Managing Campuses During the Coronavirus

This episode of Future you is brought to you by Nelnet Campus Commerce, Delivering payment technology for a smarter campus, and by Entangled Solutions. This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo, and I'll be joined in a little bit by my co host, Michael Horn. Today's episode will be one of two that we're going to dedicate to the coronavirus and its impact on higher education. It's a swiftly moving story, of course, with dozens of campuses closing temporarily to students and shifting to providing courses remotely as a whole. Many are comparing to what's happening right now in our lives to 911 within higher education. I think a comparison could also be made to what happened in New Orleans in higher education, to higher education institutions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many schools there, of course, had just started their fall semester when the storm hit and flooded the city. Colleges and universities closed, and students spread out to other campuses around the country for the semester. There was a real concern about whether institutions in the city would ever come back. At the time, I was an editor at the Chronicle and over Labor Day weekend that year flew to Houston to spend a few days with the senior administration of Tulane University, who had decamped to a hotel. There I was a fly on the wall of the university's war room, led by its president at the time. So, Scott Cowan, when the coronavirus started to shut down campuses in the middle of the semester in the last week, I thought back to Scott in those first days after Katrina. So he was the first call I made when we decided to record this episode to talk about the higher ed lessons learned from Katrina and how they might be applied here. Scott Cowan, welcome to Future youe.

Yeah, thank you, Jeff. I always enjoy being with you, but not for the reason we're talking today. But I'd be delighted to help in any way I can.

Great. So, Scott, it's been 15 years since campuses in New Orleans closed temporarily in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. What do you think we've learned about interrupting a semester for an entire campus? Do you think that institutional leaders are better prepared today than they would have been in 2005, and where do you think campuses might still fall short in their planning?

I think they are better prepared today than they were in 2005, but I don't know that they were actually prepared and had thought about contingency plans for a pandemic. So one of the outcomes of 2005 in Hurricane Katrina, Jeff Is I think all institutions went back and began to really think seriously about risk management for the entire institution. If you recall, we not only had the hurricane, but there were shooter incidents on campuses 10, 15 years ago, and everybody began to look at risk management much more broadly than they had ever done before. Thinking about, well, if there was a hurricane, what would we do? If there was a shooter, what would we do? If there was a bomb in a building, what would we do? And I think that was one of the outcomes, quite honestly, of Hurricane Katrina people expanding their view of risk enterprise management. However, I doubt that anyone had on the risk matrix. There could be a pandemic. I simply don't believe they probably had. There may have been few for sure. After this pandemic will be on everybody's radar screen from here on end. I do think, though, people, and I'm not sure how many, began to think about what if we had to close, what would we do? So I think there were few who had done that. If you come to today, it's hard for me to say how many were really prepared for it. My guess is, is there's a lot more use of technology today than there was 15 years ago, and the technology now is being used to deal with students in academic programs hereafter. But I think for the most part, they're doing it on the fly. They're learning from each other. You know, if you look the notices that are coming out from the various institutions, there's a great deal of similarity in what everybody is saying to everyone. So I think there's a lot of co learning going on, and I think that's good. There's nothing wrong with that at all. So I don't think people had planned for a pandemic. And unfortunately it's later in the academic year, which also helps that it's happening in March as opposed to September or October, so they have more flexibility.

So, Scott, a lot of decisions are being made on the fly right now.

Right.

And again, similar to what you had to do because there was really no playbook for this as you described. So if campus leaders are triaging their decisions. Right. What do you think they should be thinking about first? Right. Like in the coming days, if they've already made this decision and then like next week and the week after, when you think about triaging decisions, how do you think about doing that in terms of what needs to be made when.

