Good afternoon.
I'm John Bansavich from ITS.
Thank you for participating in today's virtual town hall.
This is an annual spring tradition at USF,
presented today under unprecedented circumstances
related to the global pandemic and the effects of COVID-19.
This is a Zoom webinar, and you are
joined by more than 800 members of the USF community.
We cannot see you.
This session is being recorded and will
be captioned for accessibility purposes,
then posted next week on myUSF.
As you listen to this session, if you have questions,
please submit your question via the webinar's Q&A tool.
You may submit questions anonymously.
Now, please welcome the Reverend Paul Fitzgerald
of the Society of Jesus and president of the University
of San Francisco.
Good afternoon.
Thank you all very much for attending this virtual town
hall meeting.
This was certainly not the spring semester that any of us
expected, but I want to offer a heartfelt thank you
to all of you who have worked to reinvent the way we teach
and mentor and support our students as we
as an academic community moved to a remote learning
and teaching environment.
To our determined faculty and staff, thank you.
Thank you for creating new approaches
to getting our work done and interacting with each other
when students are dispersed around the world, when
you and our colleagues are setting up home offices
and simultaneously caring for family members, friends,
and neighbors.
My prayers are with you, your families,
and friends as each of you manage your personal as well as
professional lives during this pandemic.
As I have communicated previously,
we are intending to open the fall semester on the ground,
if possible.
But we do not yet know what that will look like exactly.
We are actively discussing how to structure our summer
courses, orientation programs for new students,
and how our classrooms, residence halls,
and co-curricular and mentoring programs will open and operate.
We are in close touch with public health officials
and government leaders as the uncertain COVID-19 situation
continues to evolve.
We are ensuring that we comply with directives from the city
and state and that our students and all campus community
members and visitors are safe.
We are in close touch with students and families
who have committed to enrolling in summer
courses, our late summer orientation programs,
and our fall semester.
More on our newest students in a moment.
First, I want to touch on a topic close
to all of our hearts--
spring commencement.
We are all deeply disappointed that we
won't be honoring the achievements
of our undergraduate and graduate students
in St. Ignatius Church and celebrating on Welch Field.
Instead, we are preparing to ship to all graduating students
their caps and gowns.
Our digital commencement hub is now live with video messages
from all the deans and myself, and we
will continue to populate this site
with student-submitted photos, videos, speeches, and more.
I hope you will visit it and share
in this virtual celebration.
I want to share now a short video animation with you.
I hope you agree that it reminds us
that this unprecedented commencement season is still
a celebratory one.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
In the midst of the pandemic, the university community
has come together and is bringing
extraordinary levels of creativity and collaboration
to our work.
Our faculty members, now delivering courses online,
are investing enormous effort into creating the highest
quality educational experience for USF students.
Our administrative staff are creating new processes
to support and mentor our students.
We are all-- all of us-- doing what
we must to navigate through this tumultuous period.
To start us off today, I have asked Lester Deanes,
Assistant Vice Provost for Student Engagement
and Co-director of USF 101 to share some of the initiatives
underway to support the remote engagement with students
as well as services for faculty and staff.
And I've asked Professor Sonja Martin Poole,
Associate Professor of Marketing and USFFA president
to share a bit about the work with our students
and the perspective of faculty during this time of disruption
and ingenuity.
Thank you, Father, for this opportunity.
I wanted to start by talking about acknowledging
that engagement is not the work of a person.
It is the work of, the responsibility of all of us.
Engaging our students and campus community
has been the focus of many of our staff and faculty
over the last few weeks, even while managing their own losses
from the pandemic.
COVID-19 has taught us so much.
It's taught me how much my family appreciated
me being away and physically working at USF.
I guess I was a little crazy to think being at home would
be a joyful time for us.
I think they want me to go back to work as soon as possible.
I was surprised by this.
USF is not San Francisco.
Its buildings, its structure-- it holds us, and we hold onto.
Our colleagues and additional campuses
have known this for some time.
USF is the people, the connections, the relationships.
It's the instruction given by world-class faculty,
the behind-the-scenes support by our staff,
regardless of location.
I've heard personal stories of staff who are mailing stoles
and thank you notes to students from their own homes
to make sure they get them in time
for this month's celebration--
within university guidelines, of course.
This is why I work at a Jesuit school--
not because of the buildings, but the community.
The ways in which we work have shifted,
but our commitment to our students
is as strong, if not stronger than ever.
This hilltop is always with us.
The amount of work that has gone into virtually
engaging our community has been both endless ever-evolving.
I've attended virtual prayers, carnivals, dance parties,
cooking classes, class presentations, performances,
alumni career panel, and recognition ceremonies.
I've watched more Instagram and TikTok videos
than I ever have in my life.
My team has started a podcast within two weeks
of shelter-in-place.
To colleagues that have been working and teaching
remotely prior to COVID-19, you're the true rockstars.
You're leading the way in sharing with us your talents
and expertise, and we greatly appreciate you.
To ITS, it has been both supporting our community get up
to speed on technology using teaching and programs,
making this transition as seamless as possible.
Thank you.
To all the staff providing services
I've never done before, including processing
hundreds of emergency fund requests
to students, taking care of their basic needs,
we thank you.
In regards to the working group, there
are two things I wanted to mention.
Dons at Home is a landing page developed
to help curate engagement efforts into one
site for the USF community to get their stories
and, yes, get resources, share stories, and advertise events.
Especially thanks to my team in Student Engagement, HR, Koret,
and Web Services for your help in putting this together.
I encourage you all to check it out in the coming weeks.
It's going to continue to evolve and change.
Please share with your classes and colleagues.
Summer engagement.
Michael Beseda and Jeff Hamrick will speak later
about enrollment.
COVID-19 has required universities
to reimagine how they're engaging students in the summer
months.
So this summer, we will revisit a previous model
of offering summer orientation-type experiences
to incoming students to get them in contact with staff, faculty,
and other students during the month of June and July.
This is in addition to summer advising.
We need to re recruit our current students as well.
The value of a USF education is in its instructors
and personalized attention providing students with--
personalizing and providing for students to help them thrive.
We'll work with our campus partners
to think through creative ways to reach
our incoming students-- more information coming
in the next week or so.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Now, I want to turn it over to Professor Poole.
Thank you, Lester.
Thank you for your service leadership.
And thank you, Father Fitzgerald,
for the opportunity to be part of the program today.
My name is Sonja Martin Poole.
I'm an associate professor in the School of Management
and president of the USF Faculty Association.
The past seven weeks have been, for all of us,
a period of unprecedented disruption and uncertainty.
As we close out this semester, on behalf
of the full-time librarians and faculty,
I wanted to take a few moments to give a brief update
on the ways we have responded during this crisis
and our hopes and intentions as we move forward.
The librarians and faculty have stepped up and forward
in remarkable ways to meet both urgent and emergent needs.
And in my view, we, along with the rest of you,
have been heroic in transforming the campus
to meet the needs of this moment.
First, we transformed our classrooms.
With only two working days to implement,
we, along with our part-time faculty colleagues
and academic staff across the campus,
took on the massive lift of instructional redesign
and the shift to remote teaching.
We have experimented with, adapted,
and adjusted to distant learning and teaching;
significantly increased our office hours;
and have provided individualized instruction for students
across the globe, from Accra to Shanghai.
