This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Jason Education, we talked so much about it, rightfully, talks so much about it. And one of the hardest working reporters always but certainly right now is Janet Lauren trying to keep in touch and trying to keep track of everything that's going on in higher education. This week alone, there have been numerous stories. Janet joins
us on the phone. So, Janet, before we get to the President of Warhouse, who we're going to bring on in just a second, give us thirty seconds on state of higher education right now. Well, a lot of schools have sent kids home because of higher test rates of coronavirus. We saw on earlier this week, the University of North Carolina said students should go home because a lot of
kids were testing positive. Yesterday, UM Notre Dame had eighties students test positive in one day and they decided to pause clastic, pause online I'm sorry, pause in person activity for two weeks and see what happens. In Michigan State yesterday said UM that they would they would not be having on campus program right. Yeah, that's our backdrop let's
bring in David Thomas. He's President Morehouse College. He joins us on the phone from Atlanta on this Wednesday long, of course, as he just heard with Janet Lauren, our higher education finance reporter. UM. President Thomas, so nice to have you here with us. UM. You know, there's a lot on the plate of our countries, colleges and universities, the virus, reopening, virtual learning, the cost of education, inequalities. UM.
What's top of mind for you right now? Well, top of top of minds for me is UM one making sure that the quality of what we offer online this semester far exceeds what we were able to do last semester. UM, and that we're also able to create community in this virtual environment, because that's one of the things that draw
students to more House College UM. And so we've required all of our faculties who are going to teach UH this semester to be certified in online education because one of the things we learned is that there's a difference between online education and remote instruction. Remote instruction is where you essentially do what you do in an in person classroom, just being taked or delivering it on zoom or some other video platform, whereas online education there's actually a pedagogy
to it that makes it much more dynamics. So we've invested in that. And the other thing that you know keeps me awake at night is UM. Uh you know whether or not we'll be able to bring our students back for the spring semester, uh, given what we're seeing happen with the virus UH, in particular in the state of Georgia, where our positivity rates testing rates are in
double digits right now. Well, you made the decision quite early on among colleges that you could not do in person because there was too much risk for everybody, not only the students, but also the other people working on campus. Now other schools are seeing their just decisions may not have been such a great idea to invite students onto campus uh, and they're having to pivot at a very late date when kids are already there. Can you talk
about what went into your decision UM to be very early? Yeah, it was it was very UM, very straightforward. We very early on UM decided that the number one priority for us would be keeping our students and our staff and faculty, uh say, from a health and wellness perspective, and then our second priority was ensuring the quality of what we
could provide educationally. And the last, the third priority was you know, what's what what's going to be the financial impact because we have to stay viable financially and being clear about that uh made it pretty uh straightforward for us to move, you know, through our decision tree and to wind up being among the first schools to say that we would be fully remote, especially in the context of Georgia, where we also faced, uh, you know, a
very confusing political environment where literally at one point we had the governor suing the mayor over whether mass could be mandated in the city of Atlanta, um, because the governor was not going to allow that to happen in the state of Georgia, and we were going to mandate mask on our campus. Uh. And it's hard to enforce a rule, you know, when students might raise the question, well, that's that's not legal in the state. If the man
can do it, how can the college do it? Um. So so that just led us, you know, on a decision tree, and when we saw the rate of positive tests going up, UM, that led us to reverse our earlier decision, which was that we would be in a low density hybrid format UM and UH. But it was you know, in many ways, it was pretty straightforward because we just very clear about, you know, what our priorities
were in our principles UM. And so President Thomas, no I was gonna say, you know, you may also know that we were the first school, uh, first scholarship granting school to cancel fall uh football in the country. UH. And we did that almost three months ago. Uh and using the same set of principles. And so President Thomas, I have to ask you pivoting a little bit away from your day to day job, you know, figuring out the mechanics of this university. You have studied organizational behavior,
you have taught UM this over the years. You were the dean of a fantastic business school, my alma mater, Georgetown University, before you came to this job. I do wonder in your job, especially in Atlanta, especially at this incredibly press he just historically black college, what is your take on what we have seen around racial justice, racial unrest, but also more importantly the move towards really starting to talk in a serious way about diversity in corporate America.
