Brandeis Parent Check-in May 14

May 14, 2020

Ron Liebowitz:

Well good evening, everyone. I'm Ron Liebowitz and it's a pleasure to welcome all of you to what has to be a first — virtual office hours for families. I don't think there's anything in our 72-year history here at Brandeis that has anything like it. In fact, it's only recently that we've gone remote and online, and we're all getting used to it to some extent, but hopefully not for too long.

I'm joined this evening by two colleagues, the first Raymond Ou, who is our Vice Provost for Student Affairs. He raised his hand. And the other is Mark Brimhall-Vargas, who is our Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. (Mark raises his hand).

And I have to say at the outset, I thank you for taking the time to meet with us, to enable us to answer any of your questions. Many of you have sent in questions ahead of time.

So this evening what I hope to do is to just give a broad opening statement just about state of things here, what's going on on campus. And then the three of us will turn to your questions that you sent in. And the final part will be for a period to send in your own questions.

You have a box on your screen, or you should have a box on your screen that allows you to ask questions. We'll take them as they come. I should also note that we are taking down questions that are being submitted just in case we can't answer all of them. And if the past is any prediction of this evening, I would say that we would have a hard time getting to all the questions. In fact, you've had so many questions in these that we're gonna post the questions and some of those answers.

So let me begin by saying, first of all, all three of us hope that your student is doing okay. That they managed through the seven or eight weeks of remote learning in a satisfactory way. We can talk about what we're doing to prepare for, in the event that we have more online learning, remote learning, we can talk about what went well, what didn't go as well in our view. But by and large, all three of us, and in fact the entire administration was incredibly impressed by the way in which students, faculty and staff, all of us, all of them, really rose to the occasion and adopted to a very, very different type of learning.

And again, we have to be upfront, it's not the same. We pride ourselves on the in-person type of education, the close faculty-student and student to student type of learning that goes on at a place like Brandeis and specifically at Brandeis, but we are interested to hear some of your thoughts, and in the questions and answers we can get to those as well, about those experiences that your students had.

So, turning to the near term, I'd like to just give you an overview of where we are. It's our hope that we would of course, be on campus this fall. However, as many of you know, unless you're living under a rock these days, there are so many factors that will determine whether or not we and other institutions, both higher ed and others, will be able to return to a somewhat normal or somewhat typical fall semester. It's likely in some ways that we will have hybrid learning.

We know that there are some students and there are some parents and families who would prefer perhaps to be remote. They're reading the news just as we are, and until and unless some things of course happen, we'll talk about those this evening as well, they would prefer to have a more safe environment. But in any case, our hope is that this, we cross some hurdles that are established by the state and also by the CDC and feds, in terms of what has to be done in order for us to open safely. And again, between Mark, myself, or among Mark, myself and Raymond, we'll talk about those as we go along.

We're committed to maintaining our standards of academic rigor no matter what we do come the fall, be it in person classes — rigor that Brandeis is known for, or even hybrid learning. We learned a lot during the first seven or eight weeks of what worked in terms of remote learning, and we are going to have a summer institute for our faculty to give them the opportunity to learn best practices and to improve on what they've done. Even if we open up full fledge, it will be nice to have this ability in terms of remote teaching and learning.

I made a joke, but it wasn't really a joke, that these last seven or eight weeks told us that we'd never gonna have a snow day here at Brandeis again. Back in 2015 there were five snow days at Brandeis, and now that we have remote learning as we do, we know that we can sort of get by both administratively and also in terms of the classroom without having to cancel class.

Right now, our COVID-19 task force — we have a task force that began in March actually, and it's whole role in March was to help us think through and think through quickly how we can move to a remote environment. We didn't have the advantage of many colleges and universities back in March who had their spring breaks right at the time that COVID hit. So many schools were able to go right into spring break, or add a week on the spring break and give themselves two weeks to get ready for remote teaching and learning. We didn't have that. We had our spring break April 8th, if you recall, and as a result, we had to make this transition very quickly with a two-day break. That's really what we had, two days to get set up. And we're very proud at how our students reacted and how our faculty and staff were able to make that transition.

The COVID-19 task force did a great job in getting us prepared for that. But now that taskforce has more or less pivoted, and their role right now is to help us understand all the issues that need to be done in order for us to have classes again on campus, to return to campus. The university has remained open for this whole period of time. In fact, I was on campus twice last week. There are about 290 students who are living on campus who stay on campus. Most of those are international students, but other students who had a hard time getting home or for one reason or another could not be at home and continue their studies, they remained on campus. It's amazing that they did as well as they did, if you think about it. The campus looked a little bit empty to me. They're spread out across residence halls. They don't have common dining; they have takeout dining. And so it was a challenge socially for many of them, and we'll talk about that as well as we go along.

But this COVID-19 task force is now pivoting to figure out how we can bring students back on campus. And there are many criteria that we must assess as we go along in order to create plans for the coming semester. I mentioned COVID-19 taskforce, it's chaired by our Provost, Lisa Lynch, and our EVP, Executive Vice president for Finance and Administration, Stewart Uretsky.

And they have eight working groups beneath the COVID taskforce, eight working groups that are looking at specific aspects of operations at the university. Some are looking at the health issues in terms of tasting, excuse me, excuse me, testing and contact tracing. Some are looking at the undergraduate experience; others are looking at the graduate experience. (Raymond nods his head in agreement). Some are looking at finance. There are eight of them working. They're meeting regularly. The task force meets on Thursday mornings to sort of bring together all the latest that they've circulated ahead of time.

