The Debate Over Reopening Colleges

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Hey, Michael, it's good to see you over Zoom yet again. As you know, the debates around the pandemic have been vicious at times, with different camps emerging mass and no masks, gatherings, no gatherings at Thanksgiving. Open schools don't open schools. And the same, of course, is true in higher ed. I've been really struck by the media coverage and the discussion shaming presidents who announced that they intended to reopen this fall.

No kidding, Jeff. It's been all the rage. And I admit that, that I personally had some strong reactions early on as well. And I am looking forward to exploring this topic far more today with our guest, president of Boston University, Bob Brown.

This episode of Future youe is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This episode is also brought to you by Proctor U. COVID 19 has dramatically changed the landscape of assessments in higher education. Jeff Salingo and Karen Fisher report on these changes in a new white paper called Remote Education 2.0, available at proctoru.com remoteeducation.

I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. So, Michael, a friend recently shared an article from a risk communication expert that put into perspective a lot of what I've been thinking about related to this pandemic. You know, first of all, before we get inundated with mail and tweets, I have to say, you know, I think we both believe in the science around the pandemic. So let's just, just put a full stop.

Put that out there.

Right?

Let's put that out there. Full stop. But it seems when it comes to K through 12 schools and higher ed, the media has adopted a suppression narrative, a framework that opening anything up is basically impossible, rather than a management narrative about how we can be safe and get kids back to school and to campuses. Indeed, a few weeks ago, I was on a call with some presidents of colleges in California and. And several of them told me that they've been afraid to speak out about the need to reopen. So for this episode and our next one, we want to focus on this issue with two presidents who have moved in opposite directions on this question.

That's right, Jeff. And today we have President Bob Brown, who has been the president of Boston University since 2005. Boston University is an example of a campus that opened this fall. And for our next episode, we'll have the president of Sonoma State University, Judy Sakaki, come on to talk about the thinking behind a campus that made the opposite decision. Our guest today, President Brown. He's a chemical engineer by training and before coming to bu, he was the provost at MIT and a professor of chemical engineering there, where he had joined the faculty. In 1979, President Brown was named as one of the top 100 chemical engineers of the modern era by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Bob, thanks so much for joining us, and welcome to the show.

It's really great to be with you. It's really a privilege. Thank you.

Yeah. So to get us started, let's set the stage for our listeners a little bit. Boston University, like most campuses around the country, you know, you moved to online learning in March, and then on June 10, you announced that you would welcome students back in the fall, but that things would look quite different on campus. Can you take us a little bit behind the scenes around what were the key considerations you were looking at and the different options that were on the table for the fall as you went through the process of figuring this out?

Well, what was really interesting at the university is that we moved very quickly by the last week of March to set up a group that we initially called our recovery team. And so we started thinking literally two weeks into this about how you would get back. And it wasn't clear at that point that there was a road back to reopening the campus. But there was a fundamental understanding that as a research university, we were going to have to move. There was going to be this huge pressure to reopen the research side of the university and the medical school and all of those kinds of programs. And that the university, once you started on that road, the question was, how far could you go? How many of your students, how many of your programs could you bring back? The real fundamental principle is that as a residential campus, we believe that we do our best teaching and learning while in residence. And as the spring drug on, what we realized very quickly is that everything we heard from our students who were doing remote learning reinforced that fact. So, you know, in March and in April, while we're starting to try to plan for the fall, we're trying to execute around remote learning, where we had pivoted to remote learning in five days. Right. And so there was this huge kind of push to how would you bring the university back? And by early April, we had decided that we were really going to focus on that.

That's helpful. And so then you went through a couple month period, obviously, of planning at a high level what that would look like. You made the announcement in June 10th. Can you talk a little bit to the timing of that announcement? Because you made it at a time when other campus president were making similar pronouncements. But there were also many, and myself included, who were skeptical and felt that schools would change plans once they got closer to the fall. One sort of reality hit, and so forth. You, obviously, it sounds like, came from a very different premise of the importance of being in residence and in person. But how did you think about the timing of that announcement and messaging it so that people had trust, right, that Boston University versus, you know, would hold to its word. Word versus perhaps what we've seen in some other campuses around the country?