Faculty with clinical and/or community engagement--
sorry, faculty with clinical or community-engaged learning
curricula have pivoted to support community partners, who
have, of course, also been struggling
with the tremendous changes that shelter-in-place
have necessitated.
Outside of the classroom, we reimagined--
we reimagined the ways that we at USF
provide essential support services to students.
We have worked closely with staff at CASA and CAPS
to provide students emotional support
and tailored academic accommodations
as they have lost jobs, relocated homes,
cared for sick family members, and sadly, even lost loved
ones.
We have offered dedicated support
to admissions officers and strategic enrollment management
by evaluating applications, speaking
with prospective students and parents,
assuring them that USF will be here
strong through this crisis.
And to help our grads celebrate their accomplishments,
we are taking the lead on creating department and program
virtual graduation ceremonies and returning to campus
to prepare for shipping to their homes
the packages that contain their regalia.
At the same time, faculty have pivoted to finding ways
to even more deeply support the broader communities
that we work with off campus.
Some of us have provided support in our areas of expertise
to local K to 12 schools and districts
and to health care institutions and
to local and regional community organizations that do outreach,
education, and direct services.
We are also speaking to the press and policymakers,
writing papers and articles, and signing amicus briefs.
Many of us are also embedded in extended communities of care--
our churches, neighborhoods, and chosen kin--
all of which have needed more of our attention and support,
as have our academic staff and administrative colleagues.
We have done this while taking care
of our elders, young children, teenagers,
and returned college students in our families.
We are doing this while sharing internet and home workspaces
with members in our households who are trying to do the same.
Internally, at the USFFA, we've also
been working hard to find new ways to support the university.
We have spent many hours consulting
with our colleagues across campus
and at other institutions and professional associations
to better understand what our university needs from us
and what we will need from USF to get through this together.
Two key things we are trying to improve amongst faculty
are communication and education.
For weeks, we have been working tirelessly behind the scenes
to set the stage for greater shared governance
at the university and to get the information we
need to participate in decision-making.
We have proposed new systems of shared governance
to the administration.
We are resurrecting old ones, such as the University
Curriculum Committee that will start meeting this month,
and we are developing new modalities
for gathering and providing feedback
over the summer and beyond.
We recognize that everyone is scrambling
and that there are many unknowns,
but we need information and sustainable structures
to meaningfully participate in supporting academic life at USF
through the long haul.
All of us carrying out the academic mission
of the university, from faculty and librarians to program
managers and program assistants, cannot do any of this the way
we want to.
Shelter-in-place by no means ideal, but we're making a way,
and we're getting it done.
And we continue to see that the smartest and most effective way
we can do this is together, with improved transparency
and improved communication.
Librarians and faculty are determined
to keep learning and growing and sharing with one another,
to care for each other, and support
the mission of the university.
We're trying things out, sharing with our peers,
providing wonderful community spaces for thinking
and dialogue with our students.
While all of this is happening, we
are also mourning things that we can no longer do.
We are sad that we're not in class with our students
and among our colleagues and that we
won't see our graduates walk the stage next week.
But we are holding up and supporting our communities,
our students, our institutions while we
balance teaching and research and caring for our loved ones.
We're worried about the world.
We are worried about the university,
but we're glad to be in this together.
While we may be doing things differently
for the foreseeable future, I want to provide assurances
that we will continue to operate at a high level
and deliver outstanding learning experiences,
and we will continue to respond to the crisis
in courageous and innovative ways.
COVID-19 represents a challenge unlike any we've seen before.
However, I'm optimistic that if we're
able to keep the lines of communication
open and decision-making transparent, inclusive,
and mission-based, we will transform the challenge
into an opportunity to become stronger
and better collectively.
Thank you.
Now, back to Father Fitzgerald.
Thank you so much, Sonja, and thank you, Lester.
Lester is an old friend from Santa Clara,
and I'm glad we were able to lure him up here to the city.
And Sonja, let me give you one example.
Professor Evelyn Rodriguez invited me
to her senior sociology capstone class
eight days ago, 10 days ago, and I
was amazed at her mastery of Zoom
and her ability to engage all of her students
and then put them into breakout sessions
and then pull them back in to do reporting out.
And I know that this heroic effort, as you say,
is going on across our entire university, and I'm in awe.
I am just in awe.
Now, in all of this, USF is not alone.
Every college and university in the nation
is struggling in the wake of the economic uncertainty
that the global pandemic has wrought.
At USF, we are sharing knowledge with our AJCU sister schools
and with the coalition of Bay Area universities.
We're sending out regular email updates.
Your deans and vice presidents, program directors,
and department chairs all have information to share with you
and want to hear from you.
There are resources, FAQs on the website.
Still, I know-- it's a confusing and frightening time,
and sometimes information and answers
do not get to you as fast as you would like
or as fast as you need.
I hope the information you'll hear today
will give you more facts and additional answers,
but I know we always have to do better.
The cabinet and leadership team are
working on a number of scenarios that deal
with forecasted financial shortfalls,
ranging from $15 to $100 million next year.
With the huge uncertainty around enrollment,
increased financial aid need, philanthropy,
ancillary revenues from conferences and other sources,
we must prepare for a range of cases.
This is a painfully difficult time.
Some members of our community have lost loved ones
during the pandemic, and our hearts go out to them.
We will be asking everyone to share
in dealing with the challenges our community faces.
We are looking at how to ensure we are efficiently
and effectively accomplishing our priorities
in a time of economic hardship and social disruption.
I pledge to spell out these initiatives
as we implement them in detail and with the transparency
that Professor Poole talked about.
Reducing the number of vacation days you have on the books
is an important first step for your health and safety.
There is a new FAQ you on the HR website
with more details on that.
A hiring freeze is in place.
We're beginning conversations with our represented groups
of employees about other initiatives.
We are also mapping out plans for possible layoffs
and temporary furloughs.
Scores of people from across USF are working together
on these challenges.
For this meeting, I am asking the leads
of several of our 11 working groups,
tactical groups to report on what has been accomplished,
what they are working on, and what's next.
Today's presentations do not represent
all the working groups.
Most of the commencement working group's
excellent recommendations are well underway.
As a matter of fact, we're starting to pack boxes today,
down in McLaren.
Lester Deanes touched on the virtual engagement
work that is taking place, and a brand new public health working
group, staffed mostly by faculty from the school of Nursing
and Health Professions, is getting
started in anticipating our fall semester.
Thank you to those faculty for stepping up.
This is especially timely to have this update now
because Friday, May 1st, was the deposit deadline
for new undergraduate students.
Michael Beseda will share the early enrollment information
and the outlook for the fall.
As you know, updated public health information and news
is coming to you, your colleagues, your families,
and your neighbors on a daily basis,
sometimes at an overwhelming rate.
So it's appropriate to begin with Julie Orio, who is leading
the COVID-19 crisis response.
Julie.
Good afternoon.
I'm Julie Orio, Vice President of Student Life.
Thank you, Father Paul, and much appreciation
to everyone for being here today and to all
of the faculty and staff who are working tirelessly as we
respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
It truly is and will remain a community-wide effort.
As you know, we began tracking COVID-19 in January.
Early steps included the activation of the Advisory
Committee on Communicable Diseases, travel information,
a COVID-19 resource page, which at the time
focused on prevention and education.