I'm meeting twice a week with, just specifically on COVID-19 issues with Lisa and with Stewart Uretsky to get updates. We had a big meeting today. And we're now in the process of gathering all that information that I said we would need.

The factors and guidelines that will help us are, as I said before, are state related and federal related. The Governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, just released what he calls a four-phase plan for reopening the state, and embedded in those plans are what we as an academic institution could do. Those plans remain fairly vague, which is really interesting from my perspective, looking at things politically. Charlie Baker is a republican in a heavily democratic state. He was the most popular governor going into the pandemic, has very high approval ratings, and he's been very cautious. He comes from business and yet he's been very, very cautious, mostly because Massachusetts has been, the Boston area has been a hotspot. And, if anything, we've only reached a plateau. We haven't really been declining in our total new cases. I think today there are over 1600 new cases with 169 new deaths in the state. And so Charlie Baker is taking it a little bit slower. He's not out there as aggressively as some governors in other states, but Massachusetts has really faced, really a big challenge with this pandemic.

So we're gonna hear and we're gonna probably get plans on Monday, the first set of plans, more specific plans, because our stay at home orders end on the 18th and so Charlie Baker is supposed to bring much more detail to those, that four-part plan.

We're also gonna have to rely on the, consider the reliability and availability of testing and effective contact tracing as well. This is a huge concern. We're very much data-driven in terms of what decisions we're gonna make. And one of the big issues is whether or not the regulations surrounding testing will be lifted to allow places like universities, which have the laboratory facilities in place, to do some testing on campus. But in any case, we're far from that right now. We're only in May; we don't know exactly when our testing will be at the level that we need in order to cross that threshold.

We're also thinking about therapies, what type of therapies will be in place come July, August, and September, to address COVID-19. And then also of course, the longer term interest is the vaccine, which we're not really counting on for some period. But there are a number of these significant issues that are being taken up across these working groups, and as we get to the Q and A session we'll be able to address them.

We plan to communicate as frequently as possible. It's interesting, many parents have written in voluntarily thanking us for the communications. Others seemingly are not getting as many communications as the others, so we're making an effort to push as much information as we can out to both you and also your students, and we'll continue to do that. But in the meantime, we really do encourage all of you to stay in contact with us. My email is easy, many of you have used it, I know that. President@Brandeis.edu. I'm not the only one reading that email address these days and so if you write, you should expect an answer or reply, a response in some way, and I really encourage you to do that.

So let me step back now and get to some of the specific questions that all of you have been asking. And I'm gonna turn to my two colleagues here to help out. In the event that we cannot answer one of your questions, as I mentioned before, these will be written down and then we will find a place on our website, our COVID- 19 website, to list the questions and also provide answers in due course. So Mark and Raymond, are you ready?[Mark nods yes. Raymond smiles and shakes his head].

All right, so let me just go to the questions which I have here, and there are many as you probably could see me moving around on these pages, [Ron is flipping through a pile of papers] and I'll start at the top. I'm gonna read the questions and then I will begin the answer and if I want to pass it off to Mark and Raymond who are sitting, as I mentioned before, on several of these working groups, they can provide more specifics.

All right, starting out, what options is the administration considering for the fall 2020 semester?

As I mentioned in my opening statement, we're right now planning for multiple scenarios. We're looking at a scenario where we will have students on campus. We're looking for a scenario in which we'll have a mixed situation of hybrid and on campus, and we're also looking at the possibility of having all online for the fall. There are many aspects to these scenarios. So in effect, we have more than three. There were multiple scenarios in which, so for example, on the calendar, we're looking at breaking the semester into modular units — two seven-week modular units — having students take two instead of four courses to allow these courses to be compressed and done sooner. We're looking at changing the calendar so that we could complete these two modules at Thanksgiving time, allowing students to go home at Thanksgiving and not have to come back until January, giving that period of time. All of this, of course assumes that we won't have a second wave. When we start factoring in some of these other scenarios or other variables we then have multiple scenarios about the what ifs.

And I'll get to that issue right now. What if the second wave comes? What if an outbreak comes to Brandeis? Several questions that many of you submitted have to do with that as well. In the process of planning, we anticipate that we will need to de-densify our campus. In other words, we won't be able to have the density in our residence halls as we had before because of the contagion. So as a result, we're planning right now, looking for where we can create greater capacity. Many of the hotels in Waltham, in our city, are empty. We've been in contact with them for weeks to figure out what it would mean for us to both arrange for rooms to be used for students in general if we have a shortage on campus because of the de-densification of our residence halls, but also how many wings or how many floors of hotels could we use for quarantine. So if something breaks out and we have contact tracing and people have been exposed, we need to have a place where students can go. So this is all part of the planning. The planning is not just determining when people come back on campus, how many come back, but rather, what are you going to do if. So let me turn to Mark and Raymond to elaborate on this. Both of them, as I said before, are sitting in working groups. They're dealing with various aspects of this very issue about the opening in the fall of 2020. So let me have them add. Raymond, do you want to go first?

[Raymond Ou]- I'll be happy to. Good evening, everyone. This is Raymond Ou, and I'm the Vice Provost of Student Affairs at Brandeis. And it's such a pleasure to meet, despite the circumstances and despite the virtual environment. As I see not only the questions that we received from a few days ago, and also just the questions that are, that some of you have already typed in, I think for someone who works in Student Affairs, one of the first things that I want to reassure families and also give examples about what we are doing, relate to health and safety, of course. For instance, the health center as well as the counseling center, career center, residential life, Dean of Student Affairs office, chaplaincy, among other many departments, all fall under my portfolio, so there are no scenarios in which we are thinking only, just bringing students back. It's really the quality of the experience. How do we bring them back, when, and also what type of facilities they may have.

