How to Lead Through Colliding Crises

Even before the pandemic, college leaders faced a difficult reality: financial problems, campus conflict, and intense public scrutiny. Now they are making decisions about reopening in the fall that have potentially life-or-death consequences. How are they navigating the tough economic climate? What ethical considerations weigh most heavily on their minds?

To get answers, The Chronicle spoke to Carol T. Christ, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley; Christopher B. Howard, president of Robert Morris University, near Pittsburgh; and Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York. They discussed how they navigate the crises hitting the sector, the imperative of taking action to combat racism, and the risk of emotional burnout. The interview, which you can also watch on demand, has been edited for length and clarity.

Jack Stripling: We’re here to talk about what it means to lead a college in the middle of a pandemic while facing an intensifying debate over race and equity in a very polarized political environment.

The City University of New York has really been in the thick of this crisis. Dr. Rodríguez, I was looking at your website before we started the panel today. You’re the first site that I’ve seen that actually has a memorial page that shows about 50 names, which is certainly not comprehensive, but it includes students, faculty, and alumni.

And I feel like maybe it would be appropriate to start by giving you an opportunity to talk about how to prepare for the trauma and emotional toll of this pandemic. You’ve seen it up close. What have you learned?

Félix V. Matos Rodríguez: How are we going to celebrate the lives that we lost? We decided that, until we have the capacity to do something face to face, this would be our best attempt to connect with those families, with those communities. We had 50,000 visitors to the memorial page the first two weeks.

We think that is, in part, because we have no capacity to grieve in the normal ways. You cannot go to a wake. You cannot go to a funeral. You cannot go and visit the family.

One of our vice chancellors, Vice President Allen Lew, whom I recruited from D.C. to begin managing our portfolio of construction and facilities — we lost him to the pandemic, a real deep loss.

One of the biggest challenges now is how emotionally burned out our teams are. We’re all talking about the mental health of our students. Our faculty and staff are also going through a lot of trauma, fatigue, exhaustion.

Stripling: For the most part, did these tragic deaths happen after you had already closed the campuses?

Matos Rodríguez: Yes. We lost a couple of faculty from City College and Brooklyn College, I think probably a month in, if memory serves. Remember, New York was at the epicenter.

Stripling: In terms of the responsibility of leaders, we’re entering a new phase, because you’re going to be making decisions and then seeing potential consequences. Whereas before, everyone was kind of in a surge of effort just to get people out of campus.

Now, I think Berkeley is talking about a potential hybrid model, which would include some on-campus instruction. It does strike me that if, God forbid, you had an outbreak on your campus, this creates a different level of personal responsibility for people in leadership.

Carol T. Christ: After weeks of developing a very elaborate plan for a hybrid model in the fall, we decided, after we had a serious fraternity outbreak, that it was just too risky to teach face to face. And so we will begin the semester remotely, with the hope that the situation improves and we’ll be able to resume some face-to-face instruction.

Stripling: Berkeley is, I think, 43,000 students, 24,000 employees or thereabouts. Robert Morris is a different kettle of fish. You’ve got about 4,900 students and about 1,000 people working for you. The risk-management profile is perhaps different. Last I saw, Robert Morris was still planning to be back on campus for the fall.

Christopher B. Howard: That’s the case. We are following the guidelines laid out by our governor and public-health officials. And we are still now in “green phase,” so we’re still permitted to have in-class instruction.

Having been at a place like University of Oklahoma before, and GE, and other big companies in the past, the complexity that Carol and Félix are facing — from a moral standpoint, there’s no difference whatsoever. But in terms of the ability to actually orchestrate coursework — we have a significant amount of our courses online. And we’ve upped that.

Some classes are so small and so intimate. You can put them in a bigger room. And then add hybrid or HyFlex; we’re doing that, as well.

Presidents and chancellors are in the risk-mitigation business all the time anyway. We try to get students to wear their seat belts, not to take drugs they’re not supposed to take, not to give drugs that they’re assigned to take to other people. Athletics, fraternities, sororities, clubs, everything. So we are in the risk-mitigation, risk-tolerance, risk-analysis business. And we figure out in our respective institutions where that’s gone too far.

