Reversing Course on the Fall

Hey, Jeff. There were a lot of changes in college's reopening plans from the spring to the summer, huh?

Yeah, Michael, I think there were a ton of changes.

Indeed.

And I think right now, Higher Ed, of course, is facing yet another fall of remote learning or another semester of remote learning. And it was just seems like it was a couple months ago when they were talking about being on campus. This fall, a number of colleges, of course, are reversing plans. One of the first institutions to do that was Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. And we're going to have the president of Dickinson along with their CFO on this episode of Future youe.

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I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. And welcome to Future you. It's a new academic year, and last spring, when the pandemic first hit, colleges and universities, of course, were expected to be back in session and of course, in person. Indeed, many announced their plans with protocols for social distancing a few months ago. But in recent weeks, we started to see institutions walk back those plans as the virus continued to surge. One of the first institutions to do that was Dickinson College, a small liberal arts college in South Central Pennsylvania, my home state. And today we have with us, via Zoom, the president of Dickinson, Margie Ensign, and the Vice president of Finance and Administration, Bronte Burley Jones. Welcome to the show, and we really appreciate you coming on for what we know is a very difficult time for college leaders.

Great to be with you. Thank you.

Glad to be here this morning.

Yeah, deeply appreciate it. Margie. I'll start with you, Dickinson. Obviously, you all formed a lot of committees to look into reopening. Initially planned on bringing back students in the fall based on the COVID tests in particular, having quick turnaround times. But as we've seen those tests and the results in particular from them getting slower and slower from a response perspective, at some point you sort of started to conclude this no longer makes sense, or at least our assumptions are not what they were. Right. And my understanding is one staff member came to you and said, look, I just can't live with myself if something happened because the college brought back students. Is that what finally pushed you to reverse course? Or can you take us behind your decision making?

Sure. Thanks again for having both of us. So when the pandemic began, you may know, we were one of the first to bring our students back from around the world. We're a leader in global education. We had hundreds of students around the world, but we had a sense of what was coming and so we brought them home early. And while we took a bit of criticism at the beginning, you know, later parents said our kids made it home and others didn't. So from the very beginning, the health and safety of our entire Dickinson community has been our priority. And that's guided all of our decisions. So that's why we went early in the spring when we announced that we could bring students back, which was our goal. Right. We want them back with us. The testing situation was quite different from where it is now. I will say at the outset, this is a national failure. We should not have to be on this call talking about how different institutions are responding to this. But in the beginning, the testing looked like a two or three day turnaround. In a pandemic, you have to have testing and tracing in place. You really can't be back to in place safely without those two key interventions. But as the summer went on, it went from two to three days to five to seven to nine to two weeks. And recently we said, oh, it might be three weeks. That's completely unacceptable, the contact tracing. The state kept saying they would do more and they are. They're now getting ready to hire 1,000 volunteers for contact tracing. But our little community action network has moved faster than the state to put some of these things in place. So that was really the basis for our decision going back to our value and our priority, that it's health and safety. You simply can't operate safely in a pandemic if you can't test and get quick turnaround times for students, faculty, staff and community members.

So, Bronte, one of the things that was interesting to me is how Dickinson was among kind of one of the earliest to announce your reversing course. And of course, in recent weeks, Bronte, they a number of other institutions have joined you. But did you talk about the risks of being an outlier early on? Because we are. You know, colleges also operate in kind of a competitive market.

Right.

And if you were going to be one of the only ones out there, is that was that much more of a risk at the time when you were discussing this?

I would say without a doubt it was risk. But it goes back to what Margie said. We knew what our values were and in our case, we were operating from a place of financial security. We've been at the business of contingency planning, building reserves and understanding what the financial implications of A series of decisions might be. So we were clear about what funds we had available should we decide to move in this direction. So we had aligned our resources with our priorities. And so we were confident that we were in a position to act in accord with what our priorities are, the health and safety of our community.