And as the situation progressed and more information
became available about the serious nature of COVID-19,
we then saw the activation of the COVID-19 management team
who was charged with responding to developments
and informing the USF community as the university navigated
this pandemic.
Our continuity of instruction resource team
came together as remote learning became a real possibility
in slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Additional travel guidance and restrictions were put in place.
And then based on local, state, and national guidance
to help slow the spread of COVID-19,
including the statewide shelter-in-place that has just
been extended in San Francisco, USF moved to online classes.
At that time, residential students
were asked to return to their permanent addresses,
and housing was put in place for students
who needed to remain on campus.
Those students are still with us.
All student support services were moved online,
and usage has remained consistent
and even increased in some areas.
We know there are a lot of questions about how
and when USF will reopen fully.
And as Father Paul stated, our goal
is to begin the fall semester with as
much in-person instruction for new and continuing students
as is safely possible.
Although the majority of us are working remotely,
working groups and other teams are closely
tracking the latest public health guidance
as the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve.
And like other sectors of the economy,
higher education is dependent on the directives
from local and state officials, and we
are in constant communication with these leaders
and their representatives.
In coordination with the COVID-19 response team,
many working groups, as Father Paul mentioned,
were established right away and are meeting regularly
to plan and coordinate responses.
Additional information will be shared from some
of these working groups.
And for those that aren't, you can
find all of that information and membership on the COVID-19
resource page, and that is being updated.
But please know that the health, the safety,
and the well-being of our campus community will always remain
our highest priority as we determine which option--
or blend of options more likely--
in person, hybrid, online courses
we will pursue for the fall.
We know that strict social distancing and enhanced safety
measures will need to be in place for an extended period
of time, and we know that these measures will include
a robust infrastructure for testing, tracing, as well
as isolation of USF campuses and activities.
The USF Public Health working group
that Father Paul mentioned is working closely
with the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
This partnership will continue to advise the USF campus
on public health policies and practices,
with the San Francisco Department of Public
Health taking the lead.
This is to ensure the health and well-being of the campus
community, and this includes contact
tracing testing mechanisms.
Please be assured that many steps are being taken
and will continue to be taken.
Every room on campus is being inventoried
for social distancing measures-- a huge shout-out
to the facilities and our essential workers
still on campus.
Masks are being secured.
Travel guidelines are being updated,
and that's just to call out a few of the things.
Campus will look different, but the USF spirit
and our commitment to our mission and values
will always remain the same.
All of the efforts of the many working groups
are informing the USF road map for reopening.
This living, breathing document will provide a road map
for navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic
at the University of San Francisco,
and the goal of the document is to facilitate an effective path
forward in a rapidly changing environment.
The document will continue to be updated, refined
as we receive additional local, state, and federal information.
And this document will be shared with the community soon.
It will live online, and it will be updated on an ongoing basis.
In all of the uncertainty and the difficulties
that many of us have mentioned already,
I hold tight, like many others, that there is a silver lining.
I do believe that the structure and support that we
have put in place--
all of us, faculty, staff, our students--
not without challenges, will serve us
well into the future in the long run,
it will make us a stronger institution.
I now introduce Shirley McGuire, Senior Vice Provost
for Academic Affairs, who will share updates
from the continuity of instruction working group.
Thank you.
Thank you, Julie.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Shirley McGuire, Senior Vice Provost,
and I was tasked at the end of February
with forming the continuity of instruction group as the idea
that we might have to jump to remote teaching
and learning started to become more and more of a reality.
This group-- slides, please, John, when you have a chance--
this group was created, a joint effort between associate deans
in each one of the schools, educational technology
services of ITS, and the co-curricular units in Student
Life, including CASA, Student Disability Services.
This group was created right at the end of February
and has been working very hard to both prepare us for the jump
and to continually navigate that jump into remote teaching.
And I want to thank them for their work, all the work
that they have done navigating issues, looking for risks,
trying to mitigate those risks, but also providing with many
of the training sessions that our faculty and our staff
have been a part of.
I also get an opportunity to thank all of you,
echoing what everyone has said.
When we were envisioning the jump,
we knew it was going to be difficult,
and of course, there was a lot of fear and anxiety
we were navigating even when we were talking about it.
And then the input that we received from students,
from parents, from actually many of your peers
just tells us that we have done an outstanding jump.
And that jump allowed students to continue
with their coursework and many students to graduate right now.
So it was a very important move.
So we have been working hard on those tasks,
and the current goals in front of us
are we are providing assistance to the provost,
to Provost Cannon and to the deans
as they develop each school's instructional delivery plan.
We know the schools all have unique needs
and may serve different groups of students.
There are overall factors that we are considering.
That roadmap is crucial in that.
But we also know each school needs
its own source of information and needs strategies.
So those plans are being developed
in the schools with their deans and with their faculty.
So we are providing support there.
We're also supporting both the curricular
and the co-curricular side.
We're trying to identify the resources that
are needed both over the summer and the fall.
We wanted to be able to learn from what we've already done,
improve things, find new areas that might need shoring up,
and be able to identify those and work through them.
We work in very close collaboration with summer 2020
and with fall 2020 working groups,
and we're very happy that we are now
going to increase collaboration with faculty-led groups.
In particular, the USFFA is creating a rapid response
group.
I believe that's been created.
And there are many school-level groups
who have been extremely active, already holding
meetings and sending information to the group.
And we are looking forward to that very active collaboration
because we need all of that input,
and we need to learn from you what has worked
and what could use some improvement.
Next slide-- so in questions that
were submitted ahead of time, some of you
asked about some specifics.
What are we doing?
So there are models that are instructional delivery that
are out there.
Sorry, you all just got to meet my cat.
Models of instructional delivery that are out there,
and we are reviewing them in relationship to the safety
protocols that Julie was just talking about,
to space constraints-- again, having people measuring out
exactly what social distancing would take--
and the technology resources.
I do want to say that we are very fortunate that ITS was
looking ahead to seeing what resources we needed, but we
know we might need to be able--
we might need one specifically tailored
to certain kinds of instructions.
So we're gathering that information
so that the deans can use it in their plans,
ITS can use it in their plans to ready,
the registrar can look at the class schedule.
We're developing improved training modules
for both online and remote delivery possibilities
in the fall.
What type of additional training do we need?
What types of things could we share across different groups?
Incredibly creative work has been done,
so we're trying to share that information.
Also, with Glesson, with Student Disability Services,
with CASA, how can we do this all now,
both on the ground and remotely?
We've been an in-person university for 150 years,
but now we know how technology can
help us feel safe but also how it
can help us be in contact with our students
and enforce our teaching.
So we want to be able to use them.
Additional information that everyone I think
is going to find useful-- there are
two surveys that have been launched
to help with decision-making.
Both of them close tomorrow.
There's a student survey out about their experiences
this past spring.
About-- I believe 1,600 students have already
completed that survey, and we still have another day.
There is a faculty survey out, and if you're a faculty member,
please take that survey.
We want your input on what it has
been like here in spring of 2020,
but then for input around fall scenarios.
And to highlight a couple of things
that are in process right now, in concert with ETS,
we developed an eight-hour training module for teachers,
for instructors who are teaching online this summer
so that we can have a very robust experience.
We also assisted with the creation
of a robust online experience for international students
for summer 2020 and for fall 2020 and some guidance
around these courses recognizing that some of our students-- it
may take some time for them to be able to join us here
in the city of San Francisco.