Yeah, the couple of things they're doing right away, which I think make a lot of sense, is obviously at a time like this the safety, welfare of faculty, students and the staff is most important. And I think they're focused on that. The second thing I think they're doing reasonably well is that they're communicating. You can never communicate enough at a time like this. People are anxious, they want to know what's happening, and information and transparency actually helps them an awful lot. Now that I think the next task is to say, okay, we've now got this settled out, at least for the next month or two. Students are going back home, we're online. What does this mean for the future? And this is where they should be setting up work streams for every particular functional area, whether it's admissions, whether it's finances, whether it's student housing, you name it. And they ought to be saying, okay, let's assume, worst case scenario, that we could be closed for six months or a year. What we would do in that particular case, if it's less than that, you know, we could always escalate backwards, if you will. So I think it's key to get the work streams going and people thinking about, if we're closed for three, six, nine months, what would we be prepared and what should we do in each particular functional area of the institution? So clearly it's obvious about the academics, you might be able to do that through technology for a while. But the other part that I think they have to start thinking longer term is what is the financial impact of all of this on their institutions, not just in the next few months, but in the next few years? Because the other thing they have to contend with at the same time they're thinking about that is what's happening to the stock market, which means what's going to happen to fundraising? So every revenue stream really has to be pressure tested over the, over the next year to say, okay, what flexibility do we have financially, what flexibility don't. And then based on that, what do we do about cost structures? And that leads to a lot of other questions.

Yeah. So, Scott, that leads to a great question that I see online right now on Facebook groups among parents about paying for college. There's all these questions now around refunds. And, you know, this is a demand where, you know, parents and students are saying, hey, we're not living in your dorms, we're not eating your food. You know, we're still getting instruction. So how do you handle this as an institution? You know, Harvard already announced, of course they have a ton of money. Right. They've already announced they're going to prorate, but many other institutions can't Deal with that. So how do you as an institution handle such demands where parents are clamoring for potential refunds?

Yeah, well, first of all, what you do is acknowledge that we understand why they're asking for that. But I think what people have to do is to say, listen, we need some time to assess the magnitude of this, and it may take a month, it may take two months. We're keenly aware of your questions. We're very sympathetic to them, but we don't know the full scale of this right now. And until we do, it's hard to respond. Now, they'll find the right words for it, But I think it, to be honest with you, Jeff, I think for people to come out right now, unless you have a lot of money and know that you can handle what the future by making decisions right now, you know, I would appeal to people to say, we hear you, we want to respond to you. We need more time. Because they do need more time, quite honestly. This is all about, as you know, this is all about cash. Now, what are their cash reserves? What are their lines of credit? What are their expenses going to be? And, you know, the institution has to just not only worry about the students, but all the other aspects of the institution and to be responsible to all stakeholders. I think they have to do that holistically, not just do it, you know, for one group versus another.

Right. So cash is king. Right. But we know that many institutions are already living on the brink of financial sustainability. Right. When I look at even these Moody's reports, they talk often about, you know, cash flow. Does this just really ratchet it up for some of these institutions? You know, what. What can they do? If you're a board member of those institutions, what would you be recommending that they potentially do?

First of all, I think it will ratchet it up, let's be honest about it, because if they're already on watch lists, this is only going to exacerbate the situation going forward. Plus, they'll have the extra challenge, if you will, of parents saying, well, listen, I know they're on the cusp anyway financially. Now this happens, do I really want my children, my child to go back or even come if they've been accepted? So I think this is particularly problematic for those that are on the cusp financially. What can they do? You know, this is where you start doing contingency planning right now and just say, you know, what are the possibilities? That's all you can do, is pressure test every revenue stream, every cost, and say, you know, how long Can I sustain, if you will, a situation like this? Could I make it for three months? Can I make it for a semester or a year? So it's sitting and doing the analytical and hard work of it. But I would agree with you, I think this will accelerate, if you will, perhaps some closures of institutions around the a country that we're on the cusp.

So, Scott, I want to talk a little bit about the residential aspect of this, because, you know, most of these are residential colleges which have a community. Right. So it's not just about taking classes, but you're spending time together, and that's part of the learning process. When you had your students kind of spread around the country for a semester, how did you kind of try to maintain the community aspect of a residential campus when they actually weren't on campus?

Yeah, and I can't say that we actually did that yet, to tell you the truth. What I did, though, was I went to all the major cities in the United States, literally. I went and met with students in them. So because we had clusters, if you will, you know, the Northeast, there was a big cluster there in New York, in Massachusetts, and so on. So I fanned out as well as many of my senior people fanned out every time we could to where there was a large collection of Tulane students and talk to them and answered questions and whatever we could do. And that was really the best of it. Now, I will tell you, there'll be a camaraderie around students also. They love their institutions that they go to, and they will find one another in these places, and hopefully that there'll be some leadership among the students and they'll get together so many times because of an incident like this. And this is different from Katrina in some very important ways. But I think they love their institution, and they themselves will find a way to create some community within their home community. But the university could facilitate it by having, if you will, once again, online conversations with students. We did that all the time where they could call in and see me or hear me, and I would answer questions. So anything you can do to be visible, you may also recall, and you wouldn't do it now. We actually kept our athletic teams in place, so that was a rallying point every place around the country where they played. But technology does allow access of leadership to the students, and I would be using that access to just to have town hall meetings and everything needed to give them information and answer questions.

