the one once a year, we do the retreat where everybody sends their request and we pray through them. If you want to send me your request now, c Willifordnoma. Edu Carolyn and I will pray through those requests. So send them to us and we'll do that. And no, we'll keep them confidential. We'll pray for one out loud specifically. Give. Give us the opportunity to do that. But yes, Carolyn and I both are actually in the high risk category with underlining health issues. And some of you may remember that my oldest son died on December 22. He got sick and he died 15 hours later from something very similar to this. So we live it.

Yeah.

And that's also the case. I don't want you as students or our employees to have to experience loss like that.

Yeah, that's good.

Having to make decisions with that heart, with that pastoral and parental heart. I just hope some of our students get a chance to hear that, to hear the heavy parental heart and pastoral heart in our business decisions. That should increase the trust level with our leadership. And that's one of the things that I really, really love through this time and to see leadership guided by. By love for our students and for our staff rather than a business decision. What we're going to lose here, what we're going to lose. That. Those discussion. Those discussions have not been at the forefront of what we've made here. Attrition.

We exist for the students, so there would be no.

Yeah, so I'm thankful for that.

And students, some of you and some parents are emailing us asking about housing for those who had to leave or chose to leave. We really encouraged you to. But for those who did leave, will we get refund for housing? Will we get refund for the dining service? Those types of things. We will be making those decisions. But we're waiting for the federal and state government incentive packages to be done so that we know what resources will be given to us as a school to help you. Plus, we're also waiting to see if they require us to do some things because they're considering that as well. So by early May, we will have an answer for you about those questions. Please be patient. We will be fair. We will try to do the best thing we can to help. So please know we're taking that seriously.

That's good.

We're coming to a. To closing, close to the end of our podcast but can we land on a conversation on moving forward, forward, planning ahead? What do you think? How long, if you are to make plans? What are we looking at? Are we looking at April? Are we looking at May? Just in your estimation, what are we looking at? You know, for this to not to come down. I can't make any predictions for that. But from. For the normal or the new normal to come back.

My best guess is by June, we'll be entering back into the normal. The normal isn't going to be exactly what it was before this. It would be a little different, but we'll start to be able to create our normal again. That's my best guess, but I'm not a scientist, I'm not an expert. I'm just saying that as I listen, it seems like that's a good time framework.

Yeah, I agree. Not that I'm neither either. Although you watch the numbers again, the statistics, you can kind of see. And it's taken definitely a turn for the worse recently. But China, China did very well, but they have some control functions that we don't have. I was getting the Chinese food yesterday, and we were talking about China, and he's like, don't compare China and America. He's like, in China, they say something, everybody does it. America's going to be way more challenging. But if we pay attention to these rules, we're given. I think we're all in this together and we get out of it quicker if we. Social distance. If we stay, the disease can't live without us. So we can stop it if we just are disciplined.

We got a great exhortation from Alicia online. She said, praying for you and Carolyn Craig as you walk these uncertain times with your own health conditions, but especially for how this may bring up new ways of grief in your process. That was really kind. Thank you for that encouragement. And let's encourage one another. Let's. We're walking through this together. Thank you for being with us. Any last comments? Any last words before. Before we're gonna wrap this up?

We're in it together. We're praying for you.

We're in it together. Please, please, and please again, reach out to somebody. Reach out to us. I was telling one of the faculty members, they asked me to do a training on Zoom, and then they asked me very, like, very detailed questions about something, this. And they were like, well, I don't want to bother you with this. But I said, hats are gone. No hats. Like, forget the hats. There's no rolls and all that. We're in the trenches. Together. We're doing the together. Please reach out to your faculty members, reach out to anyone, any one of us. If you have any questions, we're here to help. God bless you, everyone, wherever you are, and thank you for being with us in this podcast, the special edition special podcast. God bless you. Although the views and opinions expressed on MU talks do not represent legally, legally M University, today it represents the heartbeat of M University. So God bless you everybody. Tune in next for our new episode.