Transcript of the August 14, 2020 Opening Meeting. This transcript was auto-generated by YouTube and lightly edited to correct transcription errors. Key points have been emphasized in bold to aid skimming.
Kathleen Owens, University President
Good morning, colleagues. I'm pleased to greet you today as together we begin our journey through the 2021 academic year. Of course, I wish we were together in the Lemmond Theater rather than in this asynchronous virtual environment.
As I was preparing my remarks for today, I couldn't help but think about my last opening remarks, when I noted that 2018 would be the first time in 65Â years that I had not experienced the beginning of a new academic year. And in those remarks, I wondered outloud if I would be experiencing symptoms of withdrawal or would I be giving a high five to just about everybody in sight? What never once crossed my mind was the opportunity I would have to serve our Misericordia students alongside every one of you today.
I want to begin our time together with prayer. Clearly, this is a school year like no other. To say that it is a strange and stressful season is a dramatic understatement. I take comfort, however, in the words of scripture: "There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens," and so I'd like to ground our prayer this morning in that wisdom. Let us pray:
Loving God, in the book of Ecclesiastes You taught us there is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. At the beginning of this new year, we mourn for the souls lost to the coronavirus pandemic. We fear for the health of our loved ones, our students, and our University. We weep for the racism that still afflicts our society, and so we beseech You: help us to craft and abide by the practices that will protect the Misericordia family from this virus while allowing our values of Mercy, Service, Justice and Hospitality to shine. Send us students whose presence will stretch and enrich the life of our university, as they benefit deeply from the transformational education we offer. Help us to create safe spaces for dialogue with our students and with each other, never remaining silent when You need us to speak, but never speaking when You need us to listen. You have made everything appropriate to its time together. May we rise to meet the challenges of this time by fixing our gaze on the fierce urgency of now. May we give birth to a bright future for Misericordia University. In Your most holy name we pray. Amen.
Under more usual circumstances, I would be welcoming our new colleagues during this Opening Meeting. Instead, next week you will receive an email with a link including a photo and position title for each new employee. I invite all of you to personally welcome these colleagues as opportunities arrive, extending your own manifestation of Mercy hospitality as we begin this new academic year.
There are so many colleagues to thank for their hard work and dedication to our students and to our mission. Regrettably, there's not enough time today to mention every office that has played a role in our reopening, but please know how grateful and impressed I am, and that I have conveyed the extent of your contributions to the Board of Trustees. Nevertheless, let me take the liberty of mentioning just a few instances of great achievement beginning with the men and women in our Plant Services and Housekeeping division, who have cleaned and disinfected every inch of our campus, who have moved furniture in order to social-distance, erected plexiglas divisions in various offices, installed automatic temperature-taking stations, and so much more while also maintaining the absolute beauty of this campus, providing each of us a daily glimpse of serenity in the midst of a pandemic. If I had an applause machine, I would press play right now. I also wish to acknowledge all the members of the faculty for your extraordinary efforts last spring to pivot instantly from in-person to online teaching, and for your ongoing work this summer to further enhance the online experience for our students. Thanks also to all of our colleagues in [it and teaching learning centers] who've guided facilitated and supported this transition, enabling us to fully deliver online courses and programs. And a special shout-out to the Registrar's Office, who has figured out how to adjust the class schedule and to create socially-distanced classrooms. Thanks to our Student Life colleagues who have kept our students so creatively engaged through Cougars in the Cave, and to our residence hall staff, who have assigned and then reassigned rooms and dealt with all the tangential issues that accompany roommate changes. While we are all disappointed with the cancellation of the fall semester intercollegiate season, I am grateful to our Athletics department and to all our coaches for maintaining regular communication with our student athletes as the landscape for fall athletics has changed. I wish also to express gratitude to our Advancement Office, for establishing a COVID-19 student emergency relief fund that supports students and families most severely impacted by this pandemic, and our Finance division, for figuring out how to adjust all the dining options, as well as how to administer the CARES Act, including all the red tape that comes along with that much-needed financial assistance. Finally, I must acknowledge the incredible work of our Enrollment Management division that has worked tirelessly to recruit and enroll our new students, in collaboration of course with the Financial Aid office as families have made last-minute appeals due to their changed financial circumstances.