That's incredibly helpful, Bronte. And just to stay on that topic of financial reserves and financial planning, there have been a lot of faculty members around the country who study higher ed, and they've sort of made assumptions that. That colleges are trying to get back because of finances. Can you give. Give us a little bit more specificity around, you know, what is the financial hit to Dickinson and what did that planning look like so that you were able to prioritize the health and safety of the community?

Yeah, really good question. It's a loss of room and board revenue for us and the auxiliaries because we don't have students on campus. So we quantified that.

Right.

So in the form of reserves, fundraising, federal and state relief, and then cost cutting measures. So we also brought the entire Dickinson community into this and said, we've got to pull together. And so it's a combination of those resources that allowed us to get through the spring. And as we thought about all of the different scenarios for the fall, whether that was gonna be residential, a hybrid, or a remote, this is what it could look like financially. And if the hit is this size, these are the sequence of actions that we would take. So we're clear, even looking into the spring, what could happen in terms of the financial hit to the college and also how we would fund that hit to the college. So, again, being able to operate from a place of financial security relative to this allows us to live out our priorities.

So, Margie, I just can't imagine what is going through the minds of college presidents right now as I talk to them. This is probably one of the most stressful things, probably the most stressful thing, I think, that most college presidents have ever dealt with in their careers. I could imagine all the case studies that we're gonna have for decades ahead of us coming of this crisis. But it's really calling on. When I talk to presidents, I keep asking them, what, in your experience, has helped you in this moment? And I was interested because before you came to Dickinson, of course, you served as for seven years as president of the American University of Nigeria, and you had to deal, from what I understand, with the Ebola breakout there. So how did that prepare you for this moment?

Well, it's probably a dubious distinction to be the only American college president who's gone through this before. But honestly, it wasn't just Ebola. It was terrorist group that came 50 miles away from our campus and 300,000 refugees that my students and faculty had to feed for two years. So I think as this began to emerge, it did bring back all those memories of getting warnings, you know, Ebola may be in Yola, where the university was established with absolutely no health infrastructure. So the challenges there were enormous. And we had about 5,000 folks to, as well as a community of 200,000 when the army walked out and left us. So I have to say it brought back some tough memories. But I think it also made me and our whole team very decisive. We were and remain laser focused. Here's our values, here's our priorities. As Bronte said so eloquently, the whole team came together, and Dickinson is an unusual place in that it's extremely cooperative and transparent and everybody's at the table making decisions. So it's not just a group of senior administrators, it's faculty, it's staff, it's students, it's alums, sometimes it's community members. But once we made those decisions collaboratively and together, we have stayed laser focused on this. And all the committees that worked throughout the summer knew what our values and our priorities were. And I found in Nigeria, in that earlier crisis, you have to set those very early, and if you believe in them, then you make decisions based on those values and priorities. And that's what we've done. And in a way, I'm glad I had those experiences out in Nigeria, because I think it helped ground me and make me very aware of the seriousness of this. And that's why as this testing thing degenerates again in the United States, it's very clear what the implications of that are. I think there's some wishful thinking going on that we're in a different phase of this. We're not. We're not that different from where we were in the beginning. Until we get that in place, it's going to be tough to operate.

That's incredibly well said. And I think it's interesting, you all setting those priorities and values and being clear about that establishes such a strong culture for decision making going forward where you can entrust people. Your experience doing that internationally also relates to something earlier you said about Dickinson, which is, of course, you're known for your study abroad programs. You have a healthy international enrollment. And so I'd love to go a little bit deeper because this relates to the current moment in this country as well, of how the pandemic, but also the current political environment has impacted those presences right internationally and in the world beyond the United States. And so I'm just curious about sort of the reality is what it is out there, but what can you do about it? What can Dickinson do about it to stem that long term impact?