I’m a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. I landed on September 11, 2003, in Afghanistan to serve as the head of human-intelligence collection for a task force looking for Osama bin Laden.

I thought that was hard. One of the guys I worked with is an astronaut on the space shuttle. He was a Navy Seal, did a spacewalk yesterday. We’re built for the grind. But to see these teams from Berkeley, from CUNY, step up for such a long period — and it’s not over yet. My advice to leaders is to understand that this is going to be a marathon with sprints in between. And you have to be very deliberate and intentional about making sure your people are OK.

One of the things we have to do sometimes is say, how are you doing? Call your staff members and their vice chancellors and vice presidents. They’re not supermen or superwomen. Be there to support them.

Stripling: Among our panelists, you’re the only place that’s still planning on reopening. What’s your tolerance for infections? What’s your tolerance for deaths? I mean, is your team working on a number?

Howard: I wouldn’t go that far. I think I was reading about maybe the University of Texas system. I might have read about them talking about a specific number.

We’re doing de-densification of our dorms and a lot of other things to facilitate social distancing in the residence halls. So we’re not packed to the gills. We have commuters. Commuters can bring things in and out. But they also de-densify your dorms.

We are working very closely with the Allegheny County director of public health. We have an ad hoc committee on public health and Covid-19 led by an epidemiologist on staff. We have a very good allied-health school that allows us to synchronize at a very sophisticated level the best practices — CDC guidelines, state guidelines, county guidelines. We are in constant conversation, watching the markers, the testing, the virus per 100,000 people, so forth and so on.

We’re going to be open and transparent with our faculty, staff, and our community members. Eighty-nine percent of students want to come back. We can’t say it’s feasible in every instance. Can’t say it’s going to be perfect, but this is what the students want, and we’re going to follow all the guidelines to make sure they’re as safe as possible.

Matos Rodríguez: We are part of very large and complex ecosystems ourselves. It’s not just that we are, in our case, 25 campuses and about a million students. But we’re mostly a commuter school.

My faculty, my staff, my students, depend on public transportation. We’re totally dependent on how that’s going to play out in New York City, and the level of readiness, and the level of comfort people feel with taking that mode of transportation.

I think one of the things that Chris is talking about is the humility that we all need to have. We are giving you the best plan that our team can come up with, the best experts, the best science. But we’re really part of a larger ecosystem that will end up determining a lot of things.

Stripling: Dr. Christ, going back on to your previous comments, can you just unpack a little more for me how you finally reached the decision to go all online?

Christ: The fraternity outbreak gave us a sense of how congregate living could really seed infections. It’s interesting thinking about different kinds of institutions. You have an institution like CUNY, which is a largely commuting-student population, and then you have an institution like Berkeley, where we would have, at the beginning of the fall semester, what we’ve been calling a “mass-migration event.”
How do you handle a mass-migration event in a way that doesn’t provide seeds for outbreaks? The situation is very different from the situation we confronted in the spring. When we closed down in the spring, we didn’t have any infections. If we have an outbreak in the fall, the outbreak will be with us. We won’t be able to send all the students home.

Stripling: A lot of people are deeply skeptical that 18- to 22-year-olds are going to come onto college campuses and not behave like college kids. Is that a reasonable concern?

Christ: Of course it’s a reasonable concern. That’s what college presidents and chancellors talk about all the time. What kind of social-norming campaign can we create that convinces young people that they need to act differently, not only to protect their own health, but to protect the health of others?

Howard: We’re talking about the idea of social pods. If you generally hang around with the same five, eight, 10 people — in the military, they’re using platoons and flights of 16 people — then you can create something where that unit can monitor each other’s behavior and kind of hold each other to account. If somebody gets sick, you have a contact-tracing mechanism. where they would go together into isolation.

