Brandeis Parent Check-in May 22

May 22, 2020

Mark Brimhall-Vargus:

[Mark Brimhall-Vargas]- Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the President's office hours. My name is Mark Brimhall-Vargas. I'm the campus' chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion. I'm delighted to welcome you here today. We have a lot of questions that we wanna go over. And so I'm gonna turn it right over to President Ron Liebowitz. Thank you for joining us.

[President Ron Liebowitz] - Thank you, Mark. And thank you, everyone for joining us. In addition to Mark, we also have our vice provost for student affairs, Raymond Ou, and we also luckily have our provost here, Lisa Lynch. Lisa is one of the two co-chairs of our major COVID-19 task force, which will come in handy in answering some of your questions. I welcome back some of you who were here on our last call. We have some updates for those of you, but I wanna give some opening remarks for those of you who weren't on our last call, and for those of you who perhaps haven't received all of our communications or been able to read all of our communications over the past two weeks or so.

First of all, we're very grateful that your students have completed the semester as they have. As we've reported before, we feel very fortunate and grateful that our students faced this challenge. And they are great challenges in terms of moving to remote learning as they did with the kind of grace and also success that many of them did. There were challenges. We won't say there were not; there were lot challenges, not only for your students but also for our faculty and staff to provide as rigorous and as Brandeisian-like quality online or remote learning and teaching as possible. There were challenges. We learned from them; we'll talk about them, what's being done also in that area with Lisa a bit on.

Many of you probably saw the message that I sent out Wednesday. This is something that included information about the state of Massachusetts or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' plan for quote unquote, "Reopening Massachusetts." This was a four-part plan that was sent out by the Governor who has a task force, which includes some members from our higher education community here in Massachusetts. And we're in phase one. There are four phases; we're in phase one. And at least in terms of phase one, we talked about scaling up our research. We had one research lab open through this pandemic, a colleague who is doing work on COVID-19. But now it's time for the other research labs to scale up, and Lisa will give us an update on what that means.

Many questions have come in about opportunities for students to do research, and what this means for the summer program in research. We'll address those as well. But we feel grateful that we finally can reopen or scale up our research facilities.

There are three other phases in the plan, which don't have much detail. And that's one of the challenges that all of us face here in Massachusetts and all universities and colleges, is understanding the thresholds that we have to meet in order to bring a greater density to our campus. And again, we'll talk about that in greater detail. We have this COVID-19 Task Force, including eight working groups that are each looking at multiple scenarios that take into account, primarily health and safety of our students faculty and staff, first and foremost. But then also a lot of the other challenges that have to be met mostly in terms of testing, in terms of contact tracing, in terms of de-densifying the campus to meet the thresholds or meet the needs of what the CDC guidelines and our state and federal guidelines are for a safe environment. And we're also thinking about multiple scenarios when it comes to what happens if — there are a lot of what if scenarios.

So we have these eight working groups, and part of the challenge is answering all the questions we need to answer within a month-long period, but then also integrating the answers and trying to figure out what the best approach is. Our decisions for the fall semester, which we will make by the end of June or early July, you'll be hearing from us, really revolve around the threshold of state and federal government guidelines, as I mentioned before. The availability of effective therapies, there's been a lot of reports about effective therapies, we have to wait and see how effective they are and what they mean for our population, not only of students but also of faculty and staff. Whereas the age-specific nature of COVID-19 has been written about quite a bit, although recent writings also talk about the health risks to younger people as well, it's predominantly been an older individual health challenge. And we're concerned about that. We have many faculty members, I think half our faculty, and Lisa can confirm this, older than 50 years old. We have 70 faculty members who are 70 or older. We have many staff who have been here, part of the beauty of the Brandeis Community is that we have long-serving staff, now we have to worry about their health and safety as well. So that's one issue that we're worried about.

The reliability, availability and extent of testing is another issue. Right now, you might have read, testing is very highly regulated. If we were able to do our own testing on campus, it would be much better for us. Although the cost of this testing is really prohibitive right now, one of the key things that higher education reps through the governor's task force here in Massachusetts is pushing is the idea of helping us with testing, both in terms of regulation and in terms of cost. We wanna be able to test students regularly not just periodically, but also faculty and staff. And that comes at a prohibitive cost. So that's another issue — the reliability, availability, extent and cost of testing.

The system of effective contact tracing is important as well. Part of the challenge we face here is that we have a coming-and-going population; we have people commuting in from various communities; we have international students; people coming from other states. And the whole idea of contact tracing — it's really labor intensive. And one of the challenges today has been creating a knowledgeable workforce to be able to do contact tracing effectively. So we're looking for help there as well from the state to give us some guidance as well.

The ability to maintain public health standards of physical distancing at our residence halls, classrooms and dining facilities. It's not just a matter of what happens in the classroom, which we're concerned about. We're also concerned about what happens in the residence hall. How many students can live together? How many can use a bathroom together? What type of HVAC ventilation is appropriate for our residence halls and for our classrooms?

And then there's dining. We've had about 275 to 300 students remain on campus this summer, and we had to move to a grab-and-go type of dining situation. We would have to amend what we do in our dining halls as well. And we haven't yet got those guidelines of figuring out how we do those. We need to do that as well.

And then there's the issue of securing rooms for isolation and possible quarantine. This is something that doesn't sound so, so nice. But the reality is, if when there is an outbreak on our campus or any campus for that matter, universities and colleges must find ways in which to isolate and also to quarantine students. We've been looking at this for the last month. We have some ideas of course and we're checking them out, but we have to secure all these plans in place to be confident about what the opening will look like come the fall.