First, let me say, before we move to answering that one, our board has been very supportive. I can't thank our board enough. They knew this was a decision based on ethics. Not every board is as supportive as ours has been. So I think it's important to make that point. I'm terribly concerned about the message that we're sending to international students about being in the United States and the long term implications not just for Dickinson, not just for every college and university in this country, but for our country. Because the world is globalized and we must be sure that we are open to new ideas to these great people who come here. If I could just briefly read an email that I got recently from a family in Vietnam. It hits. So what this student said to me. My family believes that the US Is no longer a good destination for higher ed, given how both its people and government have responded to COVID 19, exaggerated by other challenges of race, politics and anti international student sentiment. I still believe that American values are unique, with American liberal arts education being among the most notable, and that Dickinson strongly reflects these values. But given the US As a whole, I no longer consider going to the US for the foreseeable future as a wise option. That is heartbreaking. That has implications for the whole country in every possible facet of our lives and that we have to turn around very quickly.

So in terms of what could you do, are you a little worried though, about your international enrollment and then study abroad going forward? I mean, what are you planning post Covid to make sure that those numbers are where you want them to be?

Well, we've done some really unique things. But first of all, we joined, as did so many colleges and universities in this country, the original MIT Harvard lawsuit to stop the most recent proposed regulation to keep, you know, entering, to keep international students from being online, from those being able to come back to the country. This is outrageous policy that's being developed. But what we've done, because we have global centers all over the world, and I think this is really a unique and creative solution, we have invited our international students to go to those centers in their country where some of them are being housed and we'll teach to them there. So I think that's a really good solution for the short term. And once we get through this, we will very quickly get back to expanding our global operations and our study abroad programs because they'll be needed more than ever.

So, Brente, I want to come back to you on something you were talking about earlier. In terms of room and board in auxiliary revenue, what have you done on tuition? Because I know this is a flashpoint across the country. There was a campus poll survey recently that 90% of college students said they thought they deserved a tuition discount if they were online this fall. So can you tell us a little bit about what you did with tuition and then more so about planning now? Because we keep talking in terms of the fall, but I'm not quite sure any of the things that you've all laid out here are necessarily going to get better by winter break. So what happens with the spring? So, Bronte, on tuition, and then let's talk about the spring.

Oh, definitely. So with regard to tuition, we had previously approved, like most other institutions, an increase for this academic year. We actually rolled that back and left our tuition levels at last year's tuition. So we made the decision to keep tuition flat going forward. So we previously announced an increase, and then we announced that we would keep everything flat for the year. So that's where we stand relative to tuition. And when we think about the spring, as I said, we've been contingency planning and budget modeling more than you could ever begin to imagine. So we have looked at a wide range of scenarios for the spring semester. And I can tell you we are clear about how we would fund each of those scenarios. There's the likely scenario, there's the aggressive scenario, and then there's the worst case scenario. In each one of those scenarios, we're clear that we have the funding necessary to get us through this. Because as you said, the likelihood that life will return to a normal spring semester, not very likely. So again, we'll be in a position to make the decisions that are best for our community. And because we have the financial confidence that we can manage whatever that financial hit is to the college for the spring semester.

Yeah, I imagine you're sick of looking at these sensitivity analyses and all the different spreadsheets that probably roll out right now. But that's true.

We have to actually date them. And this is version A on this day, version B on this day. So when this is over, you said earlier there will be case studies. Nakubo is going to have a field day with the case studies that will come out of this, this planning effort.

Well, it'll be a good historical record to sort of plot this out and figure out the different key decision points. Right. But, Margie, I guess, you know, thinking about this, not just now.

Right.

But the spring and so forth and the broader environment, where does higher ed need help from and what form should that help take? You know, the federal government, obviously, I'm sure you would expect a bigger response, but. But spell out some of those measures that you'd love to be seeing right now.