For instance, my team is actually physically going through the residence halls right now to take a look at all of the counts of bathrooms, rooms, ratios between single rooms and also bathroom stalls, because as you may have been following the news, whether it's what Dr. Fauci said the other day or other guidance, the plan must include a robust surveillance program that includes contact tracing as well as testing. And we must have a robust plan for de-densifying the residence halls. So that's actually what we're doing right now.

And we actually have an opportunity because we currently, as President Liebowitz said, we currently have between 250 to 300 students who are still on campus. And one of the reasons that we still have those students on campus is because Brandeis' ethos and our value system insists that we make sure that individuals who are in hardship, that we take care of our own. And that's why many students, whether they're international students or individuals who are traditionally from underrepresented communities don't have a place to go. So not only will some of these students stay this summer, through the summer, we actually have between 25 and 50 — I know because I'm literally counting the numbers — between 25 and 50 students currently off campus who are requesting to return onto campus.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because I want you to know that as we're planning for the fall, we're already implementing some of the guidance from public health experts. For instance, we are just finalizing a Qualtrics survey for students to fill out so that we can do the initial screening. This is very similar to when I had to take my dog, Romy, short for Romeo, to his appointment the other day. They actually used the phone screening for me so that I can then say, okay, you're okay. You can bring your dog in and leave. So there are many of the tools that are actually implemented statewide, and we're also ensuring that the physical facilities itself — for instance, the health center — we're looking at how to retrofit the environment without only plexiglass, but also looking into, okay, if we have students who need health services, where do they congregate? Where do they actually wait? And so it's the new reality that we're preparing for.

The final thing that I'll say, and then I'll turn it over to Mark, is that I saw some of the questions that you all had about mental health services and support. Being someone who has a master's in clinical counseling, this is not only something close to my heart, but what actually brought me into working in student affairs, and want to assure you that even with the current population of 300 we have on campus, we're remaining in constant contact with all of them. We not only have virtual meetings with them, but we actually have reached out directly by phone and also email, just to check on the students. And also for the students who have now gone home, the Brandeis counseling center continue to offer consultations, even though legally we actually cannot practice across state lines. At the same time, they're offering consultations and seeking out referrals, because when we think about student life and the Brandeisian experience, it's not a one sided one. It's really multidimensional, well-rounded and there's much more that we're eager to share with you, but I did want to immediately tackle some of the questions related to health, safety and ensuring the wellness of your student. With that, I'll turn over to Mark.

[Mark Brimhall-Vargas]- Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. I'm Mark Brimhall-Vargas, the campuses Diversity Officer and Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One of the things that I also want to pick up from Raymond and President Liebowitz is this notion of the mental health and the social experience of the students is critical and something that we are thinking about. For example, the Intercultural Center and Gender and Sexuality Center are spaces that are different, say from the financial aid office that has a transactional element to it, and these spaces we're actually actively engaged with the health experts and our student affairs professionals to think about how these spaces can be reconfigured either physically or in terms of time, access, so that students will have an opportunity to have space, but that obviously would not be dense.

I also want to touch on some of the questions that have talked about the academic experience. It's very important to recognize that what took place in the spring was what our provost likes to call emergency remote instruction. It was not standard typical online instruction. And so some of the questions about if students didn't always have a great experience, can they expect the fall to be different? I do want to assure everyone that our Center for Teaching and Learning, which is located in the provost office, has offered very large scale development for all of our faculty. I'm going to be participating in the June session, which is many, many hours of instructions in how to create online and in person instruction to make it really meaningful and useful to students in a way that we were probably not as well prepared as in the spring as we would be in the fall. So that is taking place this summer. It's a very aggressive training experience for our faculty who are actually quite eager to take it up. We all learned a lot about what worked and didn't work in online environments. And I know that that is something that we will be in a very different space in the fall.

[Ron] - Thank you Mark, and thank you Raymond. One question, simple question that came up is what is hybrid learning? Hybrid learning means several things. Hybrid means you can learn both in person on campus, but also you could learn remotely, either online synchronously or asynchronously, meaning in time or not in time. But it also means that a student who's here on campus might be being taught by a faculty member. And one of the issues that we're dealing with, of course, are the health consequences for our faculty and staff in addition to our students. The incidents of a serious illness as a result of COVID-19 for young people is very small. The incidence has been very low; let's hope it stays that way. But for older individuals, at-risk individuals, over 60 years old, and those with underlying health issues, it's quite different. We have about 50% of our faculty is over 50 years old. We have 70 faculty members over 70 years old. We have staff who have been on staff for 35, 40 years, and they're vulnerable. And so a form of hybrid learning could also be a student being on campus taking four courses, let's say, in a regular semester. Three of them might be in person, in a de-densified way and the fourth might be online even while they're on campus with a faculty member choosing to present their course, because of their health issues or because of their age, from online. So there's a hybrid of a various types here, but that's what we mean here, that there could be multiple types of learning.

Let me read this question 'cause I'm sure this is on your mind. It was addressed a little bit by Raymond and Mark, but I'll address it as well and then we can talk about it. In light of Dr. Fauci's statement that it is too far a bridge to hope that there is a vaccine or treatment by the fall, true, to make it safe for colleges to open and testimony today by Dr. Brian on Capitol Hill. The question that someone's asking is, how can you assure parents that our students could be safe on campus in the fall with any option other than online learning?