So I've received, and Lisa has received, and Raymond and Mark, we've all received many questions from you. In fact, we have a lot of questions to get through today. But we also wanna invite you to ask questions specific, more specific to your student's situation. We're open for those. We'll go back and forth between previously submitted questions and questions in this forum here. But let me open it up now to each of my colleagues and just see if they wanna make an introductory statement, anything to add to what I said. And then we'll go right to the questions and discussion. So let me start first with Lisa, since she's the co-chair of the taskforce with Stew Uretsky, who's overseeing the work of these eight working groups and has a perhaps best feel of how things are going. Lisa, do you wanna say, add on anything,

[Lisa Lynch] - Sure. Good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to have an opportunity to engage with you, even though it is, I think we're all getting a little bit zoomed out it at this stage. As Ron said, we've got a task force that is looking at all the many dimensions of our challenges facing us with COVID-19. We're using the metaphor, it's a bit like trying to put together a puzzle where the puzzle is just one solid color. And right now we're working on the straight edge pieces of that puzzle and putting them together, and gradually building up from there. We have over 100 individuals that are participating in the various working groups. And the working groups have representatives from the faculty, staff and students because this really is an issue that doesn't just impact one part of our community; it's the entire community. And in fact, we have shifted a lot from talking about the importance of social distancing, to using terms like physical distancing, but in the context of social solidarity to recognize the fact that at this stage, all the solutions that we've put in place, they need to be solutions that recognize the entire community's interest. And really that speaks, I think, to the founding values of Brandeis University. So that's very much informing all the work that we're doing. We can get into more specific details of the actual recommendations, the stages of those recommendations. We're already moving, as Ron mentioned, to gradually open up our research laboratories, our science laboratories, starting next week. And we will be continuing to slowly repopulate the campus over the course of this summer.

[Ron] - Thank you, Lisa. Raymond?

[Raymond Ou] - Thank you, Ron, and Lisa and Mark. My name is Raymond Ou, vice provost of student affairs and am really glad to have some of you have joined us again and seeing some new names and newly matriculated parents and others who are joining us this morning.

It's not only a pleasure, but something that we take very seriously because just most recently in fact we had one of our many subcommittee meetings and several students are currently on those subcommittees. And they gave such insightful, thoughtful comments. And also reiterating the importance of the social connections to Lisa's point in that we're not only looking at the health and safety needs of our community, but also the need for connection.

And so right now, we are not only anticipating that we're going to have some new students who are returning for the summer, in fact I was just on another Zoom call with my team because we have several community advisors that will be coming from off campus locations to actually live on campus in order to take care of the 100-150 students who are currently still residing in residence. And I shared that because the student feedback, as well as the clinical guidance we receive from the health center, are informing how we screen the students coming back, how we use a survey with those students, even though it's only two or three right now, but it's a good way for us to make sure that our protocols are in place as we plan for different scenarios in the fall.

And the final thing I'll mention is that we're also thinking, I see some of the questions are not only coming in, but since last Thursday. We also want to make sure, and I wanna quote Lisa Lynch, actually. We also want to make sure we don't forget the fun and the excitement for students to return, [Lisa Lynch nods her head] despite the fact that there are important things that all students must begin to think about and do differently when they return on campus or arrive on campus for the first time. So we're starting with many things in the summer. In fact, my team and I in collaboration with Kim Godsoe, assistant provost, and Lisa in the academic area, we're looking actually at summer programming, virtually of course for now, and then transitioning to potentially hybrid programming for social connection reasons.

So this is an anxiety, anxious time in many ways because we wanna get it right. And we also want to do it with the latest guidance from the local, state and federal advisors. So good to see everybody.

[Ron] - Thank you, Raymond. And I'll turn to Mark and then we'll go right to the questions. Mark?

[Mark] - Thank you very much. One of the things, I'm gonna change the subject a little bit, which is I'm pleased to engage anyone, particularly if you have a graduate in the class of 2020. I've been chairing the graduation exercises committee that has entirely rethought what Commencement is going to look like. We are gonna be having 38 mini celebrations by major, starting May 24. And for those of you who are part of the class of 2020, or have a someone in the class of 2020, and all faculty and staff, will be invited to these graduation exercises. So look in your inbox on May 24 for greetings from the President that will have a lot of information about how to proceed from there. It's not too late to register. So if there are any questions about graduation this year, and the in-person celebration and graduation commencement next year — so we intend to do something in person when we feel reasonably safe to do so — I'm happy to answer questions about that.

[Ron] - Thank you, Mark. So let's turn to questions and instead of going to the ones submitted over the last few days, let's get right to the ones that came in the morning 'cause we were talking about some of these issues also. And the questions, I'll read them here and then I'll let my colleagues chime in. And by the way, some of these things that are still up in the air are being discussed on the working groups. There may be a variation of opinion because things have not necessarily been worked through. As Raymond said, it's a very dynamic situation. Things change from day to day. And so we're learning as we go along.