Well, you know, with this most recent round of negotiations that's fallen apart, higher education wasn't at the top of those discussions, I think, and you and Jeff know so well, higher education is misunderstood in America. The role that we play for the country for national security issues, for research, how we support our communities. So there's a big, huge dialogue and discussion that needs to happen to make sure that our representatives at the state and federal understand the work that we. The foundational work we do in our democracy. Without that, we're all individually reaching out to congressmen and senators and so on to try to make our case. So I think collectively we need to do a better job in explaining the role of higher education in the US we need help from the federal level. All of us do. I'm on a call almost every night with the 92 college presidents in Pennsylvania and some. For some, this is existential. This moment, it is not for us. As Bronte has said, we came into this strong, we will remain strong, but we all better work together to make sure the American people and our representatives have a better idea of what we do in terms of not just education, but our key and unique role in sustaining a democracy. So all sorts of assistance is needed for colleges at this moment.

That's a great point and something that we continue to need to emphasize, I think, which is it's not just about the teaching and learning that it goes on campuses, but it's a much bigger part of the fabric of our democracy and the world's future. So look, and at this moment, if

I could just jump in, I was on a webinar with three other college presidents and 900 college leaders the other day, and each of us described not only what we were doing on our campus, but in our community. And I thought the functions we have taken over at this moment when we're not getting national leadership is extraordinary. And I would say to both of you, I challenge you. That's a story that needs to be told, how everybody has stepped up to take care of homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment. It's a positive story and it's one that needs to be shouted out, I think.

No, thank you for that. And honestly, Margie Bronte, I know you both are extraordinarily busy right now reopening campus in these unusual times, remote and doing all the steps that you're taking for your community. And so super appreciate you both joining us on Future youe.

Thanks so much for your time. Thank you very much.

And we'll be right back.

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Welcome back on Future youe. After a really interesting conversation going behind the scenes of what Dickinson went through and reversing planning around reopening the campus and instead moving to remote learning. And for this segment of Future you, Jeff, really excited because it's not just you and I reacting to that conversation and contextualizing it, but we're actually bringing someone who knows something to the conversation. Chris Marsicano, assistant professor of practice in the educational Studies department at Davidson College, who's been turning a lot of heads in higher ed. Chris, with your College Crisis Initiative starting to track institutions across America are doing in terms of their reopening. So first, thanks for joining us to help put all of this in context. And why don't you start out by telling folks what the College Crisis Initiative is?

Sure. Well, Jeff, Michael, thank you so much for having me on. I'm a big fan of the work you do, and it's such a great opportunity to talk about what we're doing at the College Crisis Initiative, which we call C2I for short, to sort of answer your question about who we are and what we're doing. It all started on March 11th when Davidson decided it was going to go online for the remainder of spring semester 2020. And I was sitting in my office in a socially distant manner, mind you, with three of my research assistants, and we were all sort of talking about what can we do to help in this situation. It's so difficult to Know what to do? How can we be helpful to the sector, to the country, to students and families everywhere? And so the idea we came up with was just to start tracking track colleges as they decided to go online. So we built this quick data set, wrote a very, very short paper about trends that we saw in how colleges were going online in the spring. That paper drew the attention of a lot of people, surprising to us. It was a big surprise, one of whom being the great Jeff Selingo, I think you guys know him. And so we got a chance to talk about not just with people like Jeff, but also with funders and with other organizations to give us a little bit of money so we can start tracking the fall reopening plan. So many thanks to the ECMC foundation, who has funded our project. And so now what we're doing is we're tracking colleges as they reopen, whether they're reopening in a hybrid model or an in person model or an online model.

So, Chris, I think that's a great segue to something that I was fascinated by this, this summer in that when you were talking about March 11, right, when all these colleges decided to shut down for the rest of the spring semester, or in some cases they were only going to shut down for a couple of weeks around spring break, but then decided to go online for the rest of the summer or the rest of the spring semester later on. There was essentially one model and that was we're going online until the end of the semester. Now we're coming back in the fall and God, to track all these different models, right? We see some, oh, we're going to start a couple weeks early and then we're going to stop at Thanksgiving and we're going to go online for exams and we're going to cancel fall break. And now we have hybrid and we're only going to invite freshmen back in the fall and sophomores back in the spring or whatever. I mean, there are, it seems there are as many plans for the fall as there are colleges in the U.S. what are you finding?

