What we'd like to welcome our Bloomberg television audience as well into a conversation we're always excited to have because we love business schools. Here on Bloomberg Business Week, we do an annual ranking. We dive deep into the business of the business schools, and it's a little bit different
these days, that is for sure. Reach to Agrawal is the interim dene at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, also the founding director for the school's Center for Health Information and Decision Systems, joining us on the phone from College Parking, A really nice to have you with us. We know it is an incredibly busy and a very different time in the education of business students. Take us inside. What's school like right now? I don't even know where to begin cases.
This has been such a wild ride for the past six months, and there are so many different things that I can talk about, but I do want to sort of take you to the ACOPA experience. Let me start by sort of directly addressing your question, what's it like inside the business school today? Density is low, but students are masked and they have big smiles on their faces. From what I can tell from behind their masks they
are just so glad to be back. We'll talk to us a little bit too, Dnagarwall, about the adjustments that you guys have had to make to make in order to get students back on campus. So let me just talk about, you know, sort of two pandemics that we've dealt with in the last six months. Right. The first one is, of course the public health crisis that is
front and center in everybody's mind. But there's also a second, more subtle one that reveals itself at the end of May, and that's you know, the national spotlight on the racial injustice and systemic bias. So we've had to make adjustments to address both of these pandemics. So I'll start by focusing on the first, which has you know, of course captured everybody's attension, time and energy for six months now. Um, I want your listeners to remember two words, unprecedented and pivot,
because that has really described our experience so far. So on March eleventh, you know, we all received an email and a text on our cell phones telling us to go home because the governor had just imposed this day at home order, and literally overnight, the campus emptied out. Both campus and the city of College Park became ghost towns. And luckily we were scheduled to go on screen break the following week, and we delayed the startup classes by another week, and that allowed us to make the first
crucial pivot, you know, on a dime. We took five courses and we moved them all to online delivery. And let me just say, Carol, anybody who thought can appreciate the complexity of taking what was design is a face to face course and moving it online in a matter of a couple of weeks. You know, It's not just simply getting onto a zoom meeting and giving a lecture. There are so many nuances related to teaching. There are so many different adjustments in pivots you have to make.
So we did that. That was fall, and then the entire summer was spent in I want to say, hundreds, if not thousands of hours of meetings trying to figure out what should be our strategy in the face of a pandemic that nobody can predict, in the face of a virus that's totally unpredictable, that's moving in whatever direction it wants to, in the face of shifting public health guidance on how institutions should be moving. So that's what
our summer looks like. And when you think about the NAGA wall, the students, the interaction among students, the whole notion of a business education is an extremely elaborative one. And granted, we're all adjusting to that, and we all are adjusting to to working on zoom and Carol and I only see each other over video conference at this point, literally, UM, but what's missing and how do you make up for it? Uh?
If some, if even some of that interaction has to be virtual, that's a great question, Jason, and one that we've grappled with. UM. We have an Office of Transformational Learning that has betagogical experts who can allow us to recreate a few will, not a hundred percent, but pretty close to that of that rich, face to face interaction that you might have in an online setting. So we've tried to do that in as many of our classes as possible. But I don't want to make one more point.