So the question is, "Will the recent discovery of MIS-C, the Kawasaki-like syndrome now being seen in young adults" — and by the way, there was an opinion piece in The New York Times today that addressed this from the professor at Yeshiva whose son went through this problem, a 20 year old — "Would that change anything for Brandeis' plans this fall?" Well, I'll start out but then I'm gonna definitely turn it over to my colleagues, some of whom are working with the medical working group, looking at medical issues. I'm sure this is gonna factor in we're gonna here but I'll look at this for sure. This is something new that's emerging. The article in the paper today mentioned it, and also I see a reference here to a Washington Post piece on it as well. The number of cases has grown very dramatically from somewhere in the 30s to 160 or so just in the past week. This is something that we will take very seriously but I assume, Lisa, and I'll start with you, that this has been looked at by the working group.

[Lisa]- So one of the working groups that we have is a working group on public health. And this is, we're looking at all the dimensions of health issues associated with COVID-19. And as I said, in the course of developing all of our recommendations, and as we're implementing those recommendations, I told everybody, we have to be prepared for the fact that we are still learning about this virus and the impact of this virus and thus our policies are, we're not gonna just write down a policy and that's gonna be good for the next 12 months. We have to be in a continuous learning mode, and be ready to adapt and change our actions, behaviors, policies, in light of what we continue to learn about the virus. But I'll turn to Raymond Ou, who as vice provost for student affairs, oversees our health center on campus.

[Raymond]- Absolutely, and as the emerging information on this new dimension of concern has risen to our awareness, what we are doing is not only, of course, reading and learning as much as possible, but wanting to make sure that our medical director and as well as administrative director in the health center, are primed for how this may actually impact the level of service that we offer, and the resources that we need to have in place, and also how we educate students to be aware of any potential new symptoms or emerging guidance on new symptoms. In other words, I think while much of the Kawasaki syndrome and other concerns are still emerging, what we are already thinking and already putting together is, as you can imagine when you have young people coming onto campus, and I think this is my 23rd year of a new year coming in as a student-first professional, you're always thinking about ways to not only keep everyone safe, but also how do you communicate the messages to ensure that students are thinking about the right things, and that they access you as a resource if there are concerns. Because for example, I'm reading the Washington Post article that someone just said, thank you so much. And I think part of that is how do we ensure that early identification of concerns are immediately addressed? And how do we actually filter that to our health center for guidance, because that's what actually what happened. Is if there's a student of concern, the fortunate thing about Brandeis, and I think we do this very well at Brandeis is the networks of support are interwoven in a way so it's very rare that we don't actually know something as it's emerging because we have, whether it's community advisors or other mentors or faculty advisors, often we get the information very quickly. And as soon as we do it, we also take individualized approach. So it's very likely that someone will get on the phone with a student right away, and also to ensure if there are accommodation and other needs as necessary. So those are some of the ways in which we want to respond to this new emerging concern. So through education, communicating of how an individual's concern may be surfaced, and then how the health center may respond.

[Ron] - Thank you, Raymond. We have a question here, which we can answer very quickly, "If the Massachusetts Government allows colleges to open, if they so choose, since it would be the safest option to continue with online learning, will Brandeis make the decision based on what is safest for our students, staff and faculty or merely based on state guidelines and what other colleges have chosen to do?"

We will make a decision based on what's best for Brandeis and what's best for our students, faculty and staff. The guidelines that the Massachusetts Governor will put out give us more or less what is possible, but as the weekly meeting of Massachusetts independent college university presidents has revealed to me, is that every president recognizes that each campus has its own issues. In other words, very, very different issues to deal with. And so, how close you are to a hospital? What options do you have for immediate support? What is your student body like? How much of a commuter campus are you? So we will take the guidelines, of course, when state, federal, local governments; we'll take CDC guidelines, but we will first and foremost think about what the needs are for Brandeis. And I'll let my colleagues chime in if they have anything else to say. If not, we can just move on. [They shake their heads no] Okay, we'll just move on.

"What are options being considered for the fall? When are you going to decide?" I think I mentioned at our outset that we are going to make this decision late June, early July. And I'll call on Lisa here just to give an overview of the multiple scenarios we're thinking about just to give you an idea. Lisa?

[Lisa] - Well, I do think that we, one of the things that is has a high probability of happening is that we may well adjust the academic calendar for the fall and begin a little bit earlier in August rather than in September with a goal of finishing our classes, not our exams, but our classes by Thanksgiving. And then saying to students, "Okay, that's the end of your physical presence for those that are living on campus at Thanksgiving." This is one of the options that we're looking at. And you may have seen some other schools are doing that. And that's really driven by what epidemiologists are telling us that they anticipate in terms of various waves that come from COVID-19. So that's on the table.

We're also looking at alternative ways that the semester itself may be structured. First, in terms of multi modes in which people can take the classes. We recognize that there may be some students who are not going to be able to get to campus, physically get to campus at the beginning of the semester due to maybe inability to get their visa in time, travel restrictions, maybe they have health concerns, they're immunocompromised, and therefore, we need to be able to provide those students an option to be able to access their courses online. At the same time, we have some faculty who are immunocompromised, and as Ron said, who are older who have expressed concerns about being physically located in the class. So we're gonna have to likely have a mix of courses and modes of the courses.

We're investing in technology, as I speak, to equip more of our classrooms to be able to broadcast out from the classroom and to be able to bring people into the classroom. And that may be a de-densified class where not everybody who's in the course is gonna be physically attending the class every day. We're also working through our Center for Teaching and Learning to bring our faculty in terms of their teaching expertise from what I call their emergency remote learning experience of the last two months to a higher standard of online, mixed mode teaching. In particular, developing the lectures, posting those up online so people can access those at any time and focusing their time to organize smaller, more individualized or small group just interactive discussions with their students even in our largest courses. Now, this frankly, is just good pedagogy and something that we were slowly moving to but we now have over 300 faculty members who've signed up for this training over the summer and assistance on restructuring the way in which their students and they present their course material for the fall.

