Should Universities Reopen This Fall?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now to coronavirus and the battle to reopen schools and universities. Few have more experience with this dilemma than our next guest, Janet Napolitano. She was the first female president of California’s sprawling public university system. And she was also the first female secretary of homeland security. That was under President Obama. And she has been, among other things, dealing with the outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu when she was at DHS. She talks to our Walter Isaacson now about what her university is doing to help students at this time and what the White House should be doing to save American lives.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Janet Napolitano, welcome to the show.

JANET NAPOLITANO, FORMER U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Congratulations on a, what, seven-year run. So — and you’re leaving in a very difficult moment. Tell me how the changing situation this week on coronavirus is affecting how you’re going to reopen the University of California’s 10 campuses.

NAPOLITANO: So, we’re actually reimagining how we’re going to reopen. Two of our campuses open in August. That’s Merced and Berkeley. The others don’t not open until the end of September. So they have a bit more time. But for Berkeley and Merced, we’re really having to go back and revisit the density of the dorms that will be safe, revisit the number and types of classes that can be offered in person. I think the bulk of the academic program will be online, by necessity, but we still want to have some in-person classes, to the extent that we can do so safely. So, we had some initial plans in the beginning of July. The resurgence happens, and you have to be agile and flexible in these circumstances. So we’re going to go — like I said, revisit what had been originally planned.

ISAACSON: Why bring people back at all?

NAPOLITANO: You know, partially because there are just some classes that are better in person, certain, for example, laboratory classes, classes that are in the performing arts or the studio arts, where there is a significant and unique value add to being in person, and then the advantage of having small classes, where there can be not just classroom instruction, but facilitating that kind of off-class conversation that really goes into the university experience. And so that’s part of it. And then, in terms of dormitory living, we have students for whom the dorm is actually the best place for them to live. They may not have an adequate housing situation otherwise. And, also, we know that dormitory life is part of what young people want out of college or out of colleges and universities like the University of California. So, we want to facilitate that, to the extent we can.

ISAACSON: Do you get a lot of pushback from parents who say, hey, wait a minute, this is not what we signed up for, give us our money back, if you’re not going to take our kids into campus?

NAPOLITANO: Yes, well, we have been sued a couple of times. We did provide refunds for housing and dining last spring, when we had to shut down rapidly due to COVID. In terms of tuition, the way we view it is that tuition is really designed to pay for the faculty and to pay for the delivery of educational content, so that students can make progress towards their degrees. And it’s not specifically tied to being in person or online or remote or whatever you want to call it. But we think the fundamentals for why tuition is charged and how it’s calculated still remain. And so we have no current plans to reduce tuition.

ISAACSON: Should we use this crisis, though, to rethink fundamentally the financial model for higher education, maybe go online a whole lot more, or just change the notion of what research universities should be doing?

NAPOLITANO: I think that, definitely, lessons learned in terms of how we do online instruction will now be a permanent part of the University of California. But I think we should view them as a supplement to and not a substitute for the residential college experience. I think what we’re learning here is that there are values to being a student at a residential university, values in the social interactions between students and students and faculty and staff, the participation in extracurricular activities, the ability to take a conversation from in the classroom, and keep talking while you’re walking down the hall to the dining room, and keep it going there. And that value add is something that we should not want to lose as a country. It’s a great time of — for social maturation of 18-to-22-year-olds. But, again, Walter, I do think that the pedagogy, the way we teach, will change in light of what we have learned during the COVID crisis.

ISAACSON: You all, the California system and many other universities, are suing the Trump administration for new immigration enforcement rules saying that foreign students can’t have their visa extended if they’re at a place that’s doing mainly online learning. Why push back on that? Why should the visa be extended if most of the learning is online?

NAPOLITANO: Well, because international students at University of California, they are students, but they’re also research assistants. They’re teaching assistants. They’re a vital part of the graduate education at the University of California. And, really, the Trump administration rule was an ill-considered lever to force colleges to not do online learning and to reopen, as if the virus doesn’t exist and we’re already through the pandemic. And there was no thought given to the role that international students play in American higher education. And it’s an important role.

ISAACSON: You and others at the University of California have now endorsed a proposition that will be on California’s ballot to repeal Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action. Do you think we should now, especially in the light of what’s happened after George Floyd’s death, use race as a consideration when determining who gets admitted to colleges?

NAPOLITANO: I think it should be a consideration. At the University of California, our admissions officers review a student according to 14 different criteria. They want to evaluate the whole student. They want to evaluate how the student would contribute to the university, should they be admitted. The only thing they can’t look to is the student’s race, gender or ethnicity, which is a key part of a student’s identity. It’s such an artificial limitation. So, I hope that the ban on using that — those factors is repealed by the California voters in November.

ISAACSON: You also are trying to drop the ACT tests, the SAT tests. Is that so that you get more racial diversity? What’s the reason for dropping standardized tests like that?