I wish we could. We can't. There are risks, of course, to all of this. We don't know for sure exactly what COVID-19 will do in terms of coming back on a second wave. We're hoping to be prepared for that if we have students on campus, even a small number of students on campus. As I said before, we hope we will, at that point if we do that, we will have testing, and we will have contact tracing, and we will have places to quarantine students who, of course, test positive. So that's the most we can do. We can be ready and we can respond quickly, but there's really no guarantee that anyone can give about this not being an issue or a risk at all.

The question related is, does Brandeis have the facilities to test in house? We're not allowed to test in house just yet — that's regulated — but we do have faculty members, and some of you might've read either on Brandeis Now or else in the Wall Street Journal, that our Nobel Laureate, Michael Rosbash, a biologist, has been working or had been working with 10 other leading scientists to sort of advise the task force at the White House on how to do reopening or how to open campus and also open the economy. His part on this, how to do a testing. And he is confident, as are biologists and scientists at other universities, that universities are the place where this could take place if they were so given that permission. Mitch Daniel, the President of Purdue, as you might've read, a school with 30,000 undergraduates has pledged that Purdue will open in the fall on campus. We don't know exactly how it's gonna open, but one of the reasons he gave her that is because they have extensive — they're very big STEM engineering school — they have extensive laboratories that they believe they can accommodate a testing there. Questionable, I don't really know. But we do have facilities if in fact, we were able to get approval to do testing on campus. Of course, those tests aren't been approved fully. There are different types of tests. Ours would be probably a saliva based test, but again, that hasn't been determined just yet.

Another question — this could be for Raymond since he's on this working group. How is Brandeis hoping to modify the environment to mitigate a second wave? Air filtration, masks and face shields, campus cleanliness — what are we thinking about in those areas?

[Raymond] - Absolutely, happy to talk about all of those. First, I think I had a parent call me the other day and we were having a conversation, and this is an incoming student's parent, and one of the parents essentially said to me that, how can you possibly keep my daughter from going to a party? How can you possibly force her to wear a mask? I can't even get her to do X, Y and Z. And I really enjoyed those questions because those are some of the things that actually brought me into higher education and student affairs and looking at student development theory. I think one of the things that we know is in the student population, when students come on campus, even though we have COVID, what is not going to be different is developmentally, students are at a certain time in their lives and there will be some testing of boundaries. There will also be learning of what are the cultural norms on campus. And so one of the things we already have the experience with is that we have to have very clear policies on campus and communicated regularly. For instance, some of you may know last Wednesday, the state really beefed up its requirements related to precautions that individuals should take, which includes wearing a face mask. And as soon as that guidance went out, an email from me, the student affairs person, went out and then immediately I got several emails from our Sodexo food service folks saying, you have students who are not wearing masks. And so we immediately actually got together and devised a strategy, a campaign, additional signs, and also reminders through the residence halls. So whatever the social distance guidance may be, whatever the de-densification outlines are, we know that these are conversations that we need to be actually having with not only our staff and faculty on campus, but also with incoming students so that it's not actually new when they encounter those things. So part of the health and safety is to ensure that students are adhering to guidance related to health and safety.

Related to de-densifying, I have already mentioned that we're looking at the number of buildings that we have, the number of bathrooms that we have, and also high traffic areas and ensuring that all of the spaces in the residence halls that we do use fit the goals for de-densification. So one scenario that we're floating right now to adhere to some of the guidance is that, and I want to be clear, these are not decisions we have made yet. These are things that we're considering. Some schools, for instance, are considering, oh, well, does it make sense for only the first year students and seniors to come back on campus? Some others have phased approaches as well, because part of it is when you do have a select number of residence halls, you want to make sure that not everyone comes back at the same time. And also ensure that when you have the facilities that are not overwhelmed.

And the third thing that I would say about related to health and safety is we also know that from a mental health standpoint, the affects of COVID-19 is far greater than just the physical health aspect of it. So for instance, just today I was in conversations with Lauren Haney. You may know her name; she is the Director of Athletics. We were talking about cohort-based living/learning environments that we may be able to begin to use this year in consultation with the academic side of the house. The reason that I mentioned that is because we understand that everything has to be interrelated, and part of the health and safety for the community is that we have that tight Brandeis web regardless of whether it's virtual, hybrid, to use the term that someone asked about, or in person.

In other words, the network through which we identify how students are doing, whether it's physical health or mental health remains the same, but we also need to make them more robust. For instance, part of the guidance from some experts, public health experts, contain that even for workers like ourselves, we can't all come back on campus at the same time. We may actually have a phased entry as well. So part of what we're thinking is also, well, if you're in a hybrid environment, sometimes students may actually need to reach you during nontraditional hours. So something that my team and I are actually considering is, so can we actually take shifts for office hours that extend the nontraditional hours. So if there are concerns, if someone isn't feeling well or from a mental health standpoint, if they really need to connect with the Brandeis counseling center, that we have those expanded options for students.

[Ron] - Anything to add to that, Mark?

[Mark] - Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to add in, because this question about to bring people back or not, what is the purpose? There's a question out there about what are the academic benefits of bringing students back?

One of them is particularly salient in this moment in that a significant number of our students live in environments where access to the internet is simply problematic. It's either too expensive or spotty. This semester, for example, I've taught a course where the students that I had, some of them were babysitting at the time that class happened because they had a sibling, for example.