So those are some of the things that continuity of instruction
has been working on.
We are going to continue to work with the other working groups
and particularly with the deans and the faculty.
And we're eager to find new ways to improve
what we did during the jump.
So now, I'm going to turn it over
to Jeff Hamrick, our Vise Vice for Instructional Budget
Planning and Analytics.
And he will talk about summer 2020.
Thank you, Shirley.
John, I think I've got a couple of slides to use as well.
The cabinet recognized early as our faculty moved their spring
instruction to a remote modality that we needed
to prepare immediately to make sure
that our summer instructional offerings were successful.
As many of you know, the summer enterprise at USF
is approximately where $28 million dollars
our net tuition is generated, and it was important in order
to mitigate the risk faced by the university
financially for fiscal year 2021 that we be successful
during that period of time.
So the summer 2020 group is a cross-functional group
with representatives from strategic enrollment
management, CASA, as well as associate deans
from the schools and college.
And some of our accomplishments include, first of all,
making a recommendation to the continuity of instruction group
and cabinet that we formally move all of our summer
instruction online.
We created a common set of talking points for our deans
to communicate out to faculty advisors who
are working to get students registered for both summer
and fall courses.
And that set of common talking points
was socialized with CASA advisors as well.
We have launched a new digital marketing campaign
using reallocated budgets in order
to increase our enrollments of visiting students.
There are folks out there who are sheltering in place at home
who previously didn't have the option of taking
a course online at USF during the summer,
and we are specifically trying to recruit
that type of visiting student during the summer.
We also rolled out a new email campaign
to students who had already registered for summer courses
as well as for students who had not already
registered for summer courses.
That email campaign was supported by a recommendation
system that actually recommended specific summer course
offerings to students over the email
and had links through to information
about those courses.
I think next slide, John.
We were lagging behind initially on undergraduate registration
in the weeks after the onset of coronavirus,
but right now, our undergraduate registrations
at the School of Nursing and Health Professions
and the College and the School of Management
are in excess of budget goals.
Graduate registration is still a little bit behind budget target
but is catching up very quickly.
We have, through our colleagues in the instructional design
team and ITS and through the continuity of instruction
group, provided training for remote instruction
to 250 full and part-time faculty members.
And so far, overall, the picture for summer looks fairly good.
We know we will be short on other sources of summer
revenue, such as revenue from summer conferences and revenue
from summer housing.
So the group's goal now is to kind of hit
the ball out of the ballpark and try
to mitigate some of the shortfalls we
will be facing in other summer-related revenue areas.
My thanks to everyone on this group, and I'm
going to turn things over now to my colleague Michael
Beseda, who's the lead on an analogous group, the fall 2020
working group.
Thank you, Jeff, and it's a pleasure
to have a chance to talk to all of you
and to be able to say thank you because, as others have pointed
out, the work of recruiting and retaining students
is the work of a community, not of any individual or even
any division of the university.
But if we can go to the fall 2020 slides, as is noted,
the fall 2020 group was charged with capitalizing efforts,
coordinating efforts to make sure to the extent possible
we meet new student enrollment objectives
and that we develop, as Lester referenced earlier,
campaigns to retain current undergraduates,
to re-recruit current undergraduates,
and to coordinate graduate student enrollment efforts.
We have, as you have heard from Father Fitzgerald,
hit an important milestone for first-year recruitment
of students with the May 1st deadline.
And as of May 1st, almost 1,500 new first-year students
have committed to USF.
That's slightly more than a year ago, and in many ways,
an extraordinary outcome given the challenges that we face,
as did other institutions, but particularly
USF because of our very geographically
dispersed student population and our typical reliance
on the opportunity of those students
to come to campus in the spring for our yield events.
We were able in short order with the help of many across campus
to unveil a comprehensive suite of online opportunities
for students, prospective students and their parents
to interact with admission counselors, faculty
members, our current students, and those efforts
were fundamental to our ability to bring those 1,500 students
to commit for the fall.
Likewise, right now, colleagues--
most notably AVP Shona Milazo--
are working on a comprehensive student recruitment
and retaining effort.
And as well, grad and transfer student efforts are ongoing.
So in many ways, we are-- if we can go to the next slide--
we are at a very good place for the fall given
all of these challenges.
Nevertheless, there remain significant questions
about the fall because if you've read or followed the higher
education literature, everybody is concerned
about what we talk about as summer melt,
and that is the proportion of those students who
commit for the fall who ultimately decide
not to enroll, either because they defer their attendance,
they decide to go to another institution--
and in this case, because of COVID-19,
we have significant concerns about financial challenges
that they will face that will lead
them to make other decisions about their fall enrollment,
and any number of other things.
So we expect melt on those who have
committed to be significantly higher than in prior years.
So even with 1,500 or so commitments, in a normal year,
we would be on track to hit our enrollment goals.
With a higher amount, perhaps double or triple
what would happen in a normal year,
we could be considerably 10% to 15% or more
below our fall enrollment targets.
Likewise, registration of current undergraduates
is lagging by about 4% from historic levels,
raising questions about retention.
A 4% higher melt in those students
could be another couple hundred undergraduates.
So all of these things raise significant challenges.
And lastly, as Father Fitzgerald noted earlier,
we expect that the need to provide financial aid
to both new and current students in the months
ahead will be much higher than it has been in the past.
So my report is overall, from fall 2020,
that we feel encouraged by the work that's
been done to attract the 1,500 commitments to date,
but there remain significant issues regarding our ability
to meet enrollment targets for the fall.
With that, I will turn it over to my colleague, Vice President
Ellen Ryder.
Hello, everyone.
I'm here to talk about the fiscal stimulus package
that I'm actually working on with Michael Beseda.
Sorry about that, Shirley.
That's OK.
That's OK.
I think I have--
hopefully-- there we are.
So we had so many questions come in about this issue
that we thought we'd do a very quick update from this work
group.
Michael and I have been working on obtaining the money
from the federal stimulus-- yes, the University of San Francisco
will receive an estimate that is over $7 million of aid
from the CARES Act.
The first half of those funds go directly to students
for them to use as they please in response to students,
and we believe all students, that
are being impacted by COVID-19.
So we immediately asked for those funds.
We just received those funds, and what we're doing right now
is setting up a process that allows
us to be able to give the federal government later what
it needs in documentation, and we
hope to be able to announce in the next day or so
exactly what that process will be for the students.
So we're very happy that at least $3.6 million
of those funds will very soon go into the hands of students.
Another half of those funds, institutions
are allowed to use in relationship to emergencies.
And we certainly have many, many things
that we've had to do in relationship to the emergency.
So we are-- because we've already received the student
funds, we are now able to ask for the second half, which
we are doing, and we are looking for hopefully additional
federal funding.
So we will be reading every website,
watching everything that the Department of Education
and the federal government is doing and be ready.
That group, by the way, includes members
of Accounting and Business Services,
Office of Student Financial Services,
and Office of Contracts and Grants
so that we're prepared to be able to download
that information.
So that's a very quick update just
to make sure that the community is aware
that we are doing everything we can
to be able to receive those funds
from the federal government to help our students
and to help the university.
And now, I will turn it over to Charlie Cross, Vice President
of Business and Finance.
Thank you, Shirley.
I hope the entire community is weathering
these difficult times.