We were actually a little late to make that pronouncement than others, in that we put the safety and security of our campus as the foremost thing that we had to figure out. And we spent a lot of time in April and especially in May figuring out what the campus would look like. And when we put out that memo on June 10, we already had a pretty good view of what the campus would look like. Like, for example, we had already moved. And I'll come back and talk about this. The most important thing we did in May, late April and May was understand how to do our own RT PCR surveillance testing for our campus. We decided early on in April that if we could not do that, we couldn't figure out a route to operating our campus as a residential campus. And so we had already, by the time, well before that June 10th memo came up, we had ordered the equipment. We had made sure you could procure all of the supplies. We had a great group of biomedical engineering faculty who were expert in the kind of robotic testing that we were going to have to do. And we were pretty sure by June 10th we could make this work. And we had basically outlined all of that and the, what I call the sanitation, ventilation issues we had to address and all those things. We had a plan that we thought was executable at that point, and we didn't put out the June 10 announcement until we had that plan pretty much in place. And so it was not in our mind, not a pipe dream. The question would be not put out that statement until we thought there was substance behind it in terms of our executable plan. Now, we didn't put the whole plan out because it was too much of a message. So we rolled the plan out. If you look at the testing facility, I think was announced separately. It was announced separately. And we rolled out the details of the testing facility over time. We didn't put out the. The frequency of testing until July because we were still doing a lot of modeling and analysis about what that frequency had to be. But we knew we could run a testing facility at somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 tests per day if needed. We knew that.

So, Bob, can you talk a little bit then about how that testing and surveillance testing, as well as kind of your learn from anywhere plan, right, which means that students have this option to learn in person or online. How pivotal were those two elements above everything else that you were trying to do in terms of this plan?

You've studied us. The learn from anywhere element was absolutely key because we knew from surveys we were doing in May and just looking at what was going on that there were going to be many students who would not come back, would choose not to come back, or could not come back. The international students and travel and visas and all of these kinds of issues. So we made decisions in mid May and started having the discussions with the deans about executing what we called lfa, because we knew that was going to be critical to be able to say something to all of our students. We knew we didn't want to say to students that if you don't come back, you can't go to school. And we also knew we didn't want to do the inverse, that you can't come back. And so that led us pretty quickly into that we had to figure out how to work with both cohorts. And then I think a really exceptional decision in there was to realize that that gave students a choice and that changed the way they discussed all through the summer what they were going to do. And all the way up into August, we had students that you weren't sure if they were going to do LFA and come back or not come back. You know, if the biggest component in this is we who was going to actually be in housing at the end, we really didn't know.

So, Bob, you mentioned an executable plan. And what was interesting to me as I was talking to your counterparts across the country this summer, is that there are plans, and then you obviously have to execute them when students show up. And so did you run through those scenarios? Did you test your pressure test your plan with real people? And then the other thing that I heard was that presidents and boards might have wanted to have executable plans to reopen, but then there were people on the ground who said, you know what? We just can't execute this. Like, did you. Did you feel like you had. Were you assured by, like, everybody on campus that you can really execute this plan? So first was kind of testing the plan, pressure testing the plan, and then second was having A good assurance from people on the ground that this was. This plank could be put in place.

Back when I was saying to. To Michael is that going back into late March, in early April, we stood up a recovery structure. What I mean by that is we have a committee that started meeting twice a week at first, for an hour and a half per week, per meeting, called the abc. And it was. It's a. Some people call it another bloody committee, but that under. It had six subcommittees that all had pieces of this. An undergraduate committee, a graduate committee, a remote learning committee, a group working on testing. And so we had six subcommittees that we stood up in early April to develop the plan and things like getting procurement involved so that you could be sure you could procure all of the things you need to have to execute a testing protocol. Hardest thing to get in the country in May were swabs, nasal swabs, things like that, signage, all of these things. We had people assigned early on to all of those pieces. And so what we. So when I say execute, we had a whole structure that we're working double time. They were running the university, getting us through the spring term, which was hard, and starting to put together this plan. And by June, by the time all of our current programs were over, we totally pivoted, totally to look at the fall. And these teams just did a magnificent job. I mean, amazing things. So that in. I think it was July 27, our testing went live for the medical campus. And we had people doing time and motion studies at our testing facilities, trying to understand whether our estimates for how long it would take to go in and get tested were right. Right. And we were starting to. We were putting up all the data systems to make this work. The IT part of the. Our environment is, I think, probably as impressive as anything else that was done, but by our is&t folks. And so the amount of data that we're able to get and look at daily about what's going on inside the university. So, you know, I think one of the things that's really was strong here, and that's. That's a legacy of the way Boston University operates. We were able to focus a huge number of people on that task of bringing the university back, whether or not it would work. I mean, the worst month of my life was August.