So having a dedicated space here where they can actually really focus on studies and have all of the support structures that the institution can provide are critical for a student's success. That doesn't mean that we're going to be packing students into classrooms in a tight space, but we do want to make sure that the infrastructure of the university is there to support students in their academic journey.

[Ron] - Thank you. Someone asked about the research function of the university. I'm glad they brought that question up. This is probably the first place that I will open at the university. In fact, we're awaiting Governor Baker's green light come Monday for the first phase of opening, and that will be our research endeavor.

Our faculty, we have one scientific lab that remained open through COVID- 19. The rest had to be closed by mandate of the state. And that one was of a faculty member who's working on COVID-19 with colleagues at Boston University.

But come Monday and Tuesday, we anticipate that we're gonna have an opening allowed for our research labs. And with it, in a very, very sparse way. So they'll be only limited to three people, perhaps in each lab. Some labs are 2,500 square feet; some are 1,500 square feet, but there's probably going to be rotating shifts of three people at any one time going around the clock and also over the weekend. So the research function will be opening up, and that's a good thing because we are a research funded university. And also the number of students involved in research, both with scientists, and also at Heller School of Social Policy and Management, and also with other faculty, it's very high at Brandeis. Research is a big endeavor and so this is very, very important. But the research labs would be the first thing to open up most likely, and that will be in phase one. We hope that's as early as Monday.

Several people asked, what is the latest date by which we will let families know about the decision in the fall. And I think I said at the outset of the webinar here, that it will be late June, early July. We must make our decision by late June, early July. Back in March and April when it was clear that this was gonna go on for the full semester, we were hoping to do it earlier.

We have a whole bunch of issues riding on this, all of your students, coming either as first years or as continuing students. We also have a large number, 20% of our student population is international, and our consulates haven't yet opened. They're now beginning to take appointments for our students in July. That's the first set of visa interviews. So we have a lot of issues and we feel we have to make that determination by late June, early July. The reason we've pushed it out that far is to get the most information we possibly can on testing and also on contact tracing, and also on what the availability is of excess space for us to the house students should we need to if the pandemic comes back. So there's a whole bunch of the issues, but we will have a decision by late June or early July.

Several people asked what the financial condition of Brandeis is and how has Brandeis been impacted financially? Well, we had about a $12 million charge for the second semester, meaning the end of fiscal year 2020. Our fiscal year goes from July 1st to June 30th. So we're just finishing up our fiscal year and we're looking to be about $12 million below where we thought we would be. A lot of that is room and board refunds. A lot of it is the cost of having students go home. We have an emergency fund, as many of you know. Thank you, if any of you contributed to that emergency fund. We allocated more than $600,000 from emergency funds for students to travel home, to pay rent here, to get food and really to help them manage through this transition from Brandeis to going back home.

But we had about a $12 million deficit. We're projecting, we're doing modeling to show what the next year looks like. And of course we won't know that until we know what the impact is on our matriculation and what type of opening we have in the fall. But we've done several stress tests, assuming a 5%, a 10%, a 20%, a 35% and a 45% reduction in revenue where we're confident that we have the cash on hand to get us through a crisis, even as large as 35%. There are many levers that we have to pull that we haven't pulled yet. We've done certain things, such as suspending pay increases. My senior staff has taken pay reductions for the first six months of this year, and that will be continued for 12 months, if need be. We have a hiring freeze and a hiring frost, which is to say that it's a frost for positions that already been in the pipeline and have been approved and that are really important for us to fill. Everything else has been frozen. So we have pulled a few levers to get us to where we need to be now.

The next phase of our financial analysis will be when we determined what our semester will look like, and then see what our total matriculation is. Tuition accounts for about 60% of our net revenue and so it's a very, very big driver. Our endowment, I make a joke of this, but I used to complain, as many presidents do when you have an investment committee that invests in a conservative way, because instead of seeing increases of 15, 20, and 25% in up years, you might see 8, 12, or 14% increases. Well this year, I feel very, very grateful that we have a more conservative investment portfolio because the losses in our endowment have been far less than what they are across the board or among our peers. And so we don't anticipate to lose as much in our endowment earnings to support the operating budget as would have been the case. So our conservative endowment. Our good cash flow right now. And then also, we have lines of credit. As I said, we're a conservatively run institution from the financial perspective in many ways and we have two lines of credit and we have availability to cash should we need to do that, so we feel okay. I mean, we won't know more until, of course, the end of June, beginning of July.

Several have asked a related question about tuition. Will tuition be reduced if we go online or partially online? And the answer is yes. We will come up with a reduction in our tuition if we are offering online; it's not the same. We're going to try to have, of course, academic rigor and we're gonna improve on what we did this spring, as Mark said. Those sessions that he talked about, that he signed up for and other faculty, are pretty intensive institutes this summer, and many faculty have signed up already, which is a great sign. It just shows the commitment that our faculty have to teaching. So in any case, to answer the question, we will have a reduction in tuition if we are online or in a hybrid mode.

Raymond and Mark, do you want to add anything to those questions? [Raymond and Mark both shake their  heads and say no.]

Okay. We have another question. It says, oh, maybe this is a good one for, this is a difficult question, and maybe it's a good one for Raymond. Why did you ask students to go through the stressful housing process when you believe that students would not be housed in the halls that they were able to select? So what happens to the selection process, Raymond, after these students went through this process?

