 Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Mogulah from Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs. This virtual town hall is the last in a series of four events that have been focusing on Berkeley's plans and decisions for the fall. Past discussions focused on campus operations and administration, research, and instruction. Today we'll be talking about and taking your questions about student life and student engagement, everything from housing to health and safety to extracurricular activities. We're fortunate to have with us an excellent group of panelists, all of whom have been and remain deeply involved in ongoing planning efforts for the fall semester. They include Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Steve Sutton, Kathy Koshland, our Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, Vice Chancellor Equity and Inclusion, Oscar Deban, Lisa Garcia Bedoya, the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and Sharon Inkles, our incoming Associate Vice Provost for the faculty. We will at the end of this event provide information about where you can go throughout the summer for updated detailed information about every aspect of the fall semester and for answers to any questions we don't have time today. And speaking of which, if you're watching us through Facebook Live, feel free to post questions and we'll do our best to get to them today. And if not, it'll be on one of the websites that I'll share at the end of the event. I'm gonna go around the room here, the virtual room, but Steve, let me start with you. I understand you led the working group that was looking at issues and decisions and planning for this realm of campus life. Talk to us a little bit about how that unfolded and what the principles were that guided your work. Yeah, thank you, Dan. And welcome everyone who's out there. We appreciate you joining us tonight and all of you, students of Berkeley Valley, congratulations on your acceptance in Berkeley and congratulations to those parents and families as well. As Dan mentioned, I serve as the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and had the honor of actually working on two different working groups. One was our housing working group. We in normal years have about 8,700 single students that live on campus, but given the pandemic, it's necessary for us to reduce the density in the residence halls. So we're planning to have 6,500 students live on campus in a combination of singles and doubles this coming fall. And so there are many details for us to work out around this in terms of the testing, moving students into the residence halls, making sure that we create the type of community that we wanna have, given the restrictions that we have around the pandemic and all this has done in consultation with our public health officials. In terms of planning principles, one of the things our Chancellor talks about and I very much agree with is safety first. We really are focused on the health and safety of all members of our community, whether they're students or staff or faculty. And so that's really critical. We really put that at the center of the work that we did in our organizing committees. We also focused on issues of diversity. We know that one of the great things about Berkeley is we have such a diverse community. It's so critical for us to really use an equity lens when we make important decisions about things like our housing priorities. So those are two real important principles to me personally. And I know in terms of just the campus and the work that we've done, we really try to embrace those as we move forward. Back to you, Dan. Thanks, Steve. Oscar, let me come to you next. Steve talked about the equity lens. You're the vice chancellor for equity and inclusion. And as we know, diversity and building and sustaining a diverse community is a key priority for the chancellor and administration. So how exactly did that come into play? How was that made manifest through the course of the work of the committee you've been on? Thank you very much, Dan. And I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to the viewers, parents, students, guardians from across the world, really. I'm really thrilled to be here to share with you. And I just wanna say a little bit in that context about the Division of Equity and Inclusion, which is a division that really works across campus to make sure that students feel valued, respected and supported and that they develop a sense of belonging even in this new modality, this modality that we had experienced since COVID-19 and shelter in place. That has been an important part of the work that we've done in this committee and continues to be a part where our amazingly talented staff and faculty continue to work. I also like to say that we provide support to all students and focus on those whose experience have been marginalized, including through programs as Disabled Students Program, the Gender Equity Resource Center, working with first generation college going students as well as low income students. So the work of the committee that it really has started since the spring is to really find creative, nimble ways to support all our students in these areas because while we are changing educational modality, it doesn't mean that the needs of our students and our families have gone away. In fact, in some areas, they've increased. And so we've built especially certain areas around Disabled Students Program as well as enhancing our basic needs efforts to make sure that our students are served in a way that they deserve to be successful here at Cal, both in person and in this nimble modality of remote instruction as well. Thanks, Oscar. Sharon, let me come to you. I understand that you're obviously also a member of faculty and have some expertise in this idea of how we create belonging in a virtual space, which seems as relevant now as it's ever been in our lifetimes. