Yale, COVID and What About Fall 2020?
By Lee Bolman

Tip: Scroll to the bottom of this page to see classmate comments and Lee’s reply.

(Editor’s Note: After completing his Ph.D at Yale in Organizational Behavior. Lee’s career has focused on Organizations and Leadership including long stints at several U.S. universities and extensive overseas teaching and consulting. He has authored or co-authored 10 books. Spurred by the pandemic and other major changes, he and wife, Joan Gallos, are hard at work completing a revised edition of their book “Reframing Academic Leadership,” scheduled for 2021 publication. We could not have a more expert and directly involved classmate for tackling the challenges that Yale and all of Higher Education presently face. Lee and Joan are interested to read classmates’ comments of the topic, both before and after Yale’s anticipated July announcements for the 2020-2021 academic year.)

 

A. Whitney Griswold, Yale’s president from 1950 to 1963, held opinions that were fairly conventional at the time, but seem retrograde today. He said that immigrants to the US did not understand liberal education, that African-Americans were “beyond the pale of the liberal arts,” and that public schools were the “rotten pilings” of American education. In that context, Yale’s admissions policies in 1958 aimed for a class that was 100% male, no more than 10% Jewish, and mostly white Protestant. Admission was no problem for those with the right pedigree—if you were a legacy or a graduate of one of the elite private schools with satisfactory grades and test scores, you were almost sure to get in. Six decades later, Yale is accepting barely 6% of applicants and white males are no more than a quarter of the class. Members of the class of 1962 were blessed (O fortunati! O terque beati! ) to apply when they did, since most would have little chance of admission in today’s world, even though pedigree still helps — 12% of students admitted to the class of 2023 were legacies, and almost half came from a rarefied slice of the economic spectrum — families wealthy enough to pay the full freight ($72,100 this year for tuition, room and board).

But suppose a grandchild has been blessed with acceptance into Yale’s class of 2024. Yale, like most of the Ivy League, is in a Covid-19 hotspot. What will await a new freshman when the Fall terms opens amid a pandemic? First, she’ll have to decide whether she actually wants to start in 2020, or wait a year. She may be reluctant to risk getting seriously ill, but equally reluctant to center her first-year experience in her bedroom at home. In recent years, only about 50 of 1550 accepted freshmen have chosen to defer admission, but that number could rise this year in the face of so much uncertainty about the contours of the freshman experience.

So what will Yale do? The university has announced that the term will begin August 31, and Yale will implement some program of social distancing, but almost everything else is still to be decided. What might a pandemic campus be like? Universities across America are generating ideas. Instructors behind plastic screens like Purdue? M-W-F classes where only 1/3 of the students come to class on a given day, while the rest attend online? “Public health administrators” roving the campus carrying masks, gloves and hand sanitizer to ensure that students follow the rules as at Vanderbilt? Weekly testing for Covid-19? Take-out only in the dining halls?

Can you socially distance in residence halls that were never designed with that in mind? Would anyone want to sleep in a bottom bunk beneath a roommate who might be infected with Covid-19? Should Yale turn quads into doubles, doubles into singles, and move the overflow into some form of overflow housing? Could Yale alleviate the housing problem by following Boston University’s plan to offer students a choice of on-campus or online? If so, would Yale get even more pushback than BU from faculty wondering about their own well-being? Where will the university quarantine students who become ill? If Congress doesn’t give American universities the liability protection they’re hoping for, will Yale ask incoming students to sign waivers (as the Trump campaign has done with its rally in Tulsa)?

These are the kinds of questions that university administrators across the United States are wrestling with as they face a powerful dilemma: if they bring students to campus, they face health risks for students, faculty and staff, and legal risks for the institution, but if they don’t, many students may choose not to enroll, revenues might plummet, and budgets could go deep in the red. This is scary even for elite universities like Yale with a $30 billion endowment, and potentially devastating for more financially-vulnerable institutions.