You will hear more about our class of new students during the Fall 2020 Convocation, yet another virtual experience next week. I could go on and on about the great work of our university community, but I also wish to share with you several critical and challenging issues that confront us now and will remain with us in the immediate and more distant future. Before I do that, however, I want to put our current situation in a larger historical context. As most of you know, the Sisters who founded College Misericordia purchased the property in 1914, and the college opened in 1924, and while there were several factors responsible for the delayed opening, the Archives clearly acknowledged that it was caused in part by the Sisters' preoccupation with caring for victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. This placed them firmly in the footsteps of their predecessors, the Walking Nuns, who went out into the streets of Dublin to care for victims of the cholera epidemic in 1832, just one year after Catherine McAuley founded the Sisters of Mercy. In other words, this is not our first rodeo. It's not even our first pandemic. Women and men of Mercy have always met the needs in front of them, and together we will rise to meet this need. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge that there is nothing easy about what lies ahead for us. The regulations imposed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Education, the NCAA, the CARES Act, and any forthcoming federal legislation, are cumbersome at best and liable to change overnight. We have advanced our opening plans knowing that we might need to retreat to a total virtual learning environment on very short notice. In the midst of so much uncertainty, how are we to give our students - from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors to graduate students - a meaningful curricular and co-curricular experience? I believe the answer lies in staying true to our mission and core values, especially the value of service. And here I find Misericordia's elaboration of that value extremely helpful. We say that we are demonstrating the core value of service through selflessness, sacrifice, and action. I can't think of a better way to describe what is called for in response to the coronavirus, selflessly sacrificing business as usual, and taking action to ensure the safety of every member of this community, as well as the ongoing health of our operations. When we think about our Mercy service, we're usually focusing outward. We think of our international service experience in Jamaica, and our local service with the McGlynn Center, Mercy Services, or Lake Noxen Elementary School.. The service called for through our pandemic precautions, however, is much more akin to McAuley Market, Misrecordia's food pantry that is open to any member of our university community in need. This is a community that takes care of one another, and that is what our coronavirus measures are all about: helping one another get through this together as we begin the new academic year. There will be both challenges and opportunities shaping our landscape.
I want to spend about the next 20 minutes or so highlighting five areas of significance. There is a lot of information to convey and I encourage you to watch this at your own pace, to hit pause, or even rewind as necessary so that you have a good understanding of what lies ahead.
Let me begin first by returning to those powerful words from scripture: "There is a time for everything. A time to embrace and a time to be far from embraces," six feet apart, in fact. As we prepare to open reopen the University and embrace our new normal, it is important to acknowledge the interdependent guiding principles driving all of our decisions. First is our commitment to the health safety and well-being of our students, faculty, staff, and local community members, and second is our commitment to provide the best possible educational experiences for our students. How that will work will depend upon prevailing circumstances as the semester unfolds. Moreover, our ability to achieve our desired outcomes will depend upon the commitment and behavior of every member of our teaching-learning community. Over the last several months, various offices, committees and task forces have prepared documents, guidelines, web resources, social media posts, protocols, policies, and more, all based on the science and intended to keep our community healthy and safe so that we can prepare the next generation of distinctive Mercy graduates. We have created a COVID-19 webpage, posted a health and safety safety plan, which is required by the PA Department of Health. We've developed a Cougar Care return-to-work document that includes detailed information on university health and safety requirements. The return-to-work document will be updated as new information is received from the Department of Health or CDC, so be sure to always refer to the website for the most up-to-date information. Additionally, everyone should have received information about our WorkSafe smartphone app that permits daily personal symptom checks. Temperature-checking stations have been installed in every residence hall and in various buildings. An online COVID educational program from United Educators will be available for every member of our community, and a new telecommuting policy has been approved. We have appointed a Cougar Care coordinator: Donald Stacknick, aka "Doc," and he will be working with our Cougar Care team to continuously monitor conditions on campus and in the community. Furthermore, we are preparing a dashboard for our website that will report information about positive COVID cases among members of our university community. While these many resources have been made available, the success of our fall plans will require everyone's cooperation, therefore, I will be inviting every member of our community - our students, faculty, staff, and administrators - to sign a pledge to take care of their own health and to do their part to protect Misericordia University and our community. Following today's meeting you will receive an email message containing the pledge, along with an invitation to add your signature.