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that's come into play and what you'd like parents and students to know about that? Sure, Dan. Thank you for your question and welcome everybody. Yeah, so as a faculty member and someone who's been working a lot on issues of a culture of support and healthy climate recently, I think this is a great opportunity, Ashley, for us to examine all the ways that faculty in particular can make students in their classes feel engaged and belong. So a class isn't just gonna be like this sitting and looking at a screen and hearing someone talk. It's going to be an engaging opportunity. Faculty are really creative and learn a lot from students about ways that students can learn, get to know one another, get to know the faculty member, talk freely, have ideas, be creative and feel like they're part of Berkeley culture. We're interested too beyond classes and other kinds of extracurricular engagement going to Berkeley isn't just about taking classes. It's about all kinds of other things that we will be talking about later on in the hour. Great, Lisa, you represented, I assume, in this working group, the interests and needs of graduate students. Talk to us a little bit about what's unique about the graduate student community and their experience and how you address that. I just wanna add my words of welcome to everyone, welcome to this call and to Berkeley. I was in your position in the fall of 1987 when I came here as an undergraduate. And I just want to honor that this transition is difficult under the best of circumstances both to undergraduate and graduate school and even more so in this moment of uncertainty. So just say that we appreciate that and we're all working to do our best to try to make this as positive and seamless to the extent possible transition for you. In terms of our graduate student population, we have almost 12,000 graduate students on campus. What's different for graduate students than for middle graduates is that from the beginning, graduate student life is very much centered around your department and your program. And often the most important part of graduate life is actually the connections that you make with the other students in your classes. And so we've been working hard to see how we can recreate that experience virtually, how to make sure that those serendipitous conversations and connections and intellectual discussions are able to happen, the ones that happen outside of class and that students really feel part of their local departmental community in the way that they would if they were physically on campus. Great, and I just want to let everybody know that we're going to be getting into many of the questions as many as possible of the questions that you've posed to us after this initial round of give and take with the members of the committee who joined us today. And Kathy and Medvane, I want to come to you as Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education. You play an important role in sort of the instructional infrastructure. And we've had a lot of comments and questions, concerns about how we delivered online learning and classes online in spring. And I think people want to know, how's it gonna be different? And what has the university done to make sure that it's as good as it possibly can be come late August? Well, thank you, Dan. And first let me welcome everyone. Congratulations on your admission to Berkeley, whether it's as an undergraduate or graduate student. We're really excited to have you as part of the Cal community. I've been at Cal for a long time. I have three kids who got degrees from Berkeley. It's very much a part of our family's life. And we're just thrilled to have you all with us. We made a big leap in the middle of the semester, last spring, moving everything into an online, or actually to say a remote learning environment where faculty should have picked up their courses and aimed their Zoom camera at themselves and proceeded. And that wasn't terrible, but it was not exactly the way we would design something if we were really planning to do this intentionally. And so we've made several investments this spring. We had a very large working group of faculty and staff developing guidelines for best practices for our faculty and our graduate student instructors. We have checklists for faculty and also for students to prepare them for the fall, for being in a largely remote environment. We have over 450 faculty who are taking a remote instruction online course this summer around best practices in this. That's an incredible number of our colleagues doing that. We have over 300 graduate students or around 300 graduate students who are remote instruction innovation fellows. They're receiving a stipend and participating in an eight week course on online pedagogy and remote instruction pedagogy. And we're investing in 30 gateway courses that we're calling a semester in the cloud or we're actually redesigning critical courses from the ground up to be truly online with all the best of online pedagogy associated with that. And we're doing that with some wonderful donations from donors who care about your education, care about how Berkeley does this. So