Sure. So we have tracked 2,958 two year and four year public and nonprofit institutions that are degree granting and have undergraduates graduates. And from those institutions we have about 15 different models that range from exactly what you just talked about, what we call the Clemson model, which is online for two to three weeks before going in person to fully online like the Cal State institutions, to starting early and then ending before Thanksgiving, which we call the Notre Dame model. But of those 15 models, we have about seven sort of broad categories. And, and this broad categories range from sort of a maximum flexibility hybrid model to primarily online to sort of fully online. What we're finding is exactly what we heard earlier in the podcast today, which is that institutions are beginning to transition to online education, even those that fundamentally and genuinely wanted an in person experience. So over the past week, we've had about 40 institutions transition from wanting to do a primarily in person modality to a primarily online modality.

That's a, that's quite a shift. And I'm just curious, what do you think, like, what are the indicators that they've been looking at as, as, as, you know, to make those calls? Because in some ways, you know, Jeff and I were saying earlier, like the state of play actually hasn't changed that much from now to, you know, a few months earlier in terms of our ability to keep, you know, have robust testing and things of that nature. What's been the sort of swing in Chris that you've seen that started to move all these institutions to change plans? You know, we heard Davidson's take, but, but I suspect it's. There's some variation.

Sure. So a couple of things that we are, we are watching, we're tracking. The first is government action. It is really hard to get students from outside of the state of New York if every student from outside of the state of New York needs to, needs to quarantine for 14 days. And so, and so state action, government action is one sort of major component that colleges are having to respond to. One of my favorite examples of this is actually more House college not knowing who, whether it should be listening to the mayor of Atlanta or the governor of Georgia. And therefore with that uncertainty, not sure what to do as far as bringing students on campus. So that's the first thing, government action. The second is good old institutional isomorphism. We have a saying around C2I, which is uncertainty breeds imitation. And that's certainly what we see a lot of here. It should not be surprising that once Harvard decides to go all online, other Ivies follow and then Johns Hopkins follows as well. So institutions, as they sort of seek legitimacy, are looking to each other. But we have put some surveys in the field and we have some indication that schools are really looking out for the safety of their students, looking at public health boards in their counties, that kind of thing. Not necessarily the numbers on campus yet. They're just too few students as of August 13th or August 14th. And we're having this discussion to show what those numbers look like on campus. But they are also looking at the public health components of all of this as well.

So, Chris, the thing I love about your project as a reporter is that I'm thinking I might do a story on X. I wonder where the data are and you're there with it. Tell us a little bit behind the scenes a little bit. How are you actually doing this? I'm just fascinated. When I ask you for a piece of data and you're like, okay, let's get on the phone, we get on the phone and a week later, magically, the numbers show up. So what are you doing?

It's pretty fun. And credit goes out to the 35 or so students who are really powering this. It's fun to be the director of this because my job is basically to look pretty. They do all the hard work. Their brilliance and their talent is always fun to sort of bask in the glow up. But in general, we are trying to figure out how colleges are innovating. And so we have to be a little bit innovative ourselves. So we take an old world, an old school approach and then sort of a new school approach. The old school approach is we've got about 30 students that we call data collectors who go out to all 3,000 or so college websites that we track. About 4,000 if you include the international schools that we've begun to track as well in the UK and China and elsewhere. And they hunt down reopening plans and they read those reopening plans and go through a rubric to determine what the plan looks like. They then categorize that plan and put it into our data set. But we also have a group of what can only be called data wizards through another project at Davidson called Project Pronto, who have built the dashboard that you can use@collegechrisis.org dashboard but have also built for us a web crawler program that tracks that goes to every single website in our data set every night at midnight. It determines whether or not those websites have been updated and in the morning sends us a report with all of the institutions that have updated their websites in the past 24 hours. We then use that report to flag where our data collector students should go to figure out whether there's been a plan change. We get a lot of false positives. Institutions are are updating their website all the time. But we do, it does allow us to sort of hone in on where there might be major updates. So we are now at the point where by and large, we can get an institution updated within 24 to 36 hours. There's sometimes a lag on it. And to be clear, we're not perfect. The data are not perfect. We're trying to track 3,000 institutions with 30, 18 to 22 year olds. We're going to make mistakes. And when we do make those mistakes, we ask institutions to let us know, either by emailing us at c2iavidson.edu or filling out a correction form that is available on both the Chronicle of Higher Education website and our dashboard as well.