Stripling: One of the better things I read in this pandemic was written by Corey Robin, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College. It was a piece in The New Yorker, a case for funding public universities, but it was juxtaposed with questions about whether institutions of much greater means are really better positioned to reopen, either in the fall or in the future, in a safe way.

Robin writes, “At CUNY, even in the best of times, we often don’t have soap in our bathrooms. We also still have push faucets. To wash one hand, I must use the other to twist and hold one of the sink’s two handles hard and continuously. This produces water of a single temperature — cold — leaving me always with one hand that’s touched the surface and must remain unwashed. It’s hard to imagine coronavirus tests, when washing both hands is nearly impossible.”

He was writing this in response to the president of Brown University having written an op-ed saying we need to reopen. These are categorically different institutions in terms of resources and wealth.

Matos Rodríguez: I think it is a crucial question, and it’s one that we have thought about. We have a blended funding model, funding from the City of New York and from the State of New York.

The effects of the pandemic on the budget of the city and the state have been documented. Many of us think that federal action is long overdue, in terms not just of specific support for higher ed, our sector, but also for localities, for states and cities. That’s indispensable for us to be able to provide the level of support to our students that we want.

It’s a challenge, in part, because it is sort of in constant motion. The city approved a budget, because they had to by law to do it by June 30. But it’s a budget that is waiting for the federal response. And that’s going to have a ripple effect on our capacity to do a whole number of things in the fall and the spring.

We have not made a final announcement as to the mode of instruction. But we’re moving much more to a space where maybe just the courses that require labs, and studio courses that can be done in person with social distancing, might be the ones that we offer. And we move everything else online.

But the capacity to be able to have the PPE that our folks would need if we were to open in any kind of modality is very much part of our thinking. Longer term, I hope that we don’t end up in a space where the residential experience becomes a much, much more elite kind of experience in higher ed. I think that that would be devastating.

Stripling: A lot of faculty feel that financial imperatives are driving some of these reopening decisions. I know that Robert Morris has already had to furlough some people and eliminate some positions. How important, just from a purely financial perspective, is it for Robert Morris to reopen?

Howard: When I was active-duty military, we’d say, “Mission first, people always.” Mission first, people always. The mission of our universities is to be the gateway to great lives, great careers for our students.

The idea that a financial imperative trumps health and the education, the pedagogical imperative, is simply false.

There’s no university leader that doesn’t appreciate if you don’t get the finances right, you go out of business. So I think it’s a false dichotomy to say that presidents and chancellors are putting the financial part above the public-health part.

Am I cognizant, are we cognizant, are my colleagues cognizant of the financial piece? Yes, we are. Is it the driver? No, it’s not. It is those that are least amongst us that will be most greatly impacted if we don’t come back in some form. That form can vary from university to university and system to system. Whether it be K-12 or higher education, those that have the least resources are going to be impacted the most.

Stripling: Pivoting off of that idea about mission first, the great, proud history of Berkeley, of course, is the Free Speech Movement. I’m picturing it as an incubator for conversations we’re seeing now around race and equity in this country. Dr. Christ, I’m wondering how you think an institution like yours is positioned to engage with that social and political challenge from afar.

Christ: We’re in the midst of four deeply interrelated crises right now. There’s the pandemic. And then there is the economic impact of the pandemic, which is both separate and obviously deeply intertwined with the pandemic itself.

The pandemic is an inequality amplifier. That’s true of individuals. It’s true of groups in society. And it’s true of institutions. The fact that we have this passionate conversation going on right now about systemic racism and social justice is, I think, in many ways connected to the amplifying effect of the pandemic.

And then you have a political crisis in this country about partisanship and the inability to conduct ourselves in the ways in which civil societies usually conduct themselves.

The moment we’re in is such a moment of opportunity to educate. In my adult life, I have not lived at a time when there are these four simultaneous crises. On the Berkeley campus, despite the fact that the campus itself looks very deserted when you walk through it, the online community, the virtual community, is extraordinarily lively, with people asking urgent questions about social equity, and thinking about racism in the university.