And finally, we're looking at the possibility of dividing the fall semester into two modules where students would take a lighter course, fewer number of courses, half the usual number of courses, but do it in a more intense way over a seven-week period of time, take final exams, and then begin the second set of courses. And this is driven and informed by our experience in the spring, where we've seen that students are experiencing more difficulty in concentrating on a large number of courses. And we believe that if we do have to have students online, there may be some benefit to having them focus on just two courses at a time in a deeper and more intensive way, completing those courses and then moving on to the next. That also makes it easier for us to adapt if we get hit by, if we're starting in person, and then we get hit by a large, a second wave, a very severe second wave of COVID later in the semester to be able to pivot again. So these are all the different kinds of options that are on the table at the moment.

[Ron] - There are many questions that still are out there that the working groups are working on. Some of them have to do with some of the questions that have been sent in to us. For example, "You focused on first years and seniors with the logic that incoming students should come to campus if we're allowed to de-densify to a certain extent, because they had a rough senior year of high school and you want to introduce them to university, Brandeis life in a very positive way, or a more positive way. Seniors, of course, you don't want to cheat them out of their senior year." So the sentiment is giving them priority. But then there are also questions about, "Should you look at fields of study that require physical space, like science laboratories, like studio art?"

These are questions that the working group is still working on. And I know a lot of people were asking what would be the criteria for students who can come back to campus if they can? And those are the ones that we're thinking about. There are many iterations of that.

Here's a practical question that maybe Raymond can answer, or whoever, "Are students going to have to quarantine for two weeks once they returned to campus, if school restarts on campus in the fall?" So will they have to quarantine and maybe if a cohort of students have to quarantine, who are they?" Raymond do you wanna answer that or Lisa, either one, or Mark?

[Lisa] - Well, actually, the reality is we don't know. The state at the moment still has for anyone coming into the State of Massachusetts as a requirement that people need to go through a 14-day isolation or quarantine. But there's not, it's not like, "You're set, and here's your pass to this facility, and that's where you need to go to."  [Ron and Raymond nod heads]. That's the current guidance, I suspect that guidance will be lifted over the course of the summer. But at the moment, what we do on that front is gonna be driven by our state guidelines and, for people coming in from outside of the United States into the United States, by federal guidance and requirements at the border.

[Ron] - "Could the campus be open for seniors who have graduated to walk around and take pictures with proper social distancing and rules being practiced?" In other words, would anyone stop seniors who have graduated from being on campus physically? I guess the question refers to now to be able to take pictures in front of the Brandeis sign, in front of the wherever, or will they be chased off?

[Lisa] - Well, no one's doing any chasing. But I will say that again, even as the State of Massachusetts is going through the stage one of reopening, we still have the physical distancing or social distancing requirements in place. Do not have gatherings of more than 10 people. People are to remain six feet apart. And people are expected to wear face coverings.

[Ron] - That's not good for pictures.

[Lisa] - That's not so great, yes. So I ask people to be respectful of what our state and city rules and regulations with respect to physical distancing. And that applies to our campuses as well.

[Ron] - We have a question about athletics. And so I know that the UAA, the varsity athletics, the conference in which Brandeis competes, had a recent call, there's a question about any specific plans for athletes returning to campus and then other questions about clubs, sports and intramural sports as well. If we open up in the fall, what does it look like for varsity, club and intramurals sports?

[Lisa] - So I sit on the executive committee for the UAA actually and I was the chair of that committee over the past year. We had a call just yesterday about these issues. And our athletic directors within the UAA are meeting on a weekly basis. And they are informed, we're very fortunate that within the UAA the other member schools, have some of the premier medical schools in the country. And so are all of our decisions are getting informed by the science and faculty from the respective medical schools in the league. I think that for sure, what we can say with certainty is that this fall is not gonna be like the fall of 2019. What the parameters are of types of sport engagement, the length of the season, do we only have our season with local teams and not do the travel? These are all up in the air for discussion. But I do think that there is a heightened concern, in particular within the UAA, of the notion of putting athletes on airplanes. And we certainly don't want to create a situation in which our athletes on campus are in constant isolation from their other fellow students because of travel that they've been doing. That's not the student experience. We're a Division Three school. We focus on our student athletes, our scholar athletes. We're not professional sports. So at the end of the day, whatever we do with respect to our athletic program is gonna be driven first and foremost by what we do to enhance the student experience.

[Ron] - Raymond, what about club and intramural sports on campus? What do you envision happening in terms of those activities? Same as what Lisa just said or is it, with no traveling involved in some clubs, sports travel, but in terms of intramurals and everyday athletics, what are we looking at?

[Raymond] - I think Lisa is a bit closer to the intramural club sports. But what I will say is that, as reflected in some of the questions, we want to certainly ensure that there's fun and excitement, but not in a way that is risky or in a way that is not based on guidance. So Ron, what I would say is that I think we're really looking at how students may engage in physical activity, informed by some of the current activities in intramural sports and club sports. But for instance, how may some of those programs be done whether it's virtually or in a hybrid way? I know that I was just talking with Lauren Haynie, our Athletics Director the other day, and she was thinking about how do we best use Gosman, for instance, because of the fact that it's such a larger space. So I will say that many of the plans are still in motion, but we wanna make sure that whatever we do have in place is based on health and safety guidance. Lisa, anything more about that on sports?