USF is committed to surviving during this pandemic,
as it has weathered other difficult times
in its 165-year history.
USF survived the 1906 earthquake and fire,
which destroyed the entire campus.
It survived two world wars and the Great Depression,
and I'm confident we can now make the necessary adjustments
to get through this situation and be
an even stronger institution when the country and the world
recover.
Our working group consists of Tyrone Cannon, Jeff Hamrick,
Donna Davis, David Philpott, Ellen Ryder, and Opinder Bawa.
Our group has been charged with developing scenarios related
to the potential enrollment shortfalls, increases
in financial aid and related room and board,
outlining possible expense reductions,
and developing plans to communicate with the community.
Our hope is that enrollment will be stable,
philanthropy will be strong, the investment markets
will fully recover, and the capital markets
will be accessible.
However, the early indications we're receiving
suggest that all may not be that rosy.
We need to work together to enable our dedicated faculty
and staff to continue to deliver these services to our students
and the community.
Thank you for all your questions that you have raised
and ideas you have shared.
These have helped shape our analysis and recommendations as
well as these comments that I'm sharing with you today.
USF receives its revenues from three main sources--
one, student-driven tuition, fees, and room and board;
two, philanthropy; and three, investment income.
Over 93% of our total revenue is derived from these student
sources, and the balance is philanthropy,
investment income, and some small miscellaneous sources.
As a result, we're very vulnerable to declines
in enrollments and/or increased demand for financial aid.
Additionally, we will see increased costs associated
with public health regulations for testing,
tracing, and perhaps quarantine.
Social distancing and community welfare
will not be insignificant demands on our budget as well.
Many believe that USF's endowment
is a large pot of money that can be tapped to address
this difficult situation.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the endowment
is restricted for specific purposes,
where we may not invade the principal provided
by the donors.
We are fiduciaries of those funds,
and we must honor the restrictions
and maintain intergenerational equity for future generations
benefiting from these gifts.
Given the uncertainty of our fall enrollments,
the likely increased need for financial aid,
the decline in our investments and lowered interest income,
we must plan for reduced expenses.
We have received input from many and continue
to welcome your suggestions.
I encourage you to share any and all ideas
with me, our working group, or your supervisor.
We're studying a range of net revenue shortfalls ranging
from $15 to $100 million.
As we have limited resources, we must reduce our expenses
to counter this possible net revenue decline.
We've identified the following cost-saving measures
as solutions or possible solutions for implementation--
one, a hiring freeze; two, compensation freeze;
three, compensation rate decreases;
four, elimination and/or curtailment
of temporary or contract workers; five, vacation usage;
six, deferral of capital expenses;
seven, operating expense reductions;
and eight, the most painful, furloughs and/or layoffs.
We're hopeful that these measures
will allow the university to survive
this unprecedented situation.
I understand these are hard issues,
and I welcome your thoughts, concerns, and ideas
to help solve these problems.
Thank you for your understanding and support of the university.
And now, Peter Wilch, Vice President of Development,
will speak about our strategic planning process.
Thanks, Charlie.
As Charlie mentioned, I'm Peter Wilch, Vice President
for Development, and my charge of the university
is to provide leadership and strategic direction
for philanthropy and to guide the day-to-day management
of our $300 million comprehensive campaign, which
includes collaboration across campus towards its planning
and toward its execution.
I want to thank the entire community again for joining us
and for all the fine work that you've
done over the last several months
during this very trying time.
It's clearly a continued demonstration
of your commitment to our students
and to the community during these uncertain times.
The work that's taking place across campus
to adjust our operations and delivery of curriculum
during this pandemic is inspiring
and reflects the strong shared commitment
from all parts of our campus to our students
and to their learning outcomes.
So again, thank you.
Though we still have a long journey ahead of us,
we all anticipate, as a community,
through this pandemic, it's important to begin
to think about USF in a post-pandemic environment.
The work groups that have been highlighted thus far
are focused on sustaining current operations
and making needed modifications to best serve our students
and to meet the challenges represented in the pandemic.
The strategic planning work group's charge
is to explore the longer-term aspirations for the university
and to map a plan toward those aspirations.
So the charge, in short, is to engage a planning process which
will begin immediately.
It will help to define the university's
ongoing and long-term priorities to identify
current and future opportunities as well as vulnerabilities
and a means to capitalize upon the opportunities
and to mitigate the vulnerabilities
and will establish a framework to chart a shared path forward
for the university as one USF.
The core working group is being formed this month
and will include members from across campus.
Now, some have asked, why now?
As I referenced earlier, we are finishing
year six of our campaign, and we will
conclude the current effort at the end of fiscal year '22.
I'm pleased to say even in light of the pandemic,
we remain on target and, in fact, a bit ahead of pace,
which is good news for all the very important needs
across campus that this campaign will support.
In the planning for this campaign,
it was envisioned that a university-wide strategic
planning process would commence in the spring of 2021
to ready the university for a new campaign,
to map new aspirations, and to identify an intersection where
a new campaign might support some
of those future aspirations and ongoing needs.
In light of the current pandemic and the amplification
of the challenges that are facing the university, as has
been highlighted, Father Paul gave the charge
to commence this process of strategic planning a year
early.
As I mentioned earlier, the core working group
is being formed this month and will
include broad representation from throughout the university
community.
As we go forward with the strategic plan,
we are anticipating three phases along the timeline listed
on the slide.
Phase one, which I've referenced,
is the recruitment and the planning,
and the planning is really centered on mapping our plan
or planning our work so that we can
work towards that plan being accomplished.
And it's a process mapping that's
going to be taking place in the month of May.
In the months of June, July, and August,
we'll be drafting a living document, much in the same way
that Julie Orio referenced earlier on getting back
to the classroom.
This is a document that will continue
to breathe and live and respond to the situations
as they evolve around us.
In phase three, after we have a chance
to take in community input from many different sources,
in September and October, the strategic plan
will be reviewed and refined and then rolled out.
It is anticipated that at the December
Board of Trustees meeting that this plan would be approved.
You should anticipate several additional communications
in the weeks and months ahead.
I know that this will be a big opportunity
for us to come together as a community, as one USF.
I know from the many conversations
that I've had across campus with members
of the community over the past several months
that there is strong interest in and enthusiasm for this process
to move forward, even in light of our current environment.
Through the planning process, we endeavor
to provide shared community consensus
on institutional direction and prioritization
of those aspirations in that institutional direction,
an identification of resources--
human, financial, physical-- required
to meet these objectives, a detail of our targets,
and a timeline for implementation
and a process for regular review of USF's progress
toward these targets as a community
and with the Board of Trustees.
As this process evolves, the community
should anticipate regular updates and several invitations
to participate in the planning.
We're excited to commence this effort, even though it's
a year early, and we look forward to
and are counting on you and your active participation
in this process.
That concludes my report on the initiation
of the strategic planning working group.
Now, it's my pleasure to welcome Father Paul
back to the virtual podium to continue the town hall.
Thank you very much, Peter.
Thanks, everybody, for those reports.
Many members of the USF community
submitted questions ahead of time
when the invitation to this town hall went out.
We've tried to address many of those
in the course of this session.
Thank you for your submissions.
During the session itself, other questions have been submitted
and are being submitted, and now, we
will pose some of those questions to our presenters.
All questions with answers will be posted on myUSF
along with a captioned video of this session.