we're fortunate to have those resources which is part of what's funded the graduate fellows program and part of what's enabling us to make the semester in the cloud investment. Great, so Steve, I want to come to you. We've had a lot of comments and questions and understandable concerns from parents and students about safety on campus. I'm a parent, I worry about that. There was a recent op-ed in the New York Times that claimed any university that was depending on students 18 to 22 or 24 years old to manage risk well that it was a plan that was doomed to fail. What's your response to that? How prepared do you think we are to provide a safe environment? And if you can give us some examples about what we're gonna be doing come fall. Sure, sure, that's a great question. We are very focused on this issue. I mean, this is something that from the beginning of all of our conversations last spring and even into where we are currently, I'm wanting to make sure that we are very closely monitoring what's the public health guidance is, what the Centers for Disease Control, what their guidance is. We work very closely with the city of Berkeley related to safety issues. We also are working closely with our students. One of the things we're working on is this social norming campaign where with students, we will then try to create a sense of awareness, a sense of obligation, if you will, in terms of how we can operate effectively under the pandemic conditions. So it's really important, I think, for all of our viewers to know that this is something that is most critical to us. And also, the things that you have been reading about and knowing and practicing over the last few months are things that we're doing. So we're gonna be focusing on testing and consistent testing with all members of our campus community. We're gonna be focusing on face coverings, making sure that we are being safe for ourselves in any community that we're in. We're not gonna have large gatherings, right? So those are things that are gonna change from what you might typically experience when one comes on a college campus. So those are just a few examples of things that we're doing, Dan, to really focus on the safety of all of our members of our community. Now, Lisa, I know you've been thinking about a lot about this as well. And I'm wondering, can we eliminate risk? Is that a viable standard, or should we think about this differently? Well, I think it's important to know that there is no way to stop infection, right? We are going to follow CDC guidelines. We're gonna do social distancing. We're gonna wear face coverings. We're gonna have plans in place, sanitation locations for people to get hand sanitizer, all those things. We will do everything possible to ensure that people are protected to the extent possible. But I think it's important to know as we've seen in other institutions as states have been reopening, once people come into contact with one another, there's no 100% way to ensure that people don't get infected with COVID. And so I think it's just really important to know that we will do everything possible to be responsible and protect our students. And then if something happens, as Steve pointed out, we'll do contact tracing and we'll be doing testing so that we'll be able to isolate people and make sure that they're not able, we won't have a significant outbreak on campus. So I'm gonna get into some of the specific questions that we got in the run-up to this event. Steve, I have a feeling a lot of them are gonna fall into your lap, but I'm gonna ask my colleagues here that if any point along the way, you wanna add in or help Steve carry this load, please put a finger up in the air. First one, Steve, is will the Student Health Insurance Plan cover COVID related medical costs? It does cover testing for COVID. And so that's something that everyone should be aware of. They come to campus, we're gonna provide that testing and the Student Health Insurance Plan will cover that. There's also a reciprocal agreement so with other UC campuses. So if you have the Student Health Plan, you can still go to another campus, UCLA, UC Irvine, what have you, if you're living in another part of the state to be able to have access to the services there. Now, some of those might be out of pocket, you can get reimbursed for those through the plan, but yes, there is gonna be testing and all other services that are covered through the Health Insurance Plan. Super, next up, if a student is in off-campus housing, shared with others, if that student should fall ill with COVID, especially if they're coming to campus for in-person classes, the parent notes here, is it up to the student to find their own place to be quarantined or will the university provide one? Steve? To me again, yeah, thank you. So as part of our planning and housing, we have set aside a certain number of beds for isolation and a certain number of beds for quarantine. There are different definitions for those two issues. And so we will accommodate the students that live with us as well as students that live in other parts of the campus or the Berkeley area. We've got a team of folks right now who are really working on a very clear protocol so that we can handle these things quickly, seamlessly for the students, make sure that they're provided meals, make sure that they still have what accommodation that they need so that they can continue to recover if they either test positive or they've just been contact-traced and they have potentially been exposed. And so talk to another question came up, Steve, about