Yeah, that's awesome. Incredible work. Just shifting gears a little bit. Something that I was struck by in our conversation just before this with Margie and Bronte, Jeff, was them talking about, frankly, like, how many stakeholders had they have involved in their decisions around reopening and then reversing plans and sort of the consensus driven decision making that seemed to go through it. And I was trying to think to myself that that sounds like a recipe for paralysis, not rapid decision making. But it seems to have worked for them. And I think it's because they had such clear alignment on goals. Values. Right. Like priorities. And then, then everything could sort of flow from there. And you asked and they brought in a conversation about the board's role. Right. That I think is very interesting in that because the board has to be behind that for everyone to follow suit. And I'm curious, both of you guys, I mean, you both think about this a lot. Boards of higher ed right now seem to be all over the map relative to their leaders. Right? On what, what they want. A major fault line from my perspective is are they a public board where maybe they're appointed by the governor and therefore there's a political set of considerations into this dynamic versus a private board might be able to have a very different stance on what the college does. But they're probably also looking at the finances of the institution as well. And so that sort of factors in. How are you, you know, how are you both breaking this down?

So. So Michael, I'm going to jump in there because Chris is probably going to kill me because every, every, every week I call them up or email them and say, hey Chris, could we run some numbers on X or Y? And I'm actually interested in this and I actually don't know if this is probably not in the reopening plans or what your researchers are looking at. But I started making calls a couple of weeks ago to some friends who sit on boards because I was kind of interested. Are you voting on your plans for the fall as a board? Because to me this is sometimes a, a Gray area about whether this is the management of the university, which is usually in the purview of the management team, meaning the president and his or her senior team. Or is this the fiduciary responsibility of the college or university, which, as you know from the discussion we just had with Dickinson, huge financial repercussions of whatever you decide. So I was, I was kind of curious and Chris, you probably don't know this yet, but perhaps this is something we could look at is who's making the final decisions on these things.

Yeah, I mean, we've seen institutions respond in different ways. Right. So if you look at major large public university systems, often it is that university system board or the governor's office or something like that. I think specifically about the UNC system, institutions are not allowed to make their own decisions. They must have a sort of in person modality. It's not like Chapel Hill could all of a sudden tomorrow say, hey, we're going to be online without the approval of the state system, which in a state as diverse and as broad as North Carolina is in terms of its public institution types could be trouble. Right. So you have UNC Asheville up in a small sort of 4,000 to 6,000 student liberal arts college, effectively in the mountains, having very different needs than UNC Wilmington which would be on the coast, and UNC Chapel Hill in the middle of the state. And so having that sort of state board make that decision means that it confines the responses that colleges and universities can have. On the other hand, you've got places like Paul Quinn or Michael Sorrel. It certainly has draws that sort of the main, the main focus here and pushes an institution in really exciting and innovative ways. Developing a 36 month bachelor's degree in around three months online. And so differing institutional types certainly change. Who makes that final decision? We have not collected specifically who's making the final decision, but Jeff, give us a week, we'll get it done.

There you go. So one thing that has also struck me, Chris, in your data is if you looked, I. I'm going to mess up my time frame a little bit. But if you look three months ago, the dominant plan for colleges was to reopen in some form or fashion. And there was the high flex and like there was different variations of within your seven models. Right. That you were tracking. But I think it was majority were there and then it's switched, I think to where majority are now remote, I think. But I love the numbers. But what was maybe even more interesting than that to me is how many institutions Honestly still haven't made a decision. And Jeff, this goes to our conversation about like communication with stakeholders in higher ed and how you think about that. And I've just been struck by, you know, sort of the lack of transparency sometimes in how these plans are getting made and what communities even understand about them.