[Lisa]- No, that's all, yep.

[Ron] - Here we have a question that it says, "As a parent who is very concerned about safety and believes that colleges just cannot open on campus safely and should continue learning online in the fall, how can I best communicate with the task force to provide input on this decision?" The writer feels that he or she has written letters, and that it does not seem to really have any effect on the task force.

First of all, I'll say — don't think that. We are sharing all the emails that we're getting from parents with working groups in the task force. And that is being of course factored into our thinking. We have not made any decision yet that would prove the fact that we aren't listening because we are. We're taking in as much information as possible. In fact, we're up late at night circulating emails that we're receiving from parents and from friends and from students. So, but to answer your question I'm gonna ask my colleagues here, how best to encourage input into the task force and working groups? Where's the best place to send this?

[Raymond] - May I just quickly jump in Ron to say that I personally received over 10 emails from our last session with parents last week. And I think I was able to answer each one of them, and President Liebowitz is absolutely right. In fact, we not only take you seriously, but we actually take it back to our subcommittees and the central committee that Lisa and Stew Uretsky chair. And so what I would say is, I'll just put my email out there again, rou@brandeis.edu. Please write us, and we are not only eager to hear feedback from you, because it's very helpful, but also we wanna be able to share this feedback with others on the task force. And let me also just quickly comment that what is especially helpful is to hear from parents and families the wide ranging perspectives because we have some parents who are writing to us saying, "Absolutely, you should not open in the fall; it should only be online." And then we also have other parents writing to us saying that, "Oh, listen, please don't cater to paranoia. You can open and there will be some spread, and as long as you're containing it, it'll be fine, Raymond. Just make sure that they get that." So and then I took that back to our committee as well. So we're very receptive to the feedback. Write us, and I'll be happy to respond. And I'll turn to my colleagues as well.

[Lisa] - I'll just say again, if people have specific things that they would like to share with me, they can just send it provost@brandeis.edu. Again, on the committee the concerns that I have seen being expressed by our parents are concerns that are shared by our community. [Ron and Raymond nod their heads in agreement.] Concerns by our faculty, from our staff, from our students and many of the members of our committee are they themselves parents of college students, and are responding and participating in the committee both in their role, in their specific role on campus, but also coming from the place and perspective of being a parent of a student, either on our own campus  — because many of our staff and faculty have their students actually attend Brandeis, and I say that as a very proud parent of alum from 2017 — but from others who have students at other universities, and that has been extraordinarily helpful for us. But I do want to underscore that for sure at this stage whatever we do in the fall, it is not gonna look like what fall of 2019 looked like. And so, what it's going to look like is gonna be informed by making our campus as safe as possible in the face of a virus that we don't know everything about. And a virus that we can't see, we can't touch and that gets communicated from individuals in the most insidious ways. And so that by definition means that we have to be very cautious in what we do. And we're using the summer and this sort of slow ramping up of our campus to test out different protocols, and see what we have confidence in and what, frankly, we don't have confidence in with respect to the fall.

[Ron] - Thank you. We have a very practical question here that we should answer. "My student is scheduled to go to Nepal in late September, and as I understand, the plan is still on although slightly delayed. What contingencies are in place for housing and class registration? Should the plan be canceled at or near the last moment? Should she anticipate virtual learning only? Is it too soon to know?"

[Lisa] - It's too soon to know. We will be making a decision about study abroad programs at the beginning of June, so shortly. We are seeing an increasing number of our partners that we use for study abroad programs canceling their fall programs. And we are seeing in some countries, like in the UK for example, University of Cambridge just announced that it's gonna to do all of its programming online. So we anticipate that students may need, either because of the country that they were planning to go to or a broader decision we make as a university, to reorganize their plans for the fall. Raymond can speak to the issue about housing for students that we're planning to go on study abroad in the fall. [Raymond nods his head]

[Raymond] - Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, I'm currently in communication with a student in London who actually, because her plans fell through for the summer and she's not sure what she wants to do for the fall and also what might be available for the fall, she has been in contact with the housing office. And she's currently made the decision to be on the waiting list for housing even though she was not scheduled to live on campus. And I've also encouraged her to look into off campus housing options as well, just to keep all of the different options open. But  what we would want to do — and I know that one of the questions embedded in the comments and questions and also what we received beforehand is how do we intend to de-densify the residence halls and ensure that the safety measures are in place should we have an in-person experience and opening — we're looking and physically counting the number of bathrooms, stalls, and also what we call the fixtures, bathroom and also toilet, to ensure that we follow the emerging guidance related to what may be in the best interest from health safety standpoint.

But that doesn't mean that we're neglecting on students who may have emerging housing. And I want to just use this opportunity to give you an example. Throughout the last couple of months, we could have made the decision that some schools did to ask every student to vacate residence halls, but we actually did not do that because I think that would be very unBrandeisian. But what we are doing right now is that when students aren't sure how and when to commit to housing, that we make sure they're in the pipeline should they need housing, but we're also assisting them with locating off campus housing as well. So I hope that that helps the parents in knowing how we're thinking about housing for our students.

[Ron] - We have several questions here about billing. And this is something I don't really know. I need to ask our financial officers. But it's a common sensible question asking about if our decision to open is not until late June, and tuition is due July 1, will we change the date of billing to align with when we announce what the plans are for the fall? And you know what, that's something that I know has been discussed in the working group but hasn't yet percolated up to me in the president's office, but I'm wondering if Mark or Raymond or Lisa know where they stand on that. I can easily get an answer to that question. But, do you know?