Right.

Because we had it all there. We were running it on the medical campus, but running it with MD students is not like running it with undergraduates. Right. We knew the testing would work, and we were going to start bringing undergraduates back. I think on August 16, they started back over a two week period as we brought them in slowly and tested them and put them in the protocols. But, you know, were we sure it was going to work? No. And we lived through what happened at UNC Chapel Hill and oh, you know, the tension on the campus and having to tell everybody they didn't. They're not doing what we're doing. Right. And everyone in getting everyone to suspend disbelief. Right. And let us get started. It was, it was a very tense time.

So. So against that backdrop, Bob, I'm curious, because a lot of people, you know, we're watching that UNC nightmare scenario unfold real time, but not just there. It was in several campuses, you know, around the country. And there was a lot of criticism, as you know, in the media and so forth that, you know, of cynicism right, on the part of presidents that were opening, you know, sort of saying they're putting institutions finances ahead of, you know, the health. Not really even just of students, frankly, and not even just faculty, but also staff who would be on the front lines of interactions and so forth. So I'm curious, you know, that conversation that was overwhelming, the higher ed dialogue, what was it missing, in your view? And then the second thing I'd love you to reflect in that context was it does occur to me, as I hear you talking and I see what Northeastern has done and some of the Boston campuses, there was really a cohort of you all that, that took some very big measures as a community toward reopening. What was the role that played in it and the role of resources, you know, being able to throw so much people and time and thought into this. And how maybe is that different from other campuses?

Well, there are two things, and that's very perceptive. One is that the. What's called acom, the association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Massachusetts, move very quickly under its leadership. And its leadership is Richard Daugherty, who's the administrative leader, and Laurie Leshen from wpi, who's the president of the President's Council at this point to try to organize those campuses that wanted to really share best practices. And I ended up as a member of what was called the Higher Education Testing group of that association. And we had direct line into the governor's office because Laurie was on his recovery committee. There was a lot of interest, and there always is in Massachusetts around higher education. And so the governor was very interested in how higher education was going to come back. And there's a public document that our group produced. Oh, gosh, it must have been mid to late April, which became the blueprint for how colleges would come back. So that that was a very, very important part for Massachusetts. And it gave us a sounding board for people to talk to. Our decisions around testing were in parallel with that, but were independent. We, I think, because we have a great school of public health, we have really good people in biomedical engineering, we had kind of reached the conclusions around testing and around RT PCR independently. And now the timing was interesting because that led us to stand up our own testing facility. And then, as you know, in May, the BROAD came up. Broad Institute came up in with a plan where they would offer testing to the higher education community. And we decided probably one of the toughest decisions is that we could do it ourselves. And we had all. We were way down the path of doing that and not to go with the Broad to stay independent. The Broad has just done a fabulous job for higher education in Massachusetts and made us, as, you know, unique in the country as a sector being able to do this.

So, Bob, one last question here. You've laid groundwork for a similar plan for the spring semester and set the calendar. I'm just curious about external conditions and what might change that. But I'm also interested in how higher education should start planning for even beyond the spring semester. This seems to have been a kind of a semester by semester planning. But as you know, especially high school seniors right now are starting to make their decisions about where to apply. And one question I get from parents all the time is how do we know if we're going to be on campus next fall? Right. So how. Talk briefly about the spring and the impact of external factors, particularly the rise in cases we're seeing right now and what impact that might have. But how far in advance do you think you have to start planning for 2021 at this point?