One of the controversial decisions we made over the summer, and for exactly the reasons that you outlined, Jason, is we decided we're going to come back and fall and have a hybrid quasi in person quasi online experience because we want our students to have that ragi interaction, you know, especially in the business setting when you're talking about case studies and you're talking about you know, all the things that go on in organizations where understanding people trust relationships
are such an important part of your education. So yeah, we're back now in a hybrid form. Uh. And as I said in my fall communication, a couple of weeks back to faculty and stuff. You know, we some of flew by well and Dana Well, We've got about a minute and then we're gonna come back and continue this conversation on radio. But I do want to ask you in just about a minute where their financial pressures to
also get the school opening again. Um, I don't think we made the decision to open the school based on fine to pressures. We made the decision based on the very strong message we got from students we want to be back. I had numerous down halls with students all through the summer, and in every one of them, they said, if the right health and safety precautions are in place,
we value the campus experience. We value interacting with that professors with appears, and you know, we learned so much outside of the classroom as we do in the classroom. Dina Argrea, Well, you your research is on the use of information technology and health care and health analytics, AI applications and health I do want to ask you before we shift to the other pandemic, is what do you think will be the lasting impact on our healthcare world
as a result of the pandemic. Well, we have been talking about digital transformation of healthcare for almost two decades now, but this has been an industry that's been slow to adapt, as you all know, you know, in contrast to let's say, retail, of fin edge of services, or any or any one of those industries. I think this is the inflection point after this pandemic, where so much of the health care
that we're consuming is happening through digital channels. We are almost certainly going to see a greater incorporation of data, analytics and technology into healthcare, and I think that's a good thing in the long run. So let's talk about this other pandemic and this reckoning that we're having as a nation and certainly as business leaders around the notion
of racial injustice. And diversity, especially in companies. How do you train what's the most effective thing you can do with this next crop of leaders being aggrawall to ensure that they are in a position to to take this on successfully. Yeah, you know, let me just start by saying that this has just been such a heartbreaking time for all of us and a time of great anguish
and outrage in our community. So for the past several months, you know, we've been dealing with the second pandemic, and we have a very robust set of diversity, equity and inclusion the initiatives that we put in place over several years. But in the last three months, we've really accelerated the scale the scope of our activities just in response to
everything that's happening around us. And you are so righteous, and you know, we would be remiss if we were not training the next generation of leaders to really take this you know, uh, take this boll by the horns and address this dilemma even before they get into the workplace. So let me share with you some of the things that we've done. I think one of the most remarkable things that happened is that our students step forward and
one of our underrepresented students from the undergraduate program. Brilliant young man. He produced a video over him self with help from a black entrepreneur to spark conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion. And you know, if you have time on your schedule sometimes you should view that video. I shared it with colleagues, amongst the big ten deans and
everywhere else, and just incredible kudos for it. But the bottom line of this video is that it prompts everybody with a series of very provocative questions and then it ends by saying, and what will you do? So we show it. We have shown it to all of our incoming students across all of our programs, undergraduate Master's, NBA UH, and we're using that as a way to spark conversations. Um, there's a whole host of other activities that we have planned.
We just recently revised our mission and our values and our strategic pillars to expluicitly call out diversity, equity and inclusion as a fifth strategic pillar. So we are so strongly committed we are changing our curriculum to include more discussion of the EI, even in our regular business school classes. And let me just say one more thing, we started a case collection, if you will, cases that feature diverse protagonists,
so our students get exposed to leaders from all colors, races, gender, ethnicities, etcetera. Well, and you know, we've just got about a minute left, Dean Agrawal, and I do wonder it's all about making sure that folks who have seats at the table, it's a diverse lot, right, so that we're not just surrounding ourselves with people that you know are like us. And so what do you do to make sure whether it's your faculty, with your administration, whether it's the student population
and base, that it's diverse. And again, we've just got about fifty seconds here. So we have started participating and have been participating for a while in a number of programs that allow us to attract more diverse students. UM. You know, we partner with the Black National Black NBA Association, the Hispanic NBA Association, with the Forte Foundation to get more women in. We're actually pretty proud of our diversity statistics in all of our programs. We're not doing so
well in faculty. UM. We've just partnered with the Big Tendans to start a program for unrepresented minorities in h d s so we can attract more diverse candidates to the academy. And you know have been growing to professors. So it's going to take a multi problemt approach. I don't think anyone single strategy would work, and all of us have to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Yeah, and that representation at the professorial and the instructor level
is key. Interesting to hear what you said about the cases, because uh, really rethinking the entire curriculum. It seems to be one of the things that everyone's going to have to take on. Ret Agraball, she's the interim dean at Robert H. Smith School of a Sin at the University of Maryland, joining us on the phone from College Park