Managing the Coronavirus Crisis: On the Front Lines with Northeastern University

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 Selingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo coming to you from my living room in Washington, D.C. and I'm joined by my co host, Michael Horn.

Good to be with you, Jeff. I'm live in Lexington right now.

Right. So we're usually doing this face to face and in the same room. So in these extraordinary times, we are doing extraordinary things. And as we continue to cover this unfolding crisis caused by COVID 19 and its impact on higher education, we're joined today by Mark Armini, who's the senior vice president for External affairs at Northeastern University and he's co chairing the university's task Force on COVID 19. As many of our listeners know, Northeastern is a global university with a network of campuses that starts, of course, not far from where Michael is right now in Boston and extends to Toronto, Seattle, Charlotte, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It has more than 18,000 undergraduates. Nearly 20% of its students are international. And of course, it's also well known for its global co op program, which places students in jobs as part of their academic program. And as with most other colleges right now, it has also shifted to remote education to close out the spring semester. So we're excited, unfortunately, in these unfortunate times to have Mike join us. Mike, it's great to have you with us.

Yeah. Michael and Jeff, thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm joining you from Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is about 18 miles north of Boston because, of course, I'm not in the office today.

Well, Mike, first of all, I hope that you and your family are safe in this crisis. I think that this is probably the biggest test college leaders have faced in their careers. So from where you sit, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give to a college president right now?

Well, the advice I would give, and I've been saying this for years, to anyone who's running an organization that's dealing with a crisis. And it's pretty simple. I think it's really important to stay calm and not to make impulsive decisions in the heat of the moment. Yes, you need to be quick and you need to make decisions that need to be made. But I think unnecessary rushing and sort of impulsiveness usually leads to a problem. So put good people around you and make thoughtful decisions, but don't become sort of chaotic.

That's critical so Mike, shifting a little bit to your responsibilities amidst this, you're leading this task force or co leading this task force. Can you give us a little bit of color behind this? You know, did you have a plan in place beforehand to deal with something that might happen like this? And how big is the task force, who's on it, how often do you meet? And also what's its responsibility compared to the senior leadership team at Northeastern University and the cadence of the work, frankly, and how you get it done, given, as you said, you're not meeting me face to face at the moment.

Those are great questions. Well, like all universities, you know, we had a crisis management team before this. I think, you know, I was at Harvard when 9, 11 happened. And I would say probably ever since Virginia Tech, you know, large institutions have had standing crisis management teams. The task force we have now is sort of that on steroids. We launched it on February 4, which now seems like a lifetime ago. But originally the president of Northeastern, Joseph Aoun, came to me and our chancellor, Ken Henderson, and said, you know, there's this sort of disease in China and it's starting to spread to other parts of Asia. We need to be thinking about this because we have students from Asia and we even need to be thinking about possible enrollment implications down the road. That seemed like a fairly far sighted comment on February 4th. And so a small group of us got together and little did we know then that it would turn into this global pandemic and be on our doorstep. So as it spread, frankly, our group had to grow. One of the first decisions we had to make was to pull students out of Italy. As you know, that was one of the first European countries to really become a level three CDC designation. And we had 40 students there, some on co op, as Jeff alluded to earlier, and then some doing study abroad. But to get to your question, Michael, about the structure of the group, so two of us co chair it, after a while we realized that we needed five functional areas. So in very short order, I'll give those to you. The first one is what we would just call business continuity. How do you keep the operation running, keep payroll happening and keep the lights on? The second one is learning continuity. So obviously, how do you keep the educational enterprise functioning? We obviously started that long before we had to move to online, but it helped us get ready. The third one is research continuity. So we have obviously labs. There are issues, of course, with animal subjects making sure longitudinal experiments aren't compromised. The fourth is what we call campus operations, and that's Very basic sort of supply chain work around dining and everything else that keeps the campus running, public safety. And then the fifth one is communications. And that's really important because universities have so many different stakeholder groups and constituencies, and keeping them informed really is just as important as the actual sort of substantive work. I mean, and I would say all in, you know, the group is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 people, but we have a small upper level that is trying to make most of the decisions. And when a major decision has to get made, like moving to online education, the president would obviously be involved.