[Lisa]- Yeah, I think that there is, there's flexibility on that. I had thought that we were going to, that the date for billing was gonna get moved or get pushed back. But, that's a great question. I'm gonna actually send an email right now and see if I can get an answer to that before this call is over.

[Ron] - That would be very helpful. Some parents have asked what the implications are, the financial implications, of where we stand right now in terms of our plans for the fall. And we've been pretty transparent on campus here in many of our conversations about the revenue shortfall that we anticipate. We had a conversation just yesterday with the executive committee of the board. Today we have a board meeting on this issue. We had a meeting with the committee on strategy and planning which has seven faculty members, the deans and others on it. And we, like other institutions, are projecting revenue declines as a result of either matriculation melt. In other words, if students decide for whatever reason, either health and safety reasons if we're on campus, or because they don't wanna do online learning or remote learning again, they might want to take a gap year. I'll get to that issue in a moment. So we might have, very well have revenue shortfall as a result of tuition decline, which is our biggest source of revenue. We're also anticipating a decline in our gift income or gift revenue because of the financial situation out there. So we're projecting multi-million dollar revenue shortfall.

And we have about 9 or 10 levers that we are prepared to, of course, pull in order to meet the revenue challenge or the revenue deficit challenge. We've done some of those already. We've put a frost and a freeze on hiring and filling new positions. The senior administration has taken a cut in compensation. We have frozen, well we're in consideration of several other methods that we're gonna discuss with the Board of Trustees today, but we feel we're in good shape. We have a conservative investment portfolio of our endowment and so the long term impact of this financial situation should not hurt us as much as it might hurt a more aggressive investment portfolio.

We have liquidity, and that's the big question mark as you go into revenue deficit. Do you have liquidity to carry through the situation? And we are in a good situation there as well. But in any case, we've been pretty open. And we'll know much more after our decision about how we're gonna open in the fall as to what our full enrollment will be, and therefore what our tuition will be. So keep in touch. You'll probably be hearing from us on this issue. [Lisa raises her hand]. Oh, sorry. I think Lisa got an answer or response to the question about billing.

[Lisa]- Yeah, so we are pushing back tuition billing for the fall semester to the third week in July, with a due date of August 21. And the tuition billing date fees, or revised tuition billing dates are posted on our student financial services website.

[Ron] - Okay, we have several questions on commencement. So I'm gonna turn it over to Mark Brimhall-Vargus so to answer those. Mark?

[Mark] - Thank you very much. So at the outset, if I don't get to some of the questions, or I've missed something that someone has put in the window here, please feel free to email me directly. And I'm happy to answer any specific question. My email is my initials MBV @brandeis.edu.

But to answer a few of the questions, there have been questions about what's the general thinking around the plan for graduation, the technical questions around how will I get access to these various links, et cetera. So the plan here is after soliciting feedback from the campus community and the graduates themselves, we decided to have two parts to our commencement process. The first part which will begin this Sunday, May 24th, with an email from President Liebowitz is a virtual experience that is very personalized by major. So for example, if your graduate is an English major or biochemistry or something of the like, there's actually specific for that major, it's highly interactive, and has a lot of very personalized experiences there because we wanted to make sure that in the virtual environment, that we would be providing our graduates as much interaction with each other and their faculty as possible. So, for example, if I were in the class of 2020, and President Liebowitz, Provost Lynch and VPSA Ou were part of my family, I would be receiving a particular link that I would then share with the three of them to enter this experience. But let's say somebody else comes along, a member of my

So the reason we have a limit is because the virtual rooms they have a certain capacity. But we don't anticipate that we're really gonna get to that limit. So if you have someone extra that would like to participate, that should be fine. And if you have any specific questions about your graduate, access or whatever is happening that you would like to know more about, please email me and I'm happy to give you a direct response.

[Ron] - Thank you, Mark, we do have a question. "How many Brandeis students do we know of that have been infected by COVID 19 so far? Do we have an up-to-date number and knowledge of that?" Raymond, Mark or Lisa?

[Raymond] - Well, I know currently we are monitoring one student who has positive symptoms. And I know that we have had two to three staff, faculty members who tested positive for COVID-19 on campus.

[Ron] - But in totality, the total number that we're aware of of students who have gone home since March and so forth. Do we have a running total that's beyond the two or three? Or is that just the total number we have?

[Raymond] - That's the total number.

[Lisa] - Yeah, we can't speak authoritatively about how many students have tested positive for COVID-19 because not all that information is necessarily being shared with us.

[Ron] - But to our knowledge it's a very limited number.

[Raymond] - Yes, to our knowledge it's fewer than five actually, because I was just looking at the spreadsheet. So those are the cases that we're aware of, yes.

[Ron] - Okay, so here's a question. I'm sure this is being discussed in the financial working group, and we're discussing it, of course, with the Board of Trustees. "Will the tuition be different if students take courses online instead of physically on campus?"

[Lisa] - Well, it's something that's gonna be reviewed and discussed. I think the first level of work though, is trying to figure out how we restructure and re-imagine our academic program and create it in a multi mode way, so that it can accommodate really a range of needs of both our students and faculty, with respect to in person, online, some mix of the two, over the course of the fall semester. But as we have a more precise understanding of that, we will address that issue as well.