Scripture also tells us that there is "a time to weep and a time to laugh." This is a time to weep over the sin of racism in our country. It is a time to explicitly acknowledge that Black lives do matter, and that seamless racial integration can be achieved. Upon my arrival here, and shortly after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing demonstrations and protests, I sent a letter to our entire University community about our need to listen to the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement, and then to act. I am grateful for the responses that I received from so many of you, as well as from students, Trustees, alumni, and others. Furthermore, I acknowledge and recognize that over the past few years much work has been done here to heighten consciousness regarding issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I also had a chance to view the findings of last year's campus climate study as well as the most recent NSSE results as it relates to camp- the campus culture regarding diversity. I'm aware of the petition that circulated last month seeking increased support for campus attention to issues regarding diversity. Having spent over 15 years at another Mercy-sponsored university, I am well aware of the Critical Concerns of the Sisters of Mercy: Earth, Women, Immigration, Non-violence, and Racism. Over the next many months, I will be working with our Mission Integration Office and a small group of advisors from among those who have expressed interest, including Trustees and community leaders. We also will be in consultation with the Director of Anti-racism and Racial Integration for the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy. This year we will continue to listen, but we will also act to make our community more welcoming to persons of color and more conscious of circumstances leading to racial inequality and injustice. In this I am inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King in his 1959 sermon on Gandhi. Dr. King said, and I quote, "The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers, but the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community." Here at Misericordia, the dream of the beloved community is part of our sustaining vision towards which we will continue to strive in the year ahead. This vision will be essential as we move into the heat of election season this fall. I know that Misericordia already takes a vigorous approach to encouraging our students to vote. The attention to voting rights stirred by the death of John Lewis last month and the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage on August 26th both reveal just how important each person's vote really is, and this year, no matter what the outcome, one thing we know for sure is that very few people will feel lukewarm about it. Emotions are going to run high. That is why it is essential that we prioritize listening dialogue and the hard work of good communication. Resisting both bitterness and brutality, we can draw closer to the "beloved community."
"There is a time for everything. There is a time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them." Here is, perhaps, our greatest challenge: whether you call them stone gatherers, bean counters, or accountants, there is a time to recognize that if there is no money, there's no mission. In recognition of the anticipated financial impact of COVID-19 the Board of Trustees approved a revised budget in June. At that time it was anticipated that we would be seeing much more progress in containing the COVID virus across the nation. As we all know, that has not materialized, and we are seeing the impact in our new student enrollment, which goal was reduced from 425 to 350 new students. Right now, while our new student numbers are near the revised budget number, we are seeing a decline in our resident student population. Some of the decline is the result of our decision to convert Alumnae Hall to single occupancy rooms because of bathroom facilities, and to adjust numbers in our suites and townhouses for the same reason. Moreover, students are making decisions to reside at home, either for health reasons or because their fall class schedule is predominantly online. It's important to recognize that the decrease in enrollment impacts our finances, not only this year, but also over the next four to five years as students cycle through their programs. As we have adjusted to this new environment, we have spent nearly $2 million to make our campus ready for the fall semester, including approximately a million dollars in McHale Hall to build out individual bathrooms. We've added an updated air filtering system in every residence hall room. We have rented tents for dining and social distancing. We've purchased cleaning products and air filtering apparatus for the health center. We've been improving technology and purchasing various software products intended to enhance the quality of our academic presence online, accommodating new food delivery and food preparation options, and the list continues to grow and grow. During the coming year we will need to make some very difficult decisions in order to both right-size and right-finance the Misericordia University of the future. This past summer has been extraordinarily difficult given the layoffs and furloughs of so many valued colleagues. Regrettably, we've not seen the last of personnel changes given that two-thirds of our budgets supports Human Resources. Over the next few months I will be working with the faculty, Human Resources, and the Board of Trustees as we design and implement plans to sustain our mission going forward.