So, Mike, I would say like a few weeks ago, colleges were what we might describe as kind of stage one of this crisis, right, which was moving students off campus, pivoting to online and remote learning. Where would you describe you are now you're obviously dealing with a new set or a different set of issues, even as you're kind of continue to maintain that old set of issues. You know, what are the. What are the issues you're dealing with now and what are the questions you're asking?

Yeah, and I totally agree with that, Jeff. We're, you know, we're not out of the woods by any means in terms of managing the crisis. But, you know, most of the students are out of the dorms. We have moved to online. So we've reached this sort of steady state with the main business, for lack of a better term, and now it's all about planning for the future. So one of the things we're looking hard at is admissions and, you know, do we need to change some of the yield models that we use to make sure that we have a strong class in the fall? Obviously, as you mentioned earlier, we've got to look at all of our overseas programs. We have a program at Northeastern called NUN in which incoming freshmen spend their first semester abroad. It's become a really popular program with about 1,000 students each fall taking advantage of it. But one of our sites was in Rome. And so that's one that we, you know, not surprisingly, are not going to go ahead with. It may mean putting more students in London or Montreal if those sites are a lot more viable. So all of that is in the sort of realm of enrollment. But as you know, some people are predicting we may not even be able to have students back in the fall. So this notion of online may end up being a longer term proposition than we originally thought.

Thinking about that and just give us a sense of the time horizons, it plays right because you're starting to ask some medium Term questions that get into the fall. How are you anticipating sort of what the next set of issues? How far ahead of this do you want to be in anticipating or scenario planning or do you sort of have folks maybe that you're designating outside of the committee that you say, okay, focus on this. This is a second order question. We think, think it might hit, you know, come October, if we're back or if we're not back, et cetera. Like, how are you starting to phase out the different things that are going to come? It sounds like you're already well into conversations about what the impact of this will be on the fall, but you know, sort of crystal ball it a little bit for us.

Well, one thing that was important was that the current task force that I described, and there's the two co chairs and then we have these five groups with group leaders. When we started to think about all of the contingency planning for the fall, we said, look, we can't burn that same group of people out. They just can't do it. So we did, believe it or not, create a second task force. And the president is calling it reimagining the University. That's sort of the rubric of that task force. And on purpose we chose different people in part because we didn't want to burn out everyone in that first group, but also we wanted that second group to be a little bit unshackled from the day to day blocking and tackling that some of us are doing. So there is a second group doing that medium to long term, not only planning, but sort of visioning work. And what might we look like and what might we have to do in a more distributed fashion? So that's sort of the structure of it. One thing that's been quite interesting is Jeff mentioned Northeastern having campuses in different places. We now do have campuses in Vancouver, Toronto and London. And so if you think about that from a sort of international student perspective, if there are problems with students from other countries who can't get the right visa to get into the US we are actively exploring could we put certain undergrads in London or Toronto or Vancouver. And as you guys probably know, Canada has been quite welcoming to international students. So, you know, for Northeastern to have those Canadian sites is actually, it's going to end up being a real sort of part of our overall resilience going forward.

So, Mike, it sounds like having that global footprint actually might. Some people might see it as a disadvantage now, given this is a global pandemic, but in some ways it actually Might be an advantage given where the hotspots might be of this pandemic over time.

Yes, and it's a great example of sort of the benefits of unintended consequences or however you want to frame it. But when we set out to put those campuses in place primarily to offer lifelong learning programs, you know, we hadn't thought originally that a campus in Canada could serve as a sort of safe harbor for international students who can't get back to the U.S. so President Aoun's been pretty clear that we're dealing with a sort of unprecedented situation. And if we have to put students in London or Vancouver or Toronto, then let's do that so that they don't have their education interrupted. And you're right, Jeff, there's always risk when you go to other sites. But fortunately for now, those three cities are not hotspots. London certainly is a big city and it's quite dense, but it's not in the situation that you're seeing in New York.