Well, you know, this is a really great question because if, if I go back to. And I'm going to do it kind of by talking back about what happened in the spring last year. We made all the. The decisions about the summer really rapidly in the spring because we said we've got to get the summer out of the way to concentrate on the fall. Right. And we made people very unhappy because we were canceling programs in the summer before other people were canceling them. And what we were doing was clearing the deck so we could cancel and fall. So we're doing the same thing now for the spring. We've got to get the spring nailed down. And we're doing surveys of our students and faculty about lfa. We've got to get all of those issues settled down for the spring to start thinking about fall 2021, because exactly what you said, right. And there's both the challenge and the opportunity. We have this very amazing pivot that has occurred. We have our student body. We're going to bring in a group of rising college students that all have had tremendous familiarity with remote learning. Everybody, right? And one of the questions we're actively asking ourselves right now is what does that mean? How do you seize the moment of having a faculty and a student body who has this attribute of having experience remote learning? How would you change next fall even if Covid is not an issue? Right. Would you just go back to the way you were in the fall of 19, or would you be different? And I think the consensus is we will be different. And we've got to figure that out. We've probably got about four or five months to figure that out.

That's a fascinating question that we might want you back on. On future you at some point because Michael and I have been talking a lot about this, right. What sticks from this moment. Because even if. Even if the virus is gone by the fall of 2021, which we all hope it is, or we hope there's a great vaccine by then, and everybody has it, clearly this is going to have an impact on universities and teaching for the long run.

So now the virus, you know, our sense of. Now, you know, I'm. You can find people much more experienced about the virus and the possibility of a vaccine. My sense is that our comfort level that Covid is really gone is going to happen over time. Right? Because even if tomorrow we could vaccinate everybody, the efficacy of that vaccine is still going to be relatively unknown. The how long it's going to last and you know, what your immunity is going to be, how dependent that is on other factors, your personal health factors. I think we're going to ease out of this over a period of time, even under the best of circumstances, hopefully by the fall or in the summer that all of what I'd call the vulnerable population, the people you work most about, will have been vaccinated. Right? And we will then be working on these cohorts like the, like our students. But our plan, that's why we're talking about the spring so easily and quickly making an assumption. Our plan is that we've got all this facility to operate this way. We're going to back out of this operating mode slowly as our public health people tell us it's safe to do that, but we know that unless something really goes wrong, we'll be residential next fall.

So obviously a long term planning issue for higher education institutions and for your counterparts across the country. Bob, thank you so much for being with us. Bob Brown, the president of Boston University, and we'll be right back here on future years.

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Welcome back to Future you off an important conversation with Boston University's president Bob Brown. And Jeff, I would love your perspective on this topic and what we just talked about because as we talked about in the intro to this show, the amount of president shaming in the media, on social media and the like for those who have decided to reopen campus to students seems quite significant. I mean, I personally can't remember anything like this before. And what's, what's been going on in your judgment?

Yeah, it's really interesting, Michael, and I think partially because higher ed. Let's rewind for a second back to February, March. Right, because everyone coalesced around a solution back then, right? We're going to go online, we're going to go home maybe for a couple of weeks and then maybe we'll come back. And it was clear after, you know, by the end of March that that wasn't going to happen. So then in the late spring, early summer, that's when schools started to really go into different directions for what they were going to do in the summer and the fall. And there were two media pieces in particular within weeks of each other that I think set the tone for these two camps. Kind of the reopened camp and the don't reopen camp. And the first was the op ed by Brown University President Christina Paxton and the in the New York Times. And if you remember that it was in April and the headline was something like, you know, college campuses must reopen in the Fall, here's how we do it. And I think that was on a Sunday. I think.

I think it was the week in review.

I'll never forget how my Twitter feed, mostly of higher ed folks, just blew up around that. Like, how dare somebody basically say that, you know, we should reopen because we need that, you know, we need to get students back on campus. There were a lot of people on my Twitter feed who felt that this was like a money grab. There were a lot of criticism because, of course, this is Brown University and they're an Ivy League. They can do it. And then a couple weeks later, you might remember that Michael Sorrell, who's been on this program, a good friend of ours from Paul Quinn College, wrote a piece in the Atlantic that colleges are deluding themselves if they think they could reopen, and here's why they shouldn't. Right. So I feel like these two pieces seem to have set the tone for what followed and set up these two camps. And then on top of that, what you had was over the summer, I think, in the interest of transparency, that schools kept wanting to announce their plans of what was going to happen. And in many ways, they announced really before they were ready to announce, because they wanted to get their plans out there. And then they had to start pressure testing those plans. And in some cases they didn't work. And in many ways, I think, Michael, that's why, why what President Brown just described to us felt materially different from a lot of the pronouncements that many university presidents were making in the late spring and summer. Is that your take?