[Raymond] - I appreciate the question. We actually have not made final decisions related to exactly what the housing configuration will be in the fall. And admittedly, I think you're absolutely right. The housing selection process, I have worked for a number of universities prior to coming to Brandeis, including Tufts, Simmons University, Yale College and Johns Hopkins University, and I don't think I've ever been at a university where housing selection is not stressful for students. At the same time, I think this year it's been amplified because students are of course concerned, well, not only am I going to live on campus or not, but exactly what is the configuration going to be? So as you may imagine, as you can probably imagine, every single day starting in February, the guidance was shifting about exactly what states might need to do, what our nation may need to do, and certainly the World Health Organization and the guidance from the CDC as well. And so what we wanted to do was, each moment in time we made the best decision based on the variables that we have, while ensuring that students are healthy and safe. And so you're absolutely right. A couple of weeks ago, we actually did start and finish the housing selection. And I'm looking at the numbers right now. We have robust numbers for sophomores, around a thousand of them, around 600 rising juniors and so forth. And so we certainly know that the housing, especially the in demand residences, very quickly did students actually respond to that. And we honored those housing selection requests because that was what we were absolutely intending to do. And as the guidance has shifted, we will very soon be making a decision whether or not based on the emerging guidance and evolving guidance for the de-densification, whether or not we can actually honor all of the housing selection choices that have already gone online. And I think President Liebowitz and certainly Provost Lynch and Mark have said, our number one priority's health and safety. So we never chose purposefully to put students through a stressful process thinking that we wanted that to actually amplify the anxiety. But what we did want to do was to know that many students were waiting actually, because we actually delayed the selection process a bit to give people a little bit more time. We knew that many students were eager to actually engage with us through housing. In fact, many students joined us in Zoom virtual sessions to actually just talk to us and about housing choices. So what we're hoping to do in the coming weeks is, as President Liebowitz has said, Mark and I are a bit committeed out right now, but these are important committees that we're on, and we're finalizing those decisions. And what we want to do is to make sure that all members who have signed up for housing are part of our network. Whether or not they remain on campus or if we need to actually make choices based on de-densification. And again, what's driving those decisions will be health and safety while ensuring the rigor, academic rigor of coursework.

[Ron] - We have working groups addressing the issue of the what ifs. What if instead of 2,150 on campus beds, we can only use 1,300. What would we do? I mentioned before trying to get off campus beds available for students in hotels in Waltham. There are more than a thousand beds available at Waltham as we checked. So the question is, do we reserve those now and have them available for students.

But some of the questions that the task forces are asking themselves are, which classes would come back? Would you bring the freshmen in for this type of situation or would you ask the freshmen to do online, or hybrid or defer? That question has come up a lot. Will students have the opportunity to defer? In recent polls nationally, about 30% of first years, that's private and public both combined, have said that they would probably want to defer. We don't know what our student population looks like right now, but if we had to de-densify we'd have to find other places where students can live or else accept a smaller population on campus. And we'll have more of those answers as these working groups get their recommendations into the senior administration.

I like this question. Get to the point about how you will ensure students can minimize contact. Well, the answer is we can't. We cannot ensure that. This is one of the beauties about working with 18 to 22 year olds. We can ask them that to sort of minimize, we can de-densify the residence halls, but this is why testing is so important and why multiple tests are important. Some of the ways that people are thinking about testing in college residence halls is in a cohort model. To take students in groups of 10 living together, if that's what it is, 10 in a hall instead of 30 in a hall, and use them as a cohort and test them twice a week. If nobody comes up positive, they're fine. If the test comes up positive or you know, if someone comes up positive, then you test everybody twice a week. So in other words, there are protocols that are being set up now just for this reason. We have to test and test often if we're going to have students back on campus, because you can't tell students they can't socialize. You can't tell students that they're not gonna get together. As much as you can ask them, and they can wear masks and so forth, we believe, and everyone else believes like Dr. Fauci, that these are some of the challenges you're gonna face if you bring students back on campus. So you have to have testing and contact tracing, quarantine and so forth. You want to respond to that, Mark?

[Mark] - Yeah. One of the things that we're also doing is on the assumption that students will be interacting with each other on some level, there are already a process of prioritizing significant physical changes in the various buildings that students tend to congregate in, precisely to create some level of distance even in students who are trying to connect. It's still in process, but that is something that we are working on.

[Ron] - We have a question about, please explain what support you are giving to the graduating seniors. And I am gonna turn this back to Mark because he chaired a committee in terms of the celebratory aspect of the graduations that are taking place, but also he's very well aware, as is Raymond, about the support services that we have on campus and what we will provide for students even going forward. So, Mark?

[Mark] - Yeah, so at this time, one of the things that we have done is, and thank you to President Liebowitz, we've made a commitment that we want to have some type of in-person graduation for the class of 2020, but that it would not happen until spring 2021 at the earliest we would conceive of bringing people together on that scale. So instead, we actually have over 40 mini celebrations by major that will commence on May 24th, and will proceed all the way through Monday, June 1st. The idea here is to create as much intimacy for our students who are graduating as possible, particularly an opportunity to engage with each other and the faculty who brought them to the point of graduation.

We're also aware that there are significant challenges to the students who are graduating right now. And the Hiatt Career Center is undergoing a review of itself precisely to be thinking about how it can most effectively serve this class of students who are going out into a working world where there is significant unemployment. I can't speak totally directly to that, that's under Raymond's area, but I am serving on the Hiatt Review Committee itself, and I know that this is a top priority to make sure that the graduating class is given as much support as possible.