So, Scott, what did you learn years later about that cohort of students whose semester was Interrupted. Were they any more or less committed to students when they returned as alumni or did they just kind of turn out to be like everybody else over time?

No, they turned out to be very special, Jeff. They are probably amongst the most loyal, affectionate to Tulane of any. I constantly get letters after all these years about their time afterwards and how special it was, what it meant to them and the reason why, and this is why it's different though is many they came back, many of them, and what they did was they part they contributed to the recovery of New Orleans and Tulane. They really rolled up their sleeves and got involved and, and that was so key to everybody. So I find them to be loyal, to be passionate about the institution. And with the benefit of hindsight, they normally always tell me they learned a lot there about resilience and how to deal with dire situations. So it was much more than that. Very few students just wiped their hands and walked away and say, I could care less about New Orleans and Tulane.

So Scott, you mentioned faculty and staff and kind of communicating with them early on when we were talking about the training triage here. You know, obviously universities have multiple constituencies, right? Faculty and faculty and staff. And they also have, you know, obviously students and alumni donors, you know, the board, you know, how often do you keep in touch with the board like so as you think about the different constituencies on campus, do you also have to think how often you have to communicate with them? You talked about communicating often. Does that mean with everybody? Or do you also treat triage among

those you triage, but you get a rhythm with everybody. So you decide, you know, your most important audience is right away are faculty, staff and students because they're there. But then you prioritize stakeholder groups and you get a rhythm of communication with them because what people want to expect is they just don't want the random, you know, email or communication they'd like to know. We'll listen. Once a week I'm going to send a note out to the alumni group to let them know what's happening. I'm going to do this with the board. So you get a pattern and a rhythm of communication and how frequently you do it depends on the stakeholder group. But clearly those that are closest to you on a day to day basis, which are faculty, staff and students and parents, many times you try to communicate more with them.

So it's got two other quick questions. One is that you noted we're at the end of the academic year, year or in the second half and second half of the second semester for many institutions, but we're also nearing the end of an admissions cycle. You know, when you closed for the semester, you were at the beginning of an admission cycle. This is like, you know, month of April is a big month for many institutions in terms of, again, that cash flow keeping those students coming next year. So again, as an institution, you're trying to deal with the here and now, but you also have to kind of worry about what's. What's next. How did you kind of manage that? How do you manage the short term and the long term at the same time as a leader?

Now, this is where there's a big difference, Jeff, between what we faced and what's facing now. So when we were there, it affected the universities, obviously, as you know, in New Orleans, and that put us at a huge competitive disadvantage for years with other institutions around the country for years where parents didn't want their kids to go to any school in New Orleans because of what happened to all of us because of Hurricane Katrina. So there was a big difference. And it took us years to recover, quite honestly, the full count of our student body and everything else. Matter of fact, it really took about a decade to really fully recover from that. This is different because everybody's going through the same thing. And therefore, I think there will be less concern and damage around admissions than there was for Katrina because it's happening to everybody around the country. So no one is competitively disadvantaged, if you will. They're all in the same situation now. Will it have an impact still? It may, because depending on the duration of the crisis, you know, parents may say, and university may have to say, you know what, we're not prepared to enroll the class in the fall. And, you know, if I'm a university, I'm planning on that right now. My motto would be, you know, plan for the worst and hope for the best, plan for the worst. But I don't think they'll have the kind of issues we had because they're all, as I said, in the same situation.

They're all in the same boat. So, Scott, one last question, because we're running out of time here, but obviously there's also opportunities and time of crisis. You know, can you see any silver linings for what's happening right now for colleges and universities?