Stripling: Dr. Howard, I had a question for you about this. You, like so many other presidents, spoke out after the killing of George Floyd. A lot of people in our audience and across the country think the president himself, President Trump, is exacerbating divisions around race. If you had an audience with President Trump, what you would tell him about how that rhetoric affects Robert Morris University?

Howard: I would say that Black people are tired. Our original sin is something that Black folk have been talking about since my great-great-grandfather was a slave: Amos Howard, who my father knew.

The public lynching of George Floyd is in the life of every Black person in this country. In some continuum, all of us have a story somewhere that’s like that. It’s either in our family or friends of our family. So it’s not new. It’s actually very old. And we’re very weary. We’re very wary and we’re very weary.

You go back to Emmett Till, who was beaten to death for looking at a white woman and allegedly whistling at her in Mississippi in the late ‘50s. We go back to the late John Lewis, who just passed away, and him being beat about his head and shoulders as a freedom fighter. When I graduated from the Air Force Academy in ’91, a year later there was Rodney King, a public beating, which a lot of white people didn’t think that Black people were serious about till they saw it on video.

What I would say to any leader is: Do we have a movement or do we have a moment? And if we have a movement, are we serious, or are we just talking? Because we’ve heard it all before. I’ve been Black a long time, man. We’ve heard it all before. My wife is South African. She’s heard it more, in another language.

So now is the time to act. And how do you act? And when white people listen to Black people, they can’t expect that we have all the answers, because we haven’t caused all the problems.

Stripling: As a reporter who has covered higher-ed leaders for nearly 20 years, my sense is that college presidents more or less would prefer to be perceived as nonpartisan. I wonder if there is a sense at all that we are in a different paradigm now, that maybe does require some more direct confrontation with the White House. Is there a need for college leaders to be more forceful and direct in their criticism of this White House and its policies?

When I talk to people across higher education, they’re not happy with how this White House is handling DACA. They’re not happy with the rhetoric around race. And they’re certainly not happy with the Ed Department saying that the Cares Act can’t go to Dreamers.

Matos Rodríguez: Jack, you’re covering the field, so I’m going to defer to your expertise, but I think the sector has spoken. I mean, on the three examples that you mentioned, ample coalitions of presidents, professional associations to which we belong, have come up and said: We fundamentally disagree with these policies.

It needs to be presented as issue-driven, and not part of partisan politics. In that sense, we are role models of the kinds of conversations that we want our campuses to be engaging with. People of different parties can come in and participate.

You also have to back all these things with more than words. There’s lots of work to be done here at CUNY around issues of structural racism that have been coming out from the conversations we’ve had after the killing of George Floyd. But I’m also very proud. In my first year as chancellor, we’ve made history. You could not find a more diverse higher-ed team than the one that we’ve put together at CUNY. The chancellor is a person of color. The system provost is a person of color. The CEO is a person of color. The general counsel, for the first time, is African American. Allen Lew, who we lost, was the first Asian American ever to be vice chancellor in the CUNY system. Six of my presidents are African American. We’ve never had an Asian American president on a campus. Now we have two.

There’s a clear track record that you have to show when you have the privilege and the opportunity to lead. You can then model the kind of the institution that in our case reflects the students and the city that we serve here in New York.

Stripling: I take your point. A recent example is the White House reversing its policy on international students having to take on-campus classes — that’s a perfect manifestation of what you’re describing, higher ed speaking out and there being a response.

Last question: I’m curious what this crazy few months is revealing to you that maybe you didn’t appreciate as much before about working in higher education. What are the things you’re really missing?

Christ: I think it reveals how much higher education is really about congregating. It’s all about physical presence. What we’re having to do is create virtual substitutes for the ways in which people came together.

The other point I want to make is something I keep saying to my team: We all have to remember that there’s a day after. Every day, for all three of us, is filled with complex, difficult decisions, decisions in which there isn’t any perfect or good answer. But we also have to be focused on what’s going to happen the day after. This pandemic is going to be transformational for higher education. We will be different on the day after. And the universities that will fare the best will be the ones that are focused on what the day after looks like.