So Interim Provost Tyrone Cannon, Senior Vice Provost
Shirley McGuire, and Vice Provost Jeff Hamrick
are curating questions, and we'll read them and pose them
to presenters.
So the first question, please.
Thank you, Father Paul, and good afternoon to all.
And before I begin, I want to just quickly underscore
what Lester and Sonja had to say in regards to the great work
and support that our faculty and staff are providing
during the pandemic.
We have over 20 questions that have
come in during the course of the town hall,
and I will begin this part of our town hall
with the question for Father Paul.
The question is, would leadership team members
consider not taking a salary increase, which I understand
will be deferred, but that date was not
clear in your April 24th email?
And will this salary reduction help to avoid possibly
layoffs for others?
Father.
Thank you very much for that question.
I think, as Charlie Cross referenced,
this is going to require some shared sacrifice
on the part of everyone.
But I would like this, any shared sacrifice
to be progressive.
So I've announced that I will take a 20% reduction
in my compensation.
I think it's important for me to lead by example.
And then, the members of cabinet and the academic deans
have all volunteered to take a 15% reduction
in their compensation.
And we are in conversation with the rest of the leadership
team about their participation in this effort.
And yes, if we and if other members of the community
take a reduction in our compensation,
this will save us from having to do as much reduction in force
as might otherwise be necessary.
I do want to also for this, as I say, to be progressive.
So the lowest paid people in our community
will be the most protected, and the highest
paid people will make the greatest sacrifice.
Thank you.
I'm now going to turn over to Jeff and Shirley, who
have been fielding questions that
have come in during the course of the town hall.
Sure.
And I'm happy to start.
Father Paul, I actually have another question for you.
When I talked about the CARES Act,
I didn't talk about what will happen with the students who
are not covered by the CARES Act, students
who are, of course, crucial parts of the USF community--
the DACA students, international students.
What will USF do for them given that they're not
being covered by the CARES Act?
So yes, the Department of Education,
in clarifications after the act was passed,
said that we are not allowed to give CARES money
to our DACA students, for example,
international students.
Our Board of Trustees stepped up and pledged
to raise a million dollars from among themselves
and former trustees and close friends of the university
to have a COVID-19 response fund.
And so we will use those moneys to support our DACA students.
So we won't be using the federal money,
but we'll be using philanthropic money
to make sure that every member of our community
has the support that they need to be able to continue
their education with us.
This next question is for Vice President Orio.
Julie, there are some questions submitters
who have concerns about how social distancing worked
at USF before our students largely
left the campus and also some questions
about how social distancing might work in the fall
semester.
What do we know about that yet, and how are we
going to encourage students to engage in whatever
are the appropriate public health
recommendations at that time?
Sure.
So not just for students-- it will be for all of us.
So prior to folks coming back, and even right now,
there are students on our campus.
There are essential employees on our campus,
so we are all practicing social distancing when being on campus
and taking all the necessary precautions.
So our essential employees know--
there's signage all around campus in terms
of all of the recommendations that
came through the SF ordinances, and we're
abiding by all of that.
And then, all that information will
be shared with the community prior
to however we're going to be coming back
and the expectation that it's on everybody to follow
those practices and protocols that we'll put in place.
This is a big effort from our public health working
group, our faculty and staff that are working through that.
And we will be developing a large social marketing campaign
around public health initiatives, education,
prevention, all the social distancing measures.
So all of that information will be shared with the community.
Thank you, Julie.
So there are a set of questions for Vice President Opinder
Bawa about our technology capabilities,
things that we might be considering.
I know that he has invested a great deal of time
in preparing us for the first jump,
but I think there's a couple of different questions
about things we might be considering now that we're
moving into summer and fall, things
that we might have learned.
Oh, thank you, Shirley.
I think Father Paul mentioned that great example earlier
about a professor that was using Zoom and Canvas in a very
methodical way.
I think these are some of the tools
that everybody is familiar with that are
gaining more and more traction.
We're spending a good amount of time
with faculty members in consultations
and in group settings, sharing with them these technologies
and how do you best use them.
There is also another wave of technologies
we're going to be looking at in the coming three to six months,
and these are really to do with how can we
do a better job of automating manual activities.
We still have a lot of manual forms.
So how do we digitize them?
How do we make them electronic and route them electronically
so that we could do this remotely if we're
not all together on campus at the same time?
The other technologies we're taking a look at
is things like queue management--
how do you manage a sequence of people
that have activities to be accomplished digitally
when you can't stand in line?
What do you do?
How do you do queue management?
Collaboration tools-- Slack is another very popular tool
on campus, and we don't have an enterprise license yet for it,
so we could take a look at that.
We're very fortunate that technologies like Zoom--
Zoom, particularly-- we've been the beneficiaries of a donation
from their founder, Eric Yuan.
So we're looking at other technologies,
and SalesForce is another one that
would like to do some work with us
and San Francisco Department of Public Health.
So there's a couple of other opportunities
that are coming up that we could benefit from.
Thank you, Opinder.
A few weeks ago, the president announced
that supervisors are being encouraged
to assign vacation times to their employees,
and we have some questions about that topic.
So I thought I might ask our Chief Financial Officer
to explain how a reduction in vacation
balances benefits the university and then also
maybe to ask Donna Davis to talk about why
now might be a good time for people to take vacation leave.
Thank you, Jeff.
Accounting principles require us to record a liability
for the cumulative effect of the vacation balances.
So at the end of May every year, we're
required to calculate what we would
owe all employees at that point in time for that vacation.
If that liability is reduced, it is a credit to our expense,
or reduction in our expenses.
It's an accounting treatment.
We're required to do it, and the impacts
our balance sheet and our statement of activities.
It is the same as saving any other money we would not--
any other expense we wouldn't incur.
Donna, to you.
Hi.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thank you, Jeff.
The University of San Francisco has a vacation policy
that is intended to reward employees
for the hard work and commitment that they show,
and I think in recent years, sometimes it's difficult for us
to take that time.
I think right now in the university
encouraging and assigning people to be on vacation,
there is also some added confusion and concern.
It's not the way we ordinarily think
about vacation, to stay home or to not be able to go somewhere.
The decisions that we're trying to make across the university
are strategic.
They are meant to anticipate and plan
for what already have been significant increases
in expense and what could be continuing increases in expense
and what they see as far as severely constrained revenue
dollars.
So the university feels strongly that vacation
is meant to be time away, not time that
should harm the university employees' opportunities
or work, but to reflect.
There are many, many studies and reports about how stressful
this has been for everyone, and we
heard that-- we know members in our community
have suffered very real losses as a result of COVID-19.
And so we all need to take time to retreat, to reflect,
to hopefully de-stress.
And if in doing so, we can also address what Charlie has just
explained, that's going to be an added benefit for us.
I know I saw in the Q&A stream questions
about what are new and evolving types of vacation plans,
and certainly, as Charlie said earlier, we welcome all ideas,
and we shouldn't at this time take anything off the table.
So we will continue to look at that.
The goal is to continue to prioritize and preference
vacation as a benefit for all of our employees.
Great.
Thank you, Donna.
Thank you, Charlie.
There are a number of questions about the survey results,
the surveys that I mentioned when
I talked about the continuity of instruction, both the student
survey and the faculty survey.
And to answer-- yes, we are, absolutely my office,
especially, we'll post the results
of the surveys, of course, in keeping, making sure we
keep our comments confidential and make sure we present it
based on rules of anonymity.