Yeah, absolutely. And there's two I'll mention right away. This is going to build the resilience capability of everybody because, you know, they're all having to adapt to the conditions here that does help develop what I call resilient communities. And quite honestly, looking to the future, the fact there's always going to be something going on, the more resilient people are, the better off they are in institutions. Secondly, once again, they'll go back to their enterprise risk management and think about other kinds of things they haven't thought about because they never thought about in a pandemic. And I think we'll improve there. But the third one is Jeff was very interesting. All of a sudden, every university is escalating the use of technology rather than a classroom. There's gotta be a lot of positive learnings out of that. So I think, you know, one of the silver linings is we're testing, you know, our systems and our use of technology. Now that will raise interesting questions, right? Because students will begin to say, well, geez, you know, that actually worked pretty well. Why couldn't we do that as part of our education and lower the cost? And those will be all legitimate questions. So there is an opportunity around those three things, I think, especially the use of technology that I think could have a silver lining for students and for institutions rather than just going back to the way they were before. And I suspect many institutions will look at that as an opportunity or a way to rethink about where students learn and how they learn. And does it have to be in the classroom or can it be online or could it be a connection? And as you know, many of the institutions around the country are already doing that, but many more have to be doing it. And I think the silver lining was they're getting tested by fire right now.

Scott, There were so many case studies that came out around Katrina and Tulane particularly. I think there'll probably be many more lessons learned from this. We'll be talking about these cases in higher education executive programs for years to come. Scott, thank you so much for for joining us on Future youe, and we'll talk to you soon.

My pleasure.

We'll be right back.

This episode of Future youe is brought to you by Nelnet Campus Commerce. Nelnet Campus Commerce delivers payment technology for a smarter campus. The secure payment solutions for higher education are PCI Level 1 validated and integrate with every major ERP from payment processing and refunds to payment plans and online storefronts. Nelnet Campus Commerce helps process payments on campus. Learn more@campus commerce.com this episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future youe. I'm now joined by phone from Boston with my co host, Michael Horne. It's good to have you here, Michael.

Yeah, I'm glad to be here, Jeff. So I wanted to start with you, Jeff. Actually after that interview with Scott, just thinking after Katrina and the analogy that, you know, the floods made the decision for college administrators, in essence. Right. There wasn't another choice to be made. But this crisis is different. There are real questions that people are grappling with. No one's forcing colleges to go online, certainly, or go remote. And so from your perspective, how should college leaders be weighing these decisions and different factors that must come up as they make a difficult decision one way or the other?

Yeah. So I think part of it is can they actually pull it off if they're going to go online or even remote learning? That may be just easier for some campuses than others. And so I think that if they feel like they can't pull it off, maybe they just close down for a couple weeks and then reassess the situation or they keep moving forward as long as they're allowed. But I think there's now such a wave of institutions doing this. I think it's going to be really hard to explain to parents and students of those institutions that haven't closed down, why haven't we? And then I think the other issue is just the equity issue. Right. Is like, what's your student body like? Where are they from? Are they local? Do they have other places to go, for example, if it's a residential campus? I think those are the two things that institutions are weighing their student body on one hand. And can they actually provide some sort of remote experience from this?

So as you noted, you actually reported from Houston where Tulane administrators ended up in the days after Katrina. You know, we've heard from Scott, but from your perspective, what did you learn following, following them in the days after Katrina that are applicable to this crisis? What did they do right and what mistakes did they make that we can learn from?

So two things I think they did right. You know, they had most of their senior administrators were in Houston and there were all these different work groups that were tackling different issues. Right. Scott talked a lot about triage in the interview. And so each of these work groups was looking at a particular thing, including some future looking things around admissions, for example, which Scott, you know, briefly talked about. So I think that's one thing they did. Right. Second was communication. I mean, Scott overly communicated, and I think that was good. And he talked a lot about the different constituencies he communicated with. You know, he may not see this this way. I'm not quite sure they were maybe as transparent as they could have been about, you know what, we're kind of making this up as we go. It was chaotic in that hotel suite. And, you know, and, you know, they were, I think, a little afraid about having me see all that and report all that. I think in this case, it's best to be as transparent as possible with parents and students. Right. Things are. Some things are going to work well, some things aren't going to work well. We're all in this together. We're going to try this out. You know, we don't have to be heroes here. And I think that too many institutional leaders are afraid of making mistakes, and so are faculty. And I think, to start off right from the beginning, how are you doing? And by the way, I'm going to be learning just like you and be open and transparent about that.