[Ron] - Raymond, do you want to add to that?

[Raymond] - I'm so sorry, but Zoom cut out for about 10 seconds toward the end. Mark, so I'm so sorry, I didn't actually hear your question.

[Ron] - The question about what we're doing to support graduating seniors.

[Mark] - I had mentioned the Hiatt Career Center's efforts.

[Raymond] - Absolutely, in fact, Andrea Dine, Assistant Vice President and Executive Director of Hiatt, her team pivoted very quickly to virtual webinars and also individual meetings with students as soon as COVID hit in February. And I know that they're also offering a number of internship opportunities. And currently, there are 2,500 employers on Handshake, the software platform that hosts a number of job opportunities. So while certainly employers are hiring, we understand that the concerns of students about the economic impact and how that may impact job prospects. So one of the things that we've done is that we've actually tailored a number of webinars that have received good responses on how to actually search for jobs amid the COVID outbreak.

We've also, for students who may wish to receive individual career counseling even at this late time, we're also offering those individual virtual sessions as well. And so I know that that is, that is also continuing to happen. And several weeks ago, the Hiatt Center hosted a virtual employers' fair with area employers. And most recently I've just met with institutional advancement to talk about our ongoing efforts to tap into alumni networks, not only for employer opportunities, but also to broaden the alumni network as new alumni join that honored cohort.

So those are some of the things that we're doing. And while it is a difficult time for us to pivot so quickly, I think what's exciting for us is that, we're having to think in new and interesting ways because we really have to make this work.

[Ron] - What about clubs, theaters, and sports and other activities? Someone asked this question, what are we doing about that, Raymond?

[Raymond] - Absolutely, in fact, several weeks ago I joined a Zoom session with the Greek Advisory Council and met with students who are participating in off-campus fraternities and sororities. And the reason that I joined them was because part of the, and President Liebowitz know this, part of my charge is to make sure that we invest in student life, and that includes both official and unofficial programs. The reason that I mentioned that is because what I want to share with you is the conversations that I had with students, while it was absolutely about their organizational structure and the events they want to put on, whether it's a beginning through summer even and also in the fall, it of course, eventually, we get to dwell on the COVID-19 conversation. And what was very interesting was that the students really advised us that whatever we can do to keep in regular contact with them as part of the mentoring and advising of groups that that is actually helpful because they're a bit zoomed out on just academic content. So they actually really wanted to engage with us to talk about something other than that.

In addition to that, while we, for instance, the student union president, the election cycle is usually April/May. We've actually delayed that to restart in the fall. Much of the union activities are still continuing, and I just got a spreadsheet about their proposed spending. So we are thinking about how the student clubs will need to evolve depending on what happens in the fall, but the planning and the ongoing engagement is still taking place.

[Ron] - I would say around varsity sports, we've had several conversations. The presidents of the UAA, the varsity sport league that were in the conference, and there's pessimism about the fall, at least one of the, I should say this, one of the more optimistic scenarios would be to start the season late and to move many of the sports into the spring. So most presidents are already having to deal with so many issues on the academic side and on the residential side, don't really believe that with all the travel in the UAA, we have our students going to Chicago, St Louis, Atlanta, New York, for their conference events, it looks unlikely that we will have a regular fall season and in the best scenario would be moving some of those sports, either later in the season or else into the spring.

[Mark] - Can I just add one item on clubs as well? So many of the very large signature events that Brandeis has year after year are driven from student clubs, many of which are in the intercultural center. There's already a conversation about the fact that the traditional way of those events happening simply can't take place that way. So there's no scenario that we can see where we would have a significant number of students packed in Levin or Sherman. So right now the staff are already engaging student leaders who are leaders in these various clubs to talk about ways that they can still sort of do things that are meaningful as a student organization, but not put themselves or others at risk.

[Ron] - Someone did ask about dining and how dining would change if we did have students on campus and even in a de-densified world of having just half the capacity on our campus, we would not have group dining as we do now. We have right now take out; we don't have people sitting on-site. We'd probably start there. We're working with our dining providers now to talk about what the options are and they themselves are thinking through this as well.

We have a good question about are there parents serving on the working groups? A very good question. The answer is not directly, not to my knowledge, not directly, but what happens is we receive, I would say the president's office probably receives, on average maybe 15 to 20 emails a day and growing, strictly from parents who have excellent questions, and many of them have perspectives about what we ought to be doing. Just like this evening, I see in some of the questions there's a lot of opinions that are being voiced. I take those and I immediately share those with Stew Uretsky and with Lisa Lynch who are heads of the COVID-19 taskforce, and they work those into the working groups and into discussions at COVID-19. So if there are issues that we didn't happen to think about, the parents have thought about, we bring it in that way. But these groups meet so frequently, and they meet online, and they meet in Zooms and they meet online. I don't know how successful it would be to have parents as actual participants. But I'm trying to think through here, especially after reading the questions this evening, whether there's a way that we could funnel opinions or get consultations and advice from parents more than just through the way that I'm doing it right now, which is getting direct emails.

[Raymond] - If I may actually, if actually may mention, some of you may know her name, my dear colleague Dvora Pemstein, she is our communications person as well as our Brandeis family liaison. And I know that she not only sends regular messages to all of you, but she also frequently comments on Facebook posts, and in fact, she and another colleague of ours are in regular contact with a number of parents, and actually coming into the session this evening, she was sharing with me that she is actually hearing a lot of comments from parents, but we can certainly explore other opportunities to solicit and utilize feedback from parents.