But we will be posting those results.
We're also specifically sharing them
with deans so that they can make decisions
and with the Student Life so also we
can improve many of the risk factors, many of the things
that we have in place now and be able to come up with scenarios.
It does include part-time faculty,
and a staff survey is an excellent idea,
and we need to get that one out next.
Thank you, Shirley.
There's a couple of questions about how budget cuts need
to be done strategically rather than penalizing units equally.
So I'm going to give that question to myself
and then ask Father Fitzgerald a separate question.
So I have presided over six different budget formation
cycles at USF.
Unfortunately, each of those has involved base budget cuts.
Those cuts have never been allocated out
to the units in a proportional fashion,
meaning we haven't done 3% cuts at CAS,
3% cuts in strategic enrollment management,
3% cuts in development.
The cabinet has always looked at different categories
of expenditure and university priorities
and developed schemes for allocating out cut targets
to those units that are disproportionate--
some get more, some get less--
in order to reflect the university's priorities
and the president's priorities as well.
So for example, in the last two budget formation cycles,
we have provided collectively a measure
of protection for strategic enrollment management so
that it is able to meet its enrollment
objectives, development so that it can successfully complete
the capital campaign, and Student Life because
of increasing demands from our students
for a variety of services that are offered out of that area.
So I would not expect any COVID-19-related cuts
to be done proportionally or across the board as well.
They will likely be strategic as well.
So another set of questions that we
have relates to how USF is engaging with the government
or government officials at this point in time,
presumably to collaborate or to even secure resources
for the institution.
So I was hoping to ask you, Father Paul,
to highlight some of the ways that USF is conducting itself
in those engagements.
Yes.
And this really builds on our reputation.
It builds on our successes with our students.
As you all know, we're top 2% in the country for students
outperforming their predicted graduation rates, top 2.5%
for salaries 10 years out.
So by all the external measures, we
are a top 100 university that has a very successful track
record.
I was on a virtual town hall a couple
of weeks ago with Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
and she was virtually meeting with faith leaders
from across the city, and I was one of the four
that was allowed to ask her a question.
I kind of led by saying, as you know,
most private not-for-profit higher education
institutions in the United States
were founded by religious communities,
and the D'Alessandro and Pelosi families
sent a lot of their students to Jesuit universities.
And she laughed.
Her father, all her brothers went to Loyola Baltimore.
Her husband went to Georgetown.
They've got a grandchild right now at Loyola New Orleans.
She went on for about five minutes about Jesuit education,
and I wish I had recorded it.
But then I asked her to please include
private not-for-profit higher education in the CARES Act,
and we were not mentioned in the early Senate version.
But she did include, then, in the House version $12 to $14
billion.
And we continue to work with her office.
I got a nice note from her the other day congratulating us
on getting the CARES money.
And so we hope to be in CARES 4 and CARES 5 as well.
I'm on the executive committee of the Association
of Independent Catholic Colleges and University--
California Colleges and Universities.
And so I have been asked to be on a task force
to work with Governor Newsom's office.
So you UCs, the CSUs, the private not-for-profits,
and the community colleges are all engaging the governor,
talking about how essential our sector
is for the future of the state, just
as we're talking with Speaker Pelosi about how
important our sector is for the future
of the country as a whole.
Mary Daly, the president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve
Bank, has asked me to join a task force
that she's forming to think about how
she is going to use her vote.
Whenever the Fed gets together, the governors
of the Federal Reserve branches each get
one vote to form a Fed policy.
And then, I'm on--
I've been asked to do something with Loyola New Orleans.
I'm a trustee there.
So I'm being asked to represent our values, our importance
out to the community.
Peter Wilch and I and his whole team
are talking also with our benefactors.
So philanthropy and public assistance
are going to be part--
they're not going to close the gap completely,
but they're going to help.
They're going to be important pieces as we weather this--
really not just the pandemic, but especially
the recession, which everyone predicts,
or economists predict is going to be worse
than 2008, more like 1929.
Thank you, Father Fitzgerald.
Provost Cannon, there are quite a few questions
about the process that provost and the deans
will be using to decide in the fall what
delivery is going to look like.
We have people asking, will we go completely fully online?
Would we consider that?
Would we-- when will we know?
Or are we going to wait and see?
And I know that you've been working
with the deans in terms of balancing a number of concerns.
So I thought perhaps you could take the first part
about those concerns of things that you're thinking through,
and then I'm happy to add a couple of very specific things
that we're trying to do on continuity of instruction
to support you all.
Sure.
Thank you, Shirley.
As has been indicated earlier in today's town hall,
we are planning and hoping that we will begin our fall semester
on the ground and continue to provide the high touch
education that we are known for.
Of course, as was the case this spring,
we will be guided by the City of San Francisco
health regulations as well as whatever regulations
may come from Governor Newsom depending on where
we are in the pandemic.
So as a way of preparing for both, while we are putting
our energies into being on the ground,
we are also continuing to train faculty with the support of IT
and staff to be prepared to shift should we need to do so
in the fall semester, should we see
an increase or a return of the curve, if you will,
regarding the pandemic.
But as of now, we are happily engaged and planning
to be on the ground.
And we may also, as I think Julie indicated earlier,
we may need to pay attention to social distancing that
might be required from the city of San Francisco
in terms of how many folks might be in the classroom,
et cetera, et cetera.
But that's kind of a broad overview
of what we are planning to do.
And just to add an example, so Provost Cannon
had asked me to meet with each of the deans to learn,
and I know the deans are having conversations with faculty,
and that will continue--
even at the course level, which courses
do we really prioritize to be on the ground?
Because if you're a chemist, you can only
talk about chemicals so long.
If you are in the health care field,
you need to be in the simulation labs.
Those that maybe would be actually quite well completely
up in the air as continued online classes
because we've learned so much, and some people have showed
amazing skills in that area, and that
would allow some social distancing,
gives us some more space.
And then there's hybrid, too.
And I'm also seeing this, and Provost Cannon and the deans
are receiving lots of creative ideas from the faculty.
So I also-- the answer to the question
is not wait and see in terms of planning.
It's more wait and see in terms of our ability
to be able to be the in-person institution we've
been for 150 years.
So we've been working together on that.
So I think that answered about four or five
different questions.
And I'll turn it back to Jeff.
I think an important point that actually continuity
of instruction has underscored is
while we plan to be on the ground,
we may also need to do as you said, Shirley,
hybrid for perhaps international students who are not
able to return to San Francisco at the beginning
of the semester.
Or we may have students who have compromised health
and still need to be engaged remotely.
Thank you for the question.
Thank you, Tyrone and Shirley.
We have a number of questions in the chat
thread about furloughs, layoffs, temporary layoffs.
I'm going to call in Donna Davis, who's
a member of the continuity Of operations group.
Donna, what can you tell us about the timing or use
of these options and maybe even help
us understand the distinction between some of those phrases
that I used?
Sure.
Thank you, Jeff.
Timing-- I think that is probably
the toughest one to answer.
We want to make the best possible decisions with as
clear information as we can.
And yet, it doesn't come as quickly as we want.
So we definitely need to be thoughtful about it.
So the way I would answer the timing question is
is that we need to make sure that any decision we make
gives our employees and especially
those who would be directly impacted
enough time for their own planning and enough information
and notice.