I mean, frankly, that's good advice as you start teaching online in a medium maybe that you haven't before. To have that same humility and honesty, I think gives you more of a pass with your students than sort of the expectation that this will go smoothly. But that sort of transitions, I guess, to another question that I'm curious your take on, which is, we talked to Scott about the need for keeping students connected to Tulane as a community. I mean, frankly, there it was existential. Will it come back as a school? Right. But thinking about it from the perspective of 2020 rather than 2005, what's your take about how colleges should be doing to remain connected to students in this time of crisis? They may not be coming back for spring break. You know, the NCAA tournament has cancelled, the audience being there, basketball games are played, and so much of that falling away. What's your take about the ability to stay connected and be doing.

Yeah. So I think Scott talked a lot about traveling at that time, you know, 2005, a lot of his students ended up in clusters as he talked about and traveled to see them. Obviously, that's not the case now. And although maybe, maybe some of your students are in clusters, but for social distancing reasons, it's not a good opportunity to bring people together. Right. That's not a good strategy now. But now the online tools are so much better. Right. There are so many programs, presidents and other leaders and faculty members on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And things like that. So I think the social media tools are great. I think that we could use Skype and Zoom to create virtual meetings and communities, email updates. All those tools are just so much better than they used to be back in 2005. So I definitely think that they could do that. I mean, any ideas on your end, Michael, on how to keep. Because we know from online education that there are ways of trying to keep people connected to each other.

Yeah, Well, I mean, I would say something that I've seen a lot of colleges and universities doing, which is not making this an asynchronous, exclusive experience, really keeping the rhythms and synchronicity and things of that nature. I think they should extend it beyond classes as well and create virtual gatherings where students can go together and sort of have conversations and even some of the clubs and things like that newspaper that obviously you and I have an affinity for and so forth. Some of these activities can actually continue even when you're apart. And figuring out ways to do that I think would be prudent.

Yeah. So two other thoughts and then a question for you, Michael. He mentioned this idea about refunds, which we're starting to see a lot of people complain about online. And I think Scott's suggestion there was terrific. Like, don't make any promises. Say you hear people, Right? Yes, we hear you. We need time to think about that. And you're even seeing this, by the way, among the higher ed associations that are canceling their meetings. They're basically saying, we're looking into this and we're going to work on it. So you're not making any promises that you're held to, which I thought was a pretty good piece of advice. We've asked a lot of our guests on the shows that we're doing around coronavirus about what college leaders can, can learn from this crisis. For a takeaway for this show, what are you thinking about in terms of what college leaders can learn?

Yeah, I'd say two things. One, colleges can respond quicker than people give them credit for when their backs are against the wall. Like they rally and will move everything that they can to do the right thing for their students, but also their faculty. Right. And I think we see that in this. The second thing I would say is, is it's also evident from my perspective that colleges need much stronger disaster preparedness plans in the future, which is more of a long term piece of advice to learn from. But I think we need to be much savvier in the same way that Singapore has an E Learning Week where students don't show up for the week and learn online. We need to be instituting measures like that in the United States and playing out a range of things that aren't just mirroring the last crisis, if you will, but thinking and forecasting what else might come down the pipeline. What about you?

Yeah, I think that's a very important point. Right. I think after Katrina, everybody talked about a hurricane, and then after the shooting at Virginia Tech, everybody talked about mass shooting. Right. We tend to go back to what the last crisis is. Now. I'm sure that many enterprise risk management plans will have a pandemic as part of it. The other thing that I think I've been noticing this past week is, you know, every institution kind of recreating the wheel and in some cases copying from other institutions. This to me really speaks to the value of networks within higher education. We really need to build much more, deeper and more valuable networks, which I've talked about on the show so many times, because I'm just thinking about in a crisis like this, how that could be so valuable if you were doing more course sharing between institutions, if you were sharing technology. There's all these things that could be helped in a crisis like this that I think are critically important. So thank you, everybody for joining us on this episode of Future youe. And as usual, please write to us, provide us feedback online about what we're doing right and what you don't like about the show. And until next time, thank you for listening to Future youe. Hey, folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.