I think first and foremost that, in terms of new financial concerns, has to do with financial aid. In light of the dramatic changes in the labor market, and I speak this as a labor economist and former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, we understand that families have experienced dramatic displacement from the impact on the economy of COVID-19. So we have focused a lot of attention to financial aid. And I encourage families to, especially for continuing students, to reach out to student financial services and share any updates or family circumstances. And that includes families that may not have applied for aid in the past, but now find that financially they're facing very different circumstances. So again, to our Student Financial Services, you should engage in conversation. If you've not file the FAFSA form, I would get on that, do that quickly. It's not that complicated to do. It does look at income from two years ago as opposed to your current state. But our office of student financial services does recognize that you need to update your financial information on the basis of your current circumstances. So I would really encourage people to reach out because we recognize that we are going to need to provide much more financial aid assistance in the coming year.

[Ron] - So here's two-part question. "How are you handling incoming first year students who choose to take a gap year?" And for students who do show, assuming we have on campus teaching this fall, "Will there be an orientation program?"

[Lisa] - Maybe Raymond, you could talk about orientation [Raymond nods his head] because I think there's really some very exciting ideas about orientation that we're doing, stimulated by COVID-19, but quite frankly, I think would be part of the good things that will last well beyond COVID-19.

[Raymond] - Yes, what has been inspiring, frankly, and encouraging is that in this crisis — and we are in the middle of a crisis, let's not make a mistake about what this is — the colleagues that I have among the many university departments, we've come together, trying to pivot quickly, not only responding to the health and safety guidance, but also, what are some of the goals that we have from a long term perspective that we can almost, we can better fulfill now because we must.

So one of the first things that I remember, Lisa Lynch, when I came on board last fall was Lisa and Ron and Mark and others really asked me to look at orientation and how do we make sure it's an integrated experience for all students? Because currently, what can happen, as in many places, is that they've siloed the wonderful work happening, but there's no synergy among that. So one of the things that we are hoping and thinking through right now and hoping to launch shortly, is that typically, when a student matriculates at Brandeis, we actually do not start the formal orientation until they arrive. And because of COVID what we've looked at is both online and hybrid versions what we would do.

For instance, Jenny Abdou, who's the Director of New Student Orientation, she has already mapped out some virtual sessions for incoming students in cohorts that will actually have sessions with trained, current students who are orientation leaders. And I have to say to you that there's nothing more powerful than having a peer student to actually orient you to be able to answer those questions and also to build that group cohesion.

But this is the part that I'm particularly excited about. We're not only thinking of those social experiences as the sole experiences. We're also wanting to infuse that with the important aspects of the academic experience, for example, advising. We also now have been in conversation with faculty members who are willing and eager to do a stimulating lecture on a topic of their choice during the summer. And we also have the student activities unit wanting to be able to offer virtual experiences. So all of these experiences will be from a menu of options for students as they're actually matriculating, and before they get on campus.

And then part of the plan — again, these are still forming, so we will be a be able to give more specifics that are upcoming — but we're also hoping to have staff and faculty as part of that advising cohort. It's what I have tentatively called the Brandeis Liaison Network to essentially bring synergy to all of the network of mentors, advisors, that we have on campus.

And so those are some of the ways that were wanting to both reshape what we've done in the past, but also use this opportunity to be better in what we do.

[Lisa] - I'll just speak too. There's a lot of enthusiasm about this, and from staff and faculty, to get to know your student, if you're a new family coming to Brandeis, much sooner, and I'm very excited about what is being developed on that front. And it will, that will be a permanent fixture of the Brandeis orientation experience going forward.

With respect to the question about deferrals, this is something , obviously, you engage in a discussion with the admissions office on that. And I think there's some understanding of folks that might want to make a decision to defer to January, especially if because of travel or visa difficulties of physically getting to campus.

But deferrals for a year are harder for us, honestly, and Ron might wanna speak to this because it then means that we need to set aside those places that we would have opened up for others in the subsequent year. But it is something we are talking about engaging. Again, this isn't a hard, hard line in the sand. And that's something to have discussion with our admissions office with respect to the deferrals.

But in all honesty, as a provost of the university speaking on behalf of our staff and our faculty, we truly hope that your newly matriculating student or returning student does come back to campus. We're ready, we're working to make this the Brandeis experience that we're all so proud of. It may be in some multi-modes, and different modes and not necessarily our preferred mode, but we really do wanna make it a very rigorous academic, high value and, believe it or not, even fun experience for all of our students. So we truly hope that your student does come to campus this fall.

[Ron] - Here's one. It says, "The threat of a second wave occurring this fall is very real. And there's so much that is still unknown. Does it make sense at all to be spending so much time, energy, money, et cetera, in creating multiple scenarios or students' physical presence on campus? It seems the only thing that is known is that online learning is immeasurably safer than speculating on what might happen."

This is true, but we also know it's a very dynamic situation. And we also know that in over the course of the next four to six weeks, much more information can come forward. That would give us some confidence that having students on campus will, of course, be possible.

We have to remember too we have graduate students on campus, not only undergraduates. We have almost 2000 graduate students, 750 PhD students, who have a different mode of learning where they are in class much less, once a week. They touch base with their faculty advisor. They're in the labs, they're in the studios.

The point is we have to look at all possibilities for all of our students. It's not just an undergraduate enterprise, but trust us we recognize that online learning is immeasurably safer as you say, than others, and we're keeping that in mind. But we still have to look at all the options that are out there. Let me scoot down some of the other questions that have come in.