NAPOLITANO: This actually started with a request I made to the faculty back in 2018 to evaluate the use of the SAT or ACT in U.C. admissions. Faculty came back, recommended continued use of the SAT for a period of years, during which the university would develop its own test, and its own test designed to measure whether students had mastered the preparatory coursework we require of applicants from California to the University of California. I looked at it, and the way I saw it was, we were doing all of these things in our admission process to mitigate for the simple fact that there’s this correlation between SAT and a student’s, basically, zip code, the income level of their families. And we were doing all of this work to try to erase that implicit bias in the test. And then, in the end, the test didn’t give us all that much better knowledge of how a student would do at the University of California. So I just thought, you know what? It is time to wean ourselves away from use the SAT. So we’re not going to do it all in one fell swoop. We’re going to be test-optional for two years. Many universities across the country are going to be test-optional because of the interruption caused by COVID. Test-optional means a student consider the score. But if they don’t submit a score, they’re not penalized for that. Then we will be two years test- blind. What that means is that, if a student submits a score, the score can be considered for something like course placement, but it cannot be used in the actual admissions decision. And then, by 2025, we won’t use the SAT at all.

ISAACSON: What are the fundamental moral and educational reasons to take race into account when you’re admitting students?

NAPOLITANO: We’re a public university. And I think a public university has a public responsibility to be open and accessible, to be a creator of opportunity. And I think what the country is recognizing now, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the protests that have occurred since then, is that the issue of racism in our country, it’s not gone away. It’s not magically disappeared. It’s going to require some focus and intentionality to — for our country to meet its aspirations for equality. And so, for a university like the University of California, I think it means we have to make special effort and recognize that racism has affected students of different colors and creeds throughout their upbringing. And we need to cut through that and make sure that our student body is as diverse as it can be.

ISAACSON: You were secretary of homeland security. And you took on the H1N1 flu epidemic. What did you learn from that? And what lessons from that are not being applied today?

NAPOLITANO: The number one lesson learned, I think, in H1N1 was the importance of clear and consistent science-based communication with the public, so that the public knows what it needs to do and what it can expect. I mean, in H1N1, the members of the Cabinet who were involved, myself, Secretary of HHS Sebelius, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, when we spoke with the press, we spoke only in terms of what we were being told by the CDC, the importance of handwashing and handwashing properly, the importance of coughing into your elbow, very basic tools that the public then could use to its own advantage. The next thing we learned during H1N1 was that pandemic planning really matters. We were able to use the playbook that had been developed during the Bush administration and adapt it to H1N1. But we didn’t need to start from scratch. And then, thirdly, I think we learned a lot about vaccine and vaccine manufacture. The first case in the United States was found in April of 2009. By the next fall, we had a national vaccine campaign under way. We were able to move very, very swiftly there. Now, it was different than a coronavirus, which is a much more difficult organism to create a vaccine for than H1N1, which was a form of flu. But, nonetheless, we put a lot of energy into not just the development of the vaccine, but having a vaccine distribution plan.

ISAACSON: Why can’t we match the success of other countries that have pretty much successfully gotten to very low numbers?

NAPOLITANO: Well, we had that opportunity. We let it go. We were slow to the ball. We were slow to the ball on testing. We were slow to the ball in terms of establishing supply chain for critical reagents used in testing, things like PPE, personal protective equipment, for hospitals. It’s still chaos out there. And we have been absolutely, in my view, misguided in terms of any communication coming from the White House in terms of what the country should do and what is expected of the citizens of this country. We all have a role to play here. And so that chaos, that lack of leadership has had a real impact on our public health response.

ISAACSON: You were governor of Arizona. That state’s getting walloped right now. What’s happening and what went wrong there?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, my gosh. Yes, I follow Arizona closely. And I think that’s an example of a state that never really shut down and, when it reopened, reopened far too widely far too quickly. And when you look at the resurgence of virus there, the ICU beds are at capacity, the trajectory keeps going up. That is a state that probably should consider going back into shutdown mode.

ISAACSON: Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican. You were a Democratic governor. Has this become so partisan that he has not even consulted with you, or have you been talking to him?

NAPOLITANO: I have not spoken with Governor Ducey. But I will tell you, Walter, this is a public health crisis. It should not be a partisan health crisis. And one thing I do fault the administration, the Trump administration, for is seeing everything through a political lens. This virus affects Republicans and Democrats alike. Your ICU bed capacity doesn’t depend on how many Democrats or Republicans are in your state. Wearing a mask is a commonsense intervention that can really reduce the frequency of virus. How this got wrapped into Democrat-vs.-Republican politics, I think hindsight will — not hindsight, even now — will teach us is just the wrong way to approach it.

ISAACSON: Are you being vetted to be Joe Biden’s running mate in this election?

NAPOLITANO: Not to my knowledge, no.

(LAUGHTER)

ISAACSON: I guess you would know, right?

NAPOLITANO: I guess I would know, yes.

ISAACSON: OK. Janet Napolitano, thank you so much for being with us.

NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Walter.