So we would have to build in the proper note for the decision
to be made, communicated, understood, and implemented.
So let me answer a question.
There is a lot of confusion, as usual,
in California with the law, but I
think that the way that we would use the word "furlough"
is it is a temporary action.
It is something that we do in reducing hours
because perhaps someone's work isn't quite as full-time,
or the work that is important and relevant
and matters to the institution can
be deferred to be done at a later period of time.
Or perhaps we're shifting to ensure
that we're addressing other issues at a particular moment.
But again, all of the work is important, and it matters.
These positions matter.
The furlough is a temporary reduction in those hours,
perhaps by one day a week, two days a week, or more.
Or it is a time in which we don't do that work
for a short period of time.
It could be a month.
It could be two months.
I suppose it could be longer--
not much longer.
Temporary really does mean temporary.
During that period of time, employees would still
have their benefits, and not because simply
our benefits plans allow that, but because the university
is committed to that very important contribution
to the well-being of our community members.
So furloughs do not jeopardize medical and welfare benefits.
I am certainly very happy to go into greater
detail at another time.
But in this moment, I think it's important to think
about it as the university saves money principally in salary.
There are many ways that the continuity Of operations group
and their advisors are going to look
at how we could truly implement this and the mechanics of it.
That is information that should be,
as I said earlier, shared as early as possible and often
and widely and transparently, and we will do that.
The piece that's also important in looking at that
is, how does a department know?
And would they find out, oh my gosh, tomorrow this
is happening?
Again, no, that's not how this works.
I think also on people's minds as we
talk about reductions on this temporary basis
is, how do staff who are non-represented
have the opportunity to weigh in on these important initiatives?
And I think right now, what we've
seen is that we've got an informal way in which we
do that.
We have the information that goes down from vice presidents
and deans, where it comes up from front line people,
and there's an exchange of information.
In advance of COVID-19, there was a strong initiative
that parallels the important shared governance
that Dr. Poole referenced at the beginning of this town hall.
We need to have shared governance
with all of our important constituents
and our individual members of our community.
And so we look to that.
We've had some great success with UBAC,
and I think we're looking at ways
to increase our commitment to and broaden
the opportunities for that advisory and shared role.
So I am working with Human Resources in particular
and others and deans and vice presidents
to fast track a way in which we can have non-represented staff
be able to participate in an advisory conversation that
is far more formalized so that we can socialize these issues
and exchange information with one another.
That's very broad.
It is a lot, but no one should ever
hesitate to contact Human Resources, Labor Relations,
or the Office of General Counsel.
Thank you, Donna.
So we do have a group of questions that I believe really
are asking, how do we, in this current environment,
look at our enrollment figures and look at our predictions
and look at the melt?
And what are the things that we have to consider,
or how are we considering them now?
And I thought maybe Jeff Hamrick could
start talking about our summer enrollments,
and then Michael could talk to us a little bit about the fall.
So let me just comment briefly on the uncertainty associated
with summer enrollments.
We have eight different summer sessions here
at the University of San Francisco.
So there is no unified census date
for the summer at which we can say,
these are enrolled students, and this
is the tuition we've taken in.
Students have a fair amount of flexibility
to cancel their registrations for summer courses,
and that is the greatest point of uncertainty at this moment.
We don't have any reason to believe that students will
cancel their summer coursework registrations at a higher
rate than usual at this point.
We have communicated often and clearly about the fact
that this coursework is now online,
but we also know that about half of these students
registered for summer coursework pre-coronavirus.
And so as they come to understand the learning
experience that they will encounter this summer,
some of them might choose not to remain
registered in those courses.
That is one area of uncertainty for us.
In fact, it's pretty much the only uncertainty associated
with summer at this point.
We do onboard a couple of new graduate programs
during the summer, and there are some uncertainties
associated with that.
Those programs tend to have very good plans that they're
advancing as to how they're going
to manage the uncertainties around coronavirus
at this point, and I'm speaking of our Sport Management
and Data Science programs as well as,
I believe, one program at the School of Education.
Melt refers primarily to a phenomenon
with undergraduate depositing for the fall semester.
And I'm going to let Michael Beseda comment
on the uncertainties associated with fall enrollments.
Thanks, Jeff.
So we have a number of milestones
over the course of the summer months
that give us increased certainty about
whether or not students who have deposited are going to enroll
or not.
So even at the end of this week, there
is a deadline for students to file for housing.
Soon after that, the process of students
registering for classes begins, and we're
able to track that data.
Not that long after that, bills go out to students,
and they're invited to begin to join the payment plan
and to begin to make their initial payments.
So across the summer months, we have these milestones
that typically give us better and better evidence
that a student will either enroll or not enroll.
In addition, we will be, of course, tracking who melts,
and we'll be tracking who defers.
And we'll have that data.
Finally, we expect summer to be very active,
with students not only melting, but potentially refreezing--
namely, students who may have initially thought they
wanted to go to one institution far
away or in some other circumstances now
changing their minds and recommitting to USF.
So all of those factors will come into play,
and we will have good milestones to track them as we get closer
to fall census.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thank you, Michael.
So this final question is really to Ellen Ryder.
One, I know that all the questions that came up
that we weren't able to answer or that
didn't group well into a particular category, that there
are going to be answers.
We're going to post them.
So that will be a follow-up to this town hall,
but I thought perhaps you could tell everyone maybe a couple
things we could be looking forward to
in terms of communications after this town hall.
Ellen, you're muted.
Ellen, I think you're still muted.
There we go.
Great.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Shirley.
I'm Ellen Ryder, the Vice President for Marketing
and Communications, and as Charlie mentioned,
this entire session, this virtual town hall
has been recorded and will be posted on myUSF along with all
the questions grouped according to topic area with answers,
also on myUSF.
It'll take us a couple of days to get that in place,
but we'll let everybody know when that happens.
I really appreciate the question about future communications.
Of course, we are continuing standard and baseline
communications operations and platforms through email
and posting on the website.
Resource pages have proven to be a really important source
in continuing the continually updated
information on different areas of especially
COVID-19 right now.
So those standard communication tools will continue.
What we would like to do more of,
especially in this remote environment,
are more sessions like this.
So we would love to hear from the community about what
is working, what they would like to see, and to talk more
about how we can get this critical information
about university procedures and priorities
into the hands of all members of our community.
So open doors-- we want to hear from you.
We want to hear feedback about today.
And moving forward, we want to be
in closer touch with everybody in the community
about these important issues that are facing USF.
Thank you, Ellen.
Now, back to Father Paul Fitzgerald.
Thank you very much, Shirley.
In my conversation about and my talk about our lobbying
efforts, I forgot to mention that the mayor, London Breed,
has asked me to be on the city's economic recovery task force
as well.
So we'll be able to advocate for our students, staff,
and faculty, and also for the common good
of our city, our state, and our country, and really
of humanity.
We're at time, so please watch for next week's postings
of all the submitted questions with answers.
And please watch for and carefully read communications
from me.
Reach out to your managers, deans, and vice presidents
with questions, concerns, and suggestions--
especially suggestions.
Your insights and ideas are important.
Please share them with colleagues and supervisors.
Thank you for the work that you are doing,
for participating in this webinar today.
I'm grateful for all you do each and every day
for our beloved community.
May God bless you and keep you and your families
safe and healthy.
Thank you.