[Raymond] - Ron, as you're doing that, may I raise...

- Oh, sorry, Ray

[Raymond]- May I quickly, I saw a question earlier that I really want to answer because I think it's probably on the minds of many parents, especially if we look at in-person, hybrid experiences. One of the questions from about I think, 10 minutes ago, was a parent saying that, "I live across the country and what's going to happen if my student has to be hospitalized or if Kawasaki and other ailments are affecting my student, what's gonna happen?"

Let me assure you, and this is one of the reasons that I'm not only proud, but eager to discuss this. Currently, we have what we call the CARE team on campus. It is populated by an interdisciplinary team from both the Health Center, the Brandeis Counseling Center and also academic services and others because we want to make sure it's a holistic approach. But essentially, anytime a student is hospitalized, anytime a student may be experiencing mental health or health concerns, we spring into action very quickly. And the dean's office that I oversee will be in individual contact with students and also often families as well because that's part of our existing protocol that we have to make sure that in your absence, physical absence, we are there to support your students.

Now having said all that, I also want to let you know that we're also adapting those processes, as needed, because of COVID-19. But we're building on the robust infrastructure we already have to make sure that an individualized approach can be in place and so that you can be assured when you are across the country or in another country, that we are very quickly springing into action to support your student who may not be feeling well. So I just wanted to quickly comment on that.

[Ron] - Anyone else want to add to that?

[Lisa and Mark] - No.

[Ron] - No, okay, last question. I see we're at, we're at time, but what we've done on these calls previously is to take down the questions that we haven't gotten to, and try to provide responses and then place them on our website. So we are recording this (I don't think we mentioned that at the outset) so that others can have access to the questions and answers, but also we will take the questions, and I think there are about 70 of them still on the queue, that we will be able to answer. But the last question I'll ask here. And again, Raymond and Lisa and Mark, anyone can jump in who has been part of this conversation.

I can say "how is financial aid being affected?" I gave the general response. Lisa did talk about this briefly before the response, but we do anticipate a much greater need among our student population. We are prepared for that. There are things that need to be done, as Lisa said, which is updating financial statements, and for those who have not yet applied for financial aid, there's information on the website, on student financial services site, to tell you how to do that.

But we anticipate that financial aid is going to increase, need is going to increase and we are gonna provide. We meet full need. We made that decision two years ago and so we're gonna be, we're gonna live to that, live up to that, but I don't know if you wanna answer anything, Raymond, Mark or Lisa to that?

[Lisa] - No, I think that really covers it. So again, I think that the watchword here is communication. So if you have an issue, you're experiencing difficulty on the financial aid side, obviously reach out to Student Financial Services.

If you're having, if your student is having questions or concerns with respect to on-campus housing, if you have questions or concerns with health and mental health access, again, that's the Department of Community Living, and our health center and our counseling center. Both our health center and our counseling center are up and running. And so people are available. And our health center — they're physically on campus and our counseling center is all virtually online.

And students as well should be reaching out to their advisor if they've got questions with their courses, questions with respect to, I know some students have said, "Well, what if I have a health issue "I need to drop the semester." We've been doing a lot of accommodation, recognizing again, how this is an unprecedented virus, it's disrupting all of us in the most unexpected ways. And so this is what I think of as part of the wonderful aspect of Brandeis. This is a kind and caring community with, but you need to speak up, speak up sooner rather than later, and engage with a class advisor or one of these other offices quickly to help navigate and find a solution that works for you.

[Ron] - There were a lot of questions on gap years and deferrals. And so I wanted to say the admissions office is the place to find out up-to-date information on what we're doing in terms of deferrals and gap years. And as Lisa said, we're flexible. [Lisa nods her head]. We're thinking about this, we talk about it in each of our weekly meetings. So if you have questions, please come forward.

In closing, let me just say thank you for being engaged and thank you for your questions. As much as it might seem that your questions don't matter, they matter very much. We take them very seriously. [Raymond nods his head]. And we learn a lot from what's on your mind to seeing the questions you're are asking really helps us to address certain issues that we ourselves might not be thinking about.

I should just mention that each one of us here, we're in touch with our colleagues. We have Presidents, we have Provosts, we have Vice Provosts, we have heads of student affairs, we have DEI officers. We're all talking to one another and so we're getting best practices, getting ideas. There's never been sharing like this in all my experience in senior university or college administration to see such sharing within the profession.

As I mentioned half jokingly to the faculty the other day, even Presidents are sharing information, which is never the case. The President never likes to let down their guard and say there are any weaknesses in the armor. Deans and Provosts tend to do that routinely, but not Presidents. But even now Presidents are sharing information, best practices, working collaboratively to find solutions to some of these issues that Lisa said are really unprecedented for us in higher education.

So stay in touch. Let us know what you need. Communicate.

And we look forward to seeing as many as possible, maybe on campus this fall, and if not, thereafter.

Does anyone wanna say anything more before we close out?

[Mark] - Yeah, I, there are still questions on commencement in terms of multiple majors, programs, diplomas, et cetera. Please email me and I'm happy to answer each and every one — MBV@brandeis. Thank you very much.

[Ron] - Raymond, Lisa?

[Lisa] - No, just be safe, be well, and thank you for being such warm and caring families of our Brandeis students.

[Raymond] - I would echo that, and thank you for engaging with us this morning. Thank you.

[Ron]- Thank you, everyone, goodbye.

[Lisa] - Bye. [Lisa wave both hands. Raymond waves too].