What have you seen what have you observed of late yees. So it's UM, it's you know, it's it's it's I don't quite know what the word is. But what we've seen is the confluence of two pandemics. The first is the COVID pandemic and the second is the pandemic of institutionalized racism UM in our institutions and organizations. UH. And you know, if we look at COVID, it's revealed just
stark inequities in health outcomes along lines of race. And then if we look at the pandemic of institutionalized racism, what it brings our attention to is the fact that there are still policies and practices that give license to uh the conscious and unconscious biases UM that devalue um black black lives and brown lives uh in our country. UM. And it's very interesting to me that these two viruses had been come together and so powerfully paint that picture.
The you know, the other side of it is that, in ways that I'm not heard UM in my almost forty years as an academic studying at the intersection of organizational change, leadership, and race, so many leaders now willing to use the words institutional racism, systemic racism. Um that it's you know, not just about changing people's attitudes so they say they're not racist, but really looking at, you know, the underpinnings of our social systems, whether it's for profit
corporations or educational institutions or the police force. And that really gives me some hope that, um, you know, we will see that this isn't just a moment, it's actually a movement to really move us towards, uh, the ideals
that underpinned the American idea. So in that sense, I'm hopeful more House has been particularly impacted because we are the only historically black college uh committed to the education of men, and black men have very much been part of, you know, the picture of what institutionalized racism looks like because of George Floyd. Uh. That's that's not to deny that there's also black and brown women who have been affected,
like Brianna Taylor, but we've really been at the full gram. Um. You know, here in Atlanta, I had a student who was tased pulled from his car, had done nothing wrong other than talked to someone from his car that the police didn't want him to talk to. And UM, you know, we had to spend time helping to get him released, his his record expunged. UM. And I've had other students arrested, so I've had to deal with things on that end
of the continuum. And on the other end, We've had a number of people reach out who want to partner with Morehouse College because they really want to take this moment seriously, UH and make a difference. UM. And that's been in the realm of philanthropy UM, as well as creating opportunities for our students and partnerships UH to advance other aspects of the college. So it's you know, UM, it's really captured a lot about the complexity of of race and social justice UH in our society, both the
best of it and the worst of it. Before we go, Jan and I know you want to ask one more question. Yes, if we could just talk a little bit about football again. You were very early on in saying this was not a good thing for your community, for the health of your athletes, and can you talk about it again. That decision, it is manifested in divisions, in in athletic divisions. Some
have said we can't do this. The sec in in the South where you are is continuing and again talk what went into that decision and the concern about the health of your athletes. Yeah, um, you know, when I looked at it, what I one of my principles was I would not place any uh segment of my student population at more risk than any other segment. We looked
at football and we just couldn't justify the idea. And at that time, we thought we might be able to come back in a low density residential format, but it just became clear that our football players would be at greater risk uh than our other students. And we coupled that with the fact that the black community has been disproportionately impacted. So the likelihood that you know, we would have positive cases on our campus was fairly high. Our
students are student athletes would travel to other schools. UM we had designed a very rigorous protocol to keep our students safe, but we couldn't guarantee that all the schools that they would visit to play at would have similarly rigorous protocols because it's very expensive, you know, to test every player every week or twice a week. And UH, we also started with the assumption that um our athletes
are students. First, we admit them to more House College with the expectation that they're going to graduate from more House College in four years, not that they're going to play football for three years and go pro. And UM, we just ask ourselves, you know what, what do we owe our students? And we say we owe them safety
and we owe them in education. So the other thing that we did, and if you read our announcements, UH, in the first paragraph, we make very clear that we will guarantee every student athlete their scholarship because we brought you here to graduate from Morehouse. UM. And the fact that you're a great football player, UH is a dimension of merit, but it's not what determined whether you got into more House College. And so UH, I'll be quite
honest with you. I made the announcement without I made the decision without talking to another president in Division one or Division two UM, and made the decision announced it. We put out a public announcement, woke up the next day to a plethora of UM you know, calls and UM emails. And it was only in the first interview I did that I realized we were the first school to actually cancel football and the scholarship in school, and I was actually shocked. Yeah, well you've got You've had
a lot of good company since then. Listen, we could talk to you for the rest of the day, well into the coming back. You're gonna have to come back and spend more time with this. Thank you so much. David Thomas, President of Moore House College, such a awtful guy and experience teaching at Harvard and as I said, at the dean as the dean of the business school at Georgetown mcdonndah school at a time of unbelievable growth
and where he is now a really important role. And uh we we remember also Robert Smith of course, uh that huge move uh basically taking on all of the student debt there at Morehouse. That's stemmed from a conversation over dinner with David Thomas when that all happened. Our thanks as well to Janet Lauren, our Education and Higher Education and Finance reporter,