So, Mike, let's talk. You're in the communications business, I guess now with your, your day job, your morning job, whatever that is, given all the things you're doing. So I want to talk about communications with your various stakeholders. Is it changing now from the very early days of this crisis? Are you kind of keeping the same cadence? How do you think about communications as we move now into week two, which seems like it's year 12, but yeah,

it's a good one. So, you know, I've been saying for many years that people should not send out too many campus wide emails and broadcast communications. It essentially, what I sometimes say is it devalues the currency if you issue too much of it. It's the only thing I retain from macroeconomics. But I have found in this particular crisis, essentially more is more. And so we were sending out on some days, two to three messages a day to the campus. And it was just, you know, people had enormous thirst for what was going on, what was happening on campus, what was going to be the next thing we needed to focus on. Did we have any positive tests in our community? The other thing I would say really emerged on this one, Jeff, is that all universities are pretty good at emailing their students and faculty and staff. We found on this one in particular, we had to build a whole separate communications program for parents of students. It's not surprising, but, you know, in this particular case we had a situation where a lot of students felt impervious and sort of felt like, well, I'll be fine. And their Parents were actually quite panicked. And social media also played a huge role in that because there's a whole series of channels, of course, from Facebook to Instagram to LinkedIn. And we found for the most part that parents live on Facebook and their kids live on Instagram. And so there were ways that you could segment those social channels to hit the different groups.

So just, just curious, you mentioned co ops earlier and just. Can you give us a sense of how the students will still get that experience now that they're learning virtually and what happens to that program that's such a hallmark obviously of Northeastern?

Yeah, well, that's obviously top of mind for us. So in some cases, students who were on co ops, meaning that they were at a full time job somewhere, in some cases, those students started to do what we're all doing, which is to do your job from home. And so students who may have a co op at a bank or at a big company like Raytheon, or even at a newspaper like the Washington Post, they're finding ways to do remote work, just as all of us are. And I suppose we could argue that that's the essence of experiential learning. But we are concerned about the fact that there are companies that are implementing hiring freezes. That's a challenge as we look at the next cycle. One thing we did find though, which was a nice little surprise back in the 2009 recession, was that some companies, even though they had a hiring freeze, they were still taking co ops because co ops are a good long term play for many employers. Co ops represent the future talent pipeline. So, you know, I don't want to say that we're not concerned, but in general, the model has withstood all sorts of ups and downs in the economy. Clearly there are going to be co ops overseas that we have to take a hard look at. And as Jeff knows, because we've talked about this over the years, we've really globalized the program. But you know, a co op in Italy in the next six months is probably not viable. I had a colleague of mine at Northeastern whose son is a sophomore, he was in Milan doing a co op and had to be brought back about a month ago. So that makes it real for all of us.

So, Mike, as you know, we're kind of in the midst of decision season right now for high school seniors, and most students now can't get to campus. You talked a little bit earlier about the scenario planning you're doing around enrollment, but we also have the news out this week that 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. So clearly the financial situation of households is changing rapidly. What does that mean for your financial aid budget, especially as I would assume expenses are rising for the institution, endowments are falling.

There's absolutely no doubt that we will have to step up the aid budget for families who need it. We have a program called the Northeastern Promise, which is essentially a contract that says if you're a student at Northeastern and your family suffers a sort of major economic change or shift that will make sure that, you know, your financial aid is increased in a way that you can continue your education. So that's critically important. We'll have to find the resources for that. There will be incoming freshmen who may have more financial need today than they did a month ago. So that's all part of the equation. I mean, I do feel very fortunate that Northeastern is in good financial shape. You know, we have a very strong bond rating. We, you know, we don't run deficits. And as you might remember from 2009, the schools with the really large endowments actually have a tougher time when the market crashes than schools such as Northeastern that actually don't have very large endowments. So at Northeastern, only 2% of our operating budget comes from the endowment. And there are universities in our neck of the woods where that can be a 40% number. So becoming endowment dependent has risks. And you know, our endowment going down just like everybody else's, it shouldn't have a material impact in a way that we can't sort of manage just by, you know, maximizing other revenue sources.