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to jump in on the to be determined. And higher education, as you guys know, is a very broad set of institutions. In our data set we have every nonprofit and public community college as well. A lot of the to be determined are very localized, very small public or nonprofit community college type settings. There are very few major four year universities in terms of size or in terms of Carnegie classification, however you want to define them that that have yet to come up with a to be determined plan or who have yet to come up with a plan I guess is the way I should say that. But yes, Michael, you're spot on. We saw a lot, sort of the majority focusing on primarily in person with some online options at the beginning of the summer. We are very quickly barreling towards predominantly online with some in person at the end of the summer. So whether that's moves from primarily in person to online like Dickinson, or whether that's moves from from a more hybrid model to a more online model, we are beginning to see more and more transitions towards online education.

So Chris, as we get ready to wrap up here, first of all, let's tell people where they could find your data. Let's start there first.

Yeah, sure. So if you're looking for data visualizations, you can find them on the Chronicle of Higher Education website. We are now their provider of data for their tracker. But you can also go to www.collegecrisis.org and view our dashboard there.

So what's the long term? Well, let's talk about the medium term plan for your project and then the longer term plan. Obviously I'm assuming you're going to continue tracking stuff in the year ahead. But then what happens with all of this? What do you hope this becomes?

Sure. So I think in general we want to see how colleges and universities are innovating, how they're changing that thousand year old business model over time here. And a lot of times crisis is what pushes you to innovate. And so that's what we are trying to do, is to figure out how colleges innovate in a crisis. Right now our focus is almost wholly on COVID 19, but we expect to expand and focus on other major issues within higher education institutions. We've collected some data on Racial unrest on college campuses. We've collected some data on gun violence in local communities and protest movements around. So we hope to, once we can help colleges come up with their responses to COVID 19, we hope to be able to move to other crises and be able to work on other crises as well. You know, this all comes from a very liberal arts tradition. You gotta throw out the Davidson College liberal arts tradition here. We looked back to look forward and like I said, a thousand year old model of higher education. We looked 400 years ago to a small Italian city state, Ferrara, which during the middle of the bubonic plague, had zero deaths from the plague compared to Milan and Venice that had 40,000 and 60,000. What Ferrara did to combat the plague was basically collect data, go door to door, figure out what people were doing, talk to other cities, figure out where there were outbreaks, and control the gateways in and out of the city to make sure that those outbreaks didn't reach Ferrara. We want to help colleges be Ferrara. We want to be the data that colleges use to make decisions about how they can help manage crises on their campuses. Whether that's the bubonic plague, COVID 19, or some future as yet unknown crisis.

Well, Chris, it doesn't surprise Michael or me that Davidson's a leader on this. We've had Carol, your president, on the show, of course. I've spent some time at Davidson for my new book. It just seems like it's a leader in so many different areas. And I think you're right. It shows really the value of a liberal arts education that can actually be practical in a time like this as well. And I think that's a great mix of what I think we've always talked about on the show around the liberal arts tradition. So thanks Chris for being with us today.

Well, thank you Jeff and thank you Mike and the whole team at Future youe. And especially thank you Jeff for featuring Davidson in your book. I have to tell you, having read a little bit of it already, you have nailed our admissions director, Chris Gruber perfectly. I really hope he gets the chance to look at it. Your description of his goatee and jolly attitude. Jolly attitude is just perfect and spot on. So thank you for giving Davidson the opportunity and being a friend of the college.

No, it was great to be there. Again, thank you for being on and also Margie and Bronte from Dickinson College for joining us earlier. And most important, thank you for listening. We really love to hear from you. So please drop Michael and me. Align with ideas, comments, questions, or even complaints about the episode. Until next time, this is Future you.

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.