Yeah, that's certainly my impression, Jeff, as well. I mean, from my perspective, Boston University, what he just described was both a lot of work that went on behind the scenes in the spring, frankly, to figure out what would reopening look like, like, and then a very thoughtful communication strategy behind that, basically that rolled out what they were doing in, well, measured doses. So you got the announcement in June, we're reopening. This is how we think we can do it. But it was still high level, but it gave you the sense that, hey, we're going to be rolling out exactly the plan over the next several months that you have confidence, you know, that we know what we're doing in essence. And that was materially different, I think, from what felt, at least from my perspective. And I'm putting my bias out here, but more cynical announces where people just said, hey, we're, we're, we're going to reopen, no details, very light and whatever. And then Very little communication over the summer, which creates a void. As you know, when there's no communication, it creates a void. Rumors start swirling, people start speculating. Students started wondering, will we really show up on campus? And it felt like a grab just to lock intuition. And all of a sudden, you know, there was the dates where you had to put in the deposit by, and everyone started to see those dates. And a bunch of campuses right afterwards would say, oh, we're no longer going to have people in person. And this rollback, if you will, that occurred over the late summer in particular, that markedly different, I think, from. From. From what, you know, we saw out of Boston University. Continual information transparency for parents and students. And in my estimation, Jeff, it speaks again to the importance not just of having a strategy and having thought through all the tactics, you know, the testing, what will class in person and online look like, and so on, but also the importance of communication. Jeff, I think communication cannot be understated in this pandemic.

Yeah. And it reminds me of an episode from last season with Mike Armini from Northeastern, and maybe we need to have him back on, because that was really, you know, a big part of his job was planning the communication out of this. And I think there were three things that made this a bigger story. The first one is one you just mentioned this pressure on enrollment. Colleges and universities are in a competitive marketplace. They all wanted to see what their competitors were doing if their competitors were announcing they were reopening. In some ways, I think that pressured other universities within that competitive set to say they were reopening, especially when students and parents were trying to decide over the summer about what to do, even if they may be deposited at multiple colleges and universities, all trying to keep that enrollment up. Because, remember, enrollment is the lifeblood of these institutions. And that put a lot of pressure, I think, on the communicators, because I think many universities were really talking about what they were going to do in the fall before they were really ready. As you said, they said they were reopening, and then they really didn't tell us anything else. But there are two other things from the media perspective that I think made this a bigger story. This is really one of the only few national stories I recall with a huge education angle to it. Right. You know, I was at the Chronicle during, you know, 9, 11, during Hurricane Katrina, you know, during the Great Recession. There's always an education angle to big national stories like this, but. But in many ways, schools were the story in the pandemic. K through 12 and higher ed so that means presidents were being called to comment on this by the national media. They were being asked to write these op eds. In many ways I think presidents are out of practice. Remember, these are risk averse people. For the most part. They don't.

It's a different job from what it was a generation.

It's a different job. Right. They are not the Ted Hesburgh's of Notre Dame and the Clark Kerr's. I'm watching this great documentary on Showtime now about Reagan, about the Reagan's. And you know, and there's this point yesterday in the one I just recently watched, you know, where, where Clark Kerr gets fired by, by Ronald Reagan and you know, Clark Kerr and others were really out there as presidents in previous generations. They were willing to take issue on national, on topics of national importance. That just doesn't.

Brewsters of Yale and so forth.