Yale has many questions to answer. Will some or all students return to campus in the Fall? How much instruction will be in classrooms vs. online? How will Yale implement social distancing when students do return? Most of Yale’s peers are waiting until July to make final decisions, but they are offering clues that help to frame the possibilities. Harvard has announced that all undergraduate and most graduate instruction will be online in the Fall, and is currently considering three different “paths” for undergraduates, ranging from low-density (very few on campus) to medium (30-40% on campus) to high (bring almost everyone back). All paths assume frequent testing. The middle option is a likely bet — it makes residential social distancing easier, enables something resembling a traditional undergraduate experience, and offers at least some students a choice of campus or home. In a similar vein, M.I.T. has announced that it plans to bring not more than 60% of undergraduates to campus and will require students to attest to their health on a daily basis. Could Yale bring half its undergraduates to campus in the Fall, and the other half in the Spring? Or bring freshman and seniors to campus for this academic year, and keep sophomores and juniors at home? Your rising freshman grandchild, at Yale or any of its peers, would love to know.

Meanwhile, every institution is expecting rising costs and falling revenues. Even before the pandemic, a few institutions, mostly small private colleges, have succumbed to bankruptcy every year, and a fifth or more of U.S. colleges are at significant financial risk. Public institutions, which educate more than 70% of college students in the U.S., have struggled to cope with declines in public support that began before the 2008 recession and have continued since. The average state spent $1500 less per student in 2018 than in 2008, a decrease of 16% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Public universities have bridged the funding gap by increasing tuition — to the point that for the first time in history, public colleges and universities now receive more money from families and students than from state legislatures (one reason for the massive college debt problem) As the pandemic batters both family and state budgets, some state universities have already begun to institute layoffs, mandatory pay cuts and increased teaching loads.

Ecclesiastes tells us, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” This is true even of pandemics. A century ago, more than half the student body on many campuses were infected with another deadly virus, the Spanish flu, which led to 675,000 deaths in the U.S., including many among healthy, young adults. Masks, social distancing, and outdoor classes were all among the methods universities employed then to combat the pandemic. Yale eliminated large gatherings, and quarantined itself from the city outside its gates. The strategy helped to keep Yale’s fatality rate far below New Haven’s, but we live in different times. As one of America’s oldest and most influential universities, Yale’s challenge is to develop a creative and persuasive approach that preserves the mission, protects health, and builds an even-stronger university for the 21st century. Will Yale be a leader, a fast follower or an also-ran?

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Endnotes

¹ This paper is based in part on research that my wife, Joan Gallos, and I are doing for a revised edition of our book for university administrators, Reframing Academic Leadership (Wiley, 2011, 2021).

² Kabaservice, G. (1999, December). The Birth of a New Institution: How two Yale presidents and their admissions directors tore up the “old blueprint” to create a modern Yale. Yale Alumni Magazine.

³ Harvard, Princeton and Yale all discriminated against Jews for several decades in the 20th century. See Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: the hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This was an unstated motive for broadening admissions standards beyond academic qualifications to include “character.”

⁴ From “Wake, wake, freshman wake,” created in the 19th century by Delta Beta Xi, a long-defunct Yale sophomore society. The second verse is: While some sadly ponder, still others will wonder, Why we their doors in silence dead pass by: But O, fortunati, O terque beati, (Oh fortunate and thrice blessed) Who hear the mystic call of Beta Xi.

⁵ Yes, that’s up a bit since ’62 was at Yale. Adjusting for inflation, the comparable figure for 1958-1959 was roughly $18,000.

⁶ The four states with the highest Covid-19 death rates at the end of May were New York (Columbia, Cornell), New Jersey (Princeton), Connecticut (Yale) and Massachusetts (Harvard). Rhode Island (Brown) was in 6th place, Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania) was in 9th. Rural New Hampshire (Dartmouth) in 18th place is the only Ivy League state with a death rate below the national average. This may change by the Fall: much of the northeast has been significant drops in new cases, while many states in the south and west are spiking.

We invite your comments below.