[Ron] - I do see on the Q and A here, that some parents on the board have said that they haven't received enough communications or they haven't received any communications. And I would just encourage you, if you haven't, you could send me president@brandeis.edu and someone in my office will make sure that the board gets that email and put you on the email list. It used to be that there was an opt in/opt out and parents more or less were kept on the outside, students were kept on the inside. But through this pandemic, we realized parents really do need to get as much communication and information as possible.

All right, a good question. What about accommodations? This is for Mark or for Raymond. What about accommodations for students with pre-existing conditions that didn't matter before, such as diminished lung capacity? Would it be too dangerous to enter campus? Even if we de-densified, what about them, what accommodations would we have then?

[Raymond] - I'll start with that. I think that's actually one of the reasons that we're being very thoughtful about the ways in which we may screen how students return. Because part of it is you want to eliminate as much as possible the exposure of the virus onto your campus. So even as, for example, as I mentioned earlier, we have some students who are wanting to return to campus for the summer in order to live in the residence halls right now. And what we're doing is ensuring that the survey and also the individual conversations with the clinicians and the health center ensures that we are actually screening appropriately. And I think that's one of the ways in which we want to make sure that anyone who's on campus, that the exposure and the risks are as minimal as possible.

I also just want to mention that absolutely, individuals who are immunocompromised that affects not only students, but also faculty and staff, of course. And so one of the things that I've been advising all students is not only to certainly consult with their primary health provider, but also to connect with student accessibility services because part of it is as a student is considering the different options, I do think that that can also be a resource that is not always considered. And as we're actually, when we're talking about accommodations, not only for immunocompromised individuals, I also just want to mention that for some students that also includes accessibility in the online environment, and it could be executive functioning coaching.

So I was actually just having a conversation with Kim Godsoe in the Provost's office about that. So these are some of the ways in which we are ensuring that accommodations for individuals who may be immunocompromised are addressed.

And the final thing I'll mention is that we do have a new medical director who's coming in on June 15th, and she is from MIT and she was the director of urgent care there. And I saw a question earlier, do we actually have anyone with medical expertise on the committee? The answer is yes, because our administrative director is already on that taskforce, and then the medical director will be joining her very shortly. So the clinical expertise as well as the science expertise, complement the administrative expertise that we bring to the equation.

[Ron] - A very serious question here about whether or not any current students and residents are COVID positive. Do we have any currently Raymond and Mark?

[Raymond] - We do not. And in fact, this is a number that we are tracking very closely. We do have between two to five of staff members currently that we are tracking, and at least two positive cases of COVID-19, and maybe a third right now that I was just receiving the numbers on. And these are individuals who may have been on campus, within two days of symptoms, but we do not have any students who are positive.

[Ron] - Okay, I see that we're past eight o'clock, but we got like a million questions, but let me ask a few more. I hope you don't mind. If there is need for a quarantine of students, that's after we have some opening, if we do, would they be required to go to a Brandeis designated place such as a hotel or could they come home? And I would just say right here, they would have the option of, of course, going home. We're preparing courses to be online and remote if they have to be. So I would assume, of course, they wouldn't have to go to a hotel if that was not something that they wanted to do.

[Raymond]- That's correct. If I may also add, Ron, we also of course, know that some students cannot go home. And so we also designated spaces for quarantining and self isolation for that reason as well.

[Ron] - It's interesting. Let me just say several have written about creating revenue producing opportunities here, by doing testing and charging the community. I just have to say that's a wonderful idea, and as a president looking for as many revenue streams as we can, I would just tell you that it would make people on this campus at least cringe. In other words, it's a very high level of social consciousness on campus. So much so that before this even began, we were being contacted by various organizations, hospitals in Newton and Boston, social organizations that we're in contact with, about utilizing our residence halls and our resources to help the community because of the challenges that they face. So whereas I think that's a wonderful idea and we have a really good opportunity, especially with Michael Rosbash and his colleagues in the science center to actually develop these tests, I don't know whether or not it would be in the Brandeis way to charge for those tests in order to bring in revenue. But in any case, I'll bring that back to the COVID-19 taskforce and we'll talk about that.

Well I want to stop here 'cause we pledged to go for an hour. We've gone for an hour. I recognize that we didn't get to many questions. As I said before, we will take the questions that have been submitted and we will find a way to get them on the COVID-19 website.

I want to remind folks to please send in your contact information, your email addresses if you are not getting information from the university. We're doing a lot of communications, but somehow some are saying they're not getting any. We want to make sure that you're on the list of communications and if you have any questions or your student has any questions, make sure you reach out to us to get those answers. You want to close Ray and Mark.

[Raymond]- May I just make an offer to all of the parents and families out there? If you have additional questions, and I'm still seeing the questions coming in, please also feel free to reach out to me directly. My email address is rou@brandeis.edu. You can just google Raymond Ou, it's a very unusual last name, O-U, so you can't miss me. I'm happy to connect with you offline as well.

[Mark] - Thank you, and it was also a pleasure to be here. Similarly to Raymond and President Liebowitz, if you'd like to contact me, my email is my initials, Mark Brimhall-Vargas, mbv@brandeis.edu Thank you very much for being here tonight.

[Ron] - Thank you Mark and thank you Raymond, [Raymond nods his head] and thank you everyone for being involved and please stay in touch. Good night. [Raymond waves goodbye]

[Raymond] - Thank you, everybody.