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When Thomas Katsouleas scheduled a town hall meeting for UConn students and faculty in early March about the COVID-19 pandemic, closing down the campus was one of several possibilities the school was considering.
When he actually held the virtual town hall two days later on March 12, the situation had deteriorated so quickly that UConn had decided to close the campus and move all coursework online for the rest of the spring semester.
“This was just one of the scenarios, one of many, that we were getting ready for, but it wasn’t something we were expecting to pull the trigger on,” Katsouleas said. “At that point we fully expected [students] would be coming back; only later did it become apparent that this [virus] is going to be ramping up for a significant period of time.”
In his decades-long career in higher education, Katsouleas has handled weather disasters and student and faculty issues of all stripes. He also led Duke University’s engineering school during the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out a quarter of the university’s endowment.
But for Katsouleas, who is not even a full year into his first university president job, the COVID-19 pandemic is a unique crisis that threatens residential student life, the way faculty can teach classes and possibly more than $100 million in revenue per semester for the state’s flagship university from housing, dining services and other fees.
In a nearly 40-minute interview, Katsouleas reflected on how UConn has responded to the pandemic, the university’s role as an economic and research driver and how the crisis changes the trajectory of his young university presidency, which started Aug. 1.
“In February I was feeling like the new president; I was still out on the road, meeting our donors in different parts of the country for the first time, doing all the kinds of new things you do,” Katsouleas said with a grin. “But by the end of March, I felt like I’d been president of UConn for six years.”
Elsewhere on campus, officials from unions representing professors and graduate student employees give the administration high marks on keeping the lines of communication open so far. But they still have some pressing questions.
And heavy financial losses are a harbinger for possibly painful cuts ahead.
For now, the best answer Katsouleas can provide regarding future budget decisions is that everything is on the table, as the university still hopes to reopen its campuses on Sept. 1.
UConn has already lost about $30 million this spring, as a result of students being sent home early and coursework being moved online. It made back some of that money — $21.5 million — from the federal government’s CARES Act passed in April.
The school expects to lose up to an additional $120 million in the fall semester if it closes its campuses to residential students.
Earlier this month, Katsouleas, along with the heads of Trinity College and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, joined Gov. Ned Lamont during a virtual press conference detailing a timeline for reopening college campuses, which will be predicated on the availability of testing supplies and overall prevalence of the virus in Connecticut. The state plan puts the onus of enacting social distancing requirements and other safety measures on the schools themselves.
As Katsouleas and other UConn administrators mull over the prospect of reopening campus in September — a decision will be made by June 30 — the first priority is to prevent the school’s flagship Storrs and four regional campuses from becoming COVID-19 hotspots by reducing lecture hall class sizes from about 350 students to less than 100 and setting up a contact tracing regime.
In fact, UConn is exploring the idea of offering a summer course on contact tracing, which could create a cadre of student volunteers to assist with efforts to follow the virus’ community spread, Katsouleas said.
But even as the transition of UConn’s more than 5,000 available courses to an online learning format has been largely successful, Katsouleas said the university loses more than student fees by offering strictly remote learning.
“I think the value proposition to the student is having access to those faculty at a time when the world is changing tremendously fast and there are unsolved questions,” Katsouleas said. “They also see value in the co-curricular and out-of-classroom learning they experience in a unique campus environment, and that can’t be replaced with an all-online experience.”
UConn’s administration instructed faculty to prepare for both in-person, online and hybrid methods of teaching courses for the fall semester, said Michael Bailey, executive director of UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors union.
Communication between administrators and faculty has been good so far, Bailey said, as have actions like extending by a year the time tenure track faculty must meet certain requirements. When it comes to opening for in-person coursework, Bailey said there are safety concerns — especially among those at greater risk for complications from COVID-19 — but they largely agree with Katsouleas’ sentiment of returning to face-to-face classes as soon as it’s safe.
“[Faculty] don’t feel that online learning is the best environment for learning,” Bailey said. “They would like to get back to that face-to-face learning.”
One of Katsouleas’ major goals when he first started at UConn was to double annual research spending to about $500 million over the next decade. He still says that is in the cards, despite mounting financial pressures, noting that most of the increased funding would come from outside grants.
If anything, Katsouleas said, he sees the virus sparking new lines of research.
“What does [the virus] mean to us as humans? How do we respond to this individually and collectively? … How do we get the economy going?” Katsouleas queried. “These are all questions our scholars are going to be grappling with, and I actually think there’s an opportunity for a sort of renaissance in research.”
But to make up for financial losses UConn has already or may experience, some things will likely have to go away, Katsouleas said.
Decisions about cuts will revolve around priorities like ensuring current students can finish degree programs, and avoiding jeopardizing future revenue streams, Katsouleas said.
“You have to just lay everything on the table, and there can be no sacred cows,” Katsouleas said. “You have to put in all the components of your budget, figure out what your priorities are and then deal with the fiscal realities as they may come.”
Those fiscal realities could prove dire to public universities, said James Kvaal, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a California-based nonprofit that advocates for making affordable higher education available to Americans.
That’s because state budgets, which contribute to public universities, are likely to experience drastic cuts in the wake of the pandemic, Kvaal said.
Connecticut taxpayers subsidize about a quarter of UConn’s current $1.46 billion budget.
“There are not going to be very many good options [for cost reduction],” Kvaal said, predicting higher tuition, faculty layoffs and reduction of student aid as actions colleges and universities will likely take. “[The situation] is threatening colleges and universities’ ability to serve as sources of economic opportunity.”
But as UConn faces questions as existential for a university as, “can we have students on campus?”, Katsouleas says he’s been heartened at how the college community has pulled together so far.
“We’ve been touched by loss … but we’ve had more successes, including getting an email from a faculty member who contracted COVID-19, and had just been released [from UConn Health] saying, ‘UConn Health saved my life,’ “ Katsouleas said. “There have been a lot of sweet moments, and they come more rapidly in this time than during a normal time.”
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Read HereThis special edition informs and connects businesses with nonprofit organizations that are aligned with what they care about. Each nonprofit profile provides a crisp snapshot of the organization’s mission, goals, area of service, giving and volunteer opportunities and board leadership.
Hartford Business Journal provides the top coverage of news, trends, data, politics and personalities of the area’s business community. Get the news and information you need from the award-winning writers at HBJ. Don’t miss out - subscribe today.
Delivering Vital Marketplace Content and Context to Senior Decision Makers Throughout Greater Hartford and the State ... All Year Long!
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