"There is a time for everything. There is a time to tear down, and a time to build." Now for some good news: during the past several days, I have had the opportunity to walk through the Frank M and Dorothea Henry Science Center. What a magnificent addition to our campus! Teaching and learning in this state-of-the-art facility should commence within the first week or two of the semester. As classes and offices migrate to this new section, renovation of the older parts of the building will continue, with the goal for total occupancy early in the spring semester. The Science Center is truly testimony to the forward-looking vision of our faculty, Trustees, friends, and benefactors, who worked collaboratively with our Advancement and Finance teams to not only meet, but to exceed our Now for Tomorrow campaign, which currently stands at over $36 million, 21 % above goal. As a former science faculty member, I had to pinch myself as I wandered through the various discipline-specific labs prep rooms, independent research spaces, conference rooms, and gathering spaces. In my mind's eye, I could see the next-generation Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx conducting undergraduate research experiments. Then as I visited the botany and ecology labs, along with the greenhouses and animal research labs, I am sure I saw the next-generation Greta Thunberg studying about the environment and climate science, and preparing to address the Sisters of Mercy's Critical Concern for the Earth. As the year progresses, we will plan for the official blessing and dedication of the Henry Science Center as circumstances permit.
"There is a time for everything. There is a time to seek and a time to lose." This is the time to begin the process that will enable our presidential search committee to name Misericordia University's next president. The Board Chair, Dr. Deborah Smith-Mileski, class of '75, has appointed a search committee, which will be chaired by the Board's Vice Chair, Mr. Greg Collins, class of '82. On behalf of the Board, I express great appreciation to our faculty and staff colleagues who have agreed to serve on this important committee. Earlier this week the search committee met and had its first meeting. The committee will develop a communication plan, after which you will hear more about the process and timeline. Please remember all members of the search committee in your prayers as they assume this most important responsibility.
Let me close with one final reflection. There is a word we are hearing a lot about lately describing the changes that many businesses are making in this coronavirus era. The word is "pivot." Restaurants have pivoted to outdoor dining just as yoga instructors have pivoted to YouTube videos. In higher education, of course, it's all about the pivot to online learning and virtual meetings. The word comes from one of my very favorite sports: basketball. Technically, a pivot is simply a movement in which the player holding the ball may move in any direction as long as he or she keeps one foot in contact with the floor. Recognizing a parallel with the business world, an online publication called Small Business Trends shared this insight, and I quote, "In basketball, when you pivot you're essentially saying 'I'm no longer in a good position to score or pass, but I'm not quite ready to give up the ball .' You're looking for new options that may arise out of your current state. You're aware of your surroundings and willing and able to recognize new opportunities as they arise." Here at Misericordia University, we are aware of our surroundings, the particular challenges that will face us this year, but we are also willing and able to recognize new opportunities as they arise. Things may need to change, but if we keep one foot firmly planted on the ground of our mission, if we continue to "foster intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and responsibility for persons in an environment where all are welcome," then we can move in any direction necessary to continue offering a transformational education for our students. Another definition says a pivot is a "small change made with one foot on the ground that forces you to focus on your next step." So here's our next step: under usual circumstances I would follow my remarks with an opportunity for all of you to comment or ask questions. Given that these are not usual times, I invite you to submit your questions via email to president@misericordia.edu or to leave a voicemail message at a dedicated phone number: 570-674-8036. I ask that you submit your questions by the end of business next Wednesday, August 19th. Shortly thereafter I will schedule a Zoom webinar where I will be joined by several of the Vice Presidents to answer your questions as well as accept real-time questions via the chat feature.
In the meantime, I do hope that our paths will cross - six feet apart, of course - and as we begin our new semester, I pray that God will bless our good beginnings.