Yeah, exactly. It just doesn't. This doesn't happen in this generation. And now suddenly these presidents were being put in the national pressure cooker particularly around their own institutions. And I think they were just out of, out of practice. And then it was how. So that was the second piece of this, right? The colleges being part of this national story. And then I think the third piece of this were the relations to town gown. Right. Colleges don't live in a. Most of the time colleges live in a vacuum and they may have town gown issues that we're well, well aware of if you live in the local town. But for the most part, you know, Yale is Yale and New Haven is New Haven. But once publications like the New York Times and other national media outlets started to report how you had all these Covid hotspots in and around college towns, this became again more than just a higher education story. And, and I think colleges were put in in some ways an unwinnable position that they were the cause of these, of these Covid hotspots because students were moving in and out. And we've seen that just even recently in the last couple of weeks. It was fascinating. The day the CDC recommended people don't travel for Thanksgiving was essentially the same day that colleges started to close down for Thanksgiving and send students home. And once again they were in the national spotlight for becoming essentially super spreader events. And it really puts, I think some of these presidents and institutions in a, in a hot spot because in many ways they are responsible for perhaps the growth of, of COVID cases in their local towns, but they're also responsible by the way for the economy of their local towns. So you know, I Just think of my own town of Ithaca, New York, where I went to undergraduate college. And if you read the local newspapers up there and the local in the Facebook pages and everything else, on one hand, everybody up there wanted the students back for the money, and on the other hand, they didn't want the back because of COVID And so this town gown stories, which tend to be very local and parochial, suddenly became national stories.

Yeah, I think that's a good set of points, Jeff. And just, just one thing before, I have another question for you actually, which is that point about the tension between the town gown interests and the college interests. It's something that I think was an undercurrent of this when Michael Sorrell wrote the piece in the Atlantic, basically making the claim, you know, how can you be so irresponsible? And it's against the backdrop of a lot of people like myself theorizing, hey, a lot of colleges could close in this, right? And the theory was you're putting the interests of the institution above the stakeholders of students, staff and faculty, essentially their health. But there's an interesting other piece of this, which is if the college closes, there's a lot of staff members, a lot of people who are working, you know, cleaning crews, right, who like bread and butter of a campus operation. The, the economic life of these towns where there's going to be a lot of economic damage to individuals lives, which we then know will have health spillover effects. It might not be Covid, but it will be other health effects. And I think it's, I think that's emblematic of one of the challenges of covering Covid in general, which is talking about the trade offs in all of the decisions that we have to make is within a single issue. It might seem very simple what we should do, but when you think about the spillover into 10 other facets of our lives, it all of a sudden becomes very, very complicated to figure it out. And I certainly haven't teased this out in my own head, but I think it's part the, of. Of the issue. On top of that, Jeff, and this is the question that, that I love your take on is there's a political dimension to all this, right? There was a big backdrop of a sitting president not terribly popular in higher education circles and, you know, not terribly popular in higher ed media circles either, urging schools to reopen, urging schools to play college football and all the rest, and then presidents who don't love the sitting US President, but the college presidents then choosing to reopen. And I'm curious If, if in your view that has had anything to do with this reaction we've seen.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a political element to this and I think it also shows how it played out different by state.

Right.

We saw the University of North Carolina be really pressured to reopen because of how the state was reacting to the coronavirus. And compare that to New York where the governor was actually be more aggressive about shutting down and the presidents up there were more aggressive to be reopening. Right. So you kind of had them playing in some ways opposite roles depending on the state aspect of this. I'm going to be really fascinated. To me is what's going to be fascinating to me is how this plays out over the next six to eight months because we're obviously going to get some sort of vaccine coming and we don't know what college will look like next fall in the fall of 2021. But in terms of how this is playing out by state, will we see some students now pick colleges, unlike last fall, pick colleges based on those that are in states that are reopening faster. And again, what dynamics will play out there? We're already seeing, and I'm hearing from college leaders, but also from high school counselors that the transfer activity seems to be greater or the transfer people thinking about transferring seems to be greater than in previous years. And students who had a largely online experience and not a very good one, particularly freshmen this year, are looking to transfer to schools that are largely in person right now because they're thinking, well, those are the schools more likely to be in person for the fall of 2020, 21. So I think that again, this, even though, you know, we have a new president come January, we, and I'm willing to say that, that we have, you know, we're still going to have this play out politically, I think because this is still a state based decision in so many ways that's impacting, impacting higher ed.

It's a really good set of points, Jeff. And it all whets my appetite for the next episode when we get to talk to the president of Sonoma State University, Judy Sakaki, where they were part of the Cal State system that made a very different decision from Boston University. We'll have all that and more on the next episode of 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.