Those shall be named unnamed folks in your neighborhood. Of course, with those last endowments, we know what they are. Well, Mike, one last question. You mentioned your president, Joseph N. A couple of minutes ago. You know, he's a well known entity in higher education, seen as kind of a very innovative leader. What is he doing in these early days that you think has been really right about his reaction to this? Clearly identifying this way back in early February is clearly one of them. But what else has he done right, that can serve as an example for other leaders right now in higher ed?

Yeah, I think one of his real gifts is that he's always searching beyond the horizon of today. And he really trusts the deans and the provost to sort of run the day to day. As you know, Jeff, he was a dean out at usc, so he understands all that. But as president, I think he's really decided that it's his job to be taking a 50,000 foot view. And that means also looking way ahead. So yes, on February 4, he was the first person I knew saying we better get ready for what this could mean for us. But it was about a week ago that he really said we've got to have this separate group, get organized and start figuring out what happens if this is a 12 or an 18 month crisis. And I actually, to be totally honest, was saying, geez, you know, let's just deal with what we've got going on right now that we're, you know, I sort of was thinking the barn's on fire, we got to deal with that. But I think he was right to say, look, we've got a group on that, but we can't forget the future. And so, you know, that's, I think, the job of a CEO or a president, which is to be looking around the corner at what might be coming next when everybody else around that person is a little bit caught up in the moment. And that's good leadership.

That's an outstanding example to leave our listeners with and thinking about the big picture even as we're responding in the moment right now. And Mike, we know you're awfully busy right now dealing with a lot of crises. So thanks so much for joining us during these tough times and offering an inside look at how Northeastern is handling the crisis right now and frankly, how the response will evolve in the future.

Sure. No, thanks for having me guys. Stay safe and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Yeah, you as well. And for our listeners, we'll be right back on Future you.

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Welcome back to Future youe after that incredible and interesting in depth conversation with Mike Armini from Northeastern University. Michael, as you reflect on on the number of steps that Northeastern has been taking and is taking, kind of what struck you about their response?

I'm just struck by how a global campus, to your point that could seem like a liability in these times is actually emerging as an enormous asset and giving them the ability, frankly, to see some of these disruptions before others of us have seen it, be able to ask questions that may many campuses I think, are probably not yet ready to ask. And then to be able to shift how they serve students among them is significant. Jeff, we haven't talked about the impact on international students here on visas. Paul Friedman and I recently wrote a piece for the Inside Higher Ed that we think the administration needs to do far more to clarify their status and that it's okay to be studying online and on a visa. Northeastern has some strategic options that others don't, and I'm blown away by that. From your perspective, what jumped out?

Well, two things. First of all is that back in early February when many of us were just hearing bits and pieces about what was happening in China and we think, well, never happened here, that's only in the movies. And now we're living the movie is that he identified this as an issue.

Right.

And I don't know. I know a few other presidents who probably did that because they have this kind of global view, but not many were thinking that they weren't going to finish out the semester. So that's number one. Number two is what's interesting is about these task force and they have this second task force that is kind of unshackled from the daily pieces. Right. And is thinking about kind of the visioning of the university going forward. I like that for two reasons. One is that they could focus on the future. They're not focused on the day to day and they're not going to be exhausted from dealing with these, you know, these last couple of months. I think that's really interesting and framing it not necessarily about what we're going to do in the fall, but also framing it about the future of the university in general, I think is really is really interesting.

Yeah, those are both great points. There was a lot in that interview that was pretty rich. And that is a good way for us to wrap it, though, in this episode of Future you. Thank you to all our listeners for joining us and for your feedback. You've been writing us about what's most helpful in this time of crisis. And thanks to Mike, obviously, for joining us during a difficult time. We'll be back with more episodes on this unfolding crisis and its impact on the future of higher education soon. And until then, stay safe and stay.