exactly what is that back-to-school process look like? Students are supposed to isolate for seven to 10 days when they get back. Does that mean students should come earlier? And again, I should note, a lot of this detailed information will be on the websites that we'll share later, but for now, can you sort of paint sort of a broad picture of how it's gonna work or how we hope it's gonna work in the fall, Steve? Yeah, so we're gonna have a rolling system of students moving into the residence hall. So it won't be a typical one or two days like we usually have because we need to reduce the density of just the people that are coming to campus. And so that'll be over several days. Students will get details about that move-in plan. We also will make sure that when students come that they are tested and then they will be asked to self-isolate for seven to 10 days. If they do test positive, then we will provide them a space in that quarantine or isolation location I talked about before at this point, it's gonna be at the Foothill Housing Complex. So if you're familiar with our campus, this is the housing complex. It's up by the Greek theater and the football stadium. And then that testing will reoccur. We have, we're redoubling our cleaning efforts. I mean, all of our custodial staff will have all the PPE that they need from head to toe to make sure that they're safe because their safety is top of mind for us as well. We are wiping down several times a day using hospital grade cleaners to clean doorknobs and elevator buttons and doors and all kinds of public spaces just to try to keep the space in the best condition possible. Let's turn to instruction for a bit. A lot of questions coming about instruction, understandably. Dan, can I make a comment before we move on about that? Go right ahead Oscar. Okay, I feel like this is a really great opportunity to one, to just state how our work class researchers are developing different ways to be able to test our community and to provide that support. And also to say that this is enough, this is, we need to co-create our safety. We need our both staff, faculty and students need to be shared that co-creation of that safe, that environment that helps to mitigate this COVID-19 pandemic. So we're relying on all of you who are going to come to Berkeley, who plan to come to Berkeley to work with us to make sure that we are maintaining a community that is well by mutual support and working together at it. So Oscar, let me just follow up on that for a second. How will that be monitored? And what will the consequences be if any of those population groups, students, staff or faculty violate some of the norms that are so important for safety? Well, we adhere to our Public Health Department Directives and so we are held responsible to meet those. And so we will work with the campus to make sure that we adhere to them in the best way we can. And that is really the guiding, the first most important priority guiding us. And so that's what we're going to do. But we're really going to do the best we can to make sure that our campus community is adhering to Public Health Directives. Thank you. Let's turn to instruction now. And actually, Kathy and Sharon, I'd like you to both sort of take a whack at this next one. And this is pretty typical of the kind of questions we're getting. My son is a new transfer student since he's only there two years. How will he build the important relationships with new professors in order to get involved in research and for mentoring? And secondly, could this influence his ability to graduate on time? Kathy, let me start with you. This is something that keeps coming up, which is how will my student get all the things they hoped and wished for out of their collegiate experience? Thanks, Dan. It's a really good question. And it's a challenge that we've been talking about quite a bit as leadership. I met with the Council of College Deans today, which is the Deans of all of our undergraduate colleges. And this was one of the topics of conversation. How do we build community, particularly for transfer students who do have a shortened period of time? Let me say that we offer about 6,000 courses a semester. They're pretty much all going to be offered. There's a few that won't be able to be offered because they are ones that just can't happen even in person at the moment. But most of our courses will be offered. Most of them will be offered remotely. We will have a few in-person courses. If a student can't come to campus and can't enroll in an in-person course, we've asked departments to have alternative plans available to them, another pathway that they could take so that they continue to make progress towards their degree. That is a high priority for us. In our Golden Bear orientation, we're probably going to focus on having student orientation groups tied closely to their departments or their particular college or division in the College of Letters and Plants so that they begin to build really strong academic community connections from the beginning. That's a little bit different than we normally would do it. We will rely a lot more on serendipity, but we're going to be much more intentional about how students are placed in orientation groups so that they really can begin to build some of that contact. And many of our faculty are thinking about creative things. For example, pre-recording their lectures and having them available for students to watch at any time and then taking their usual class time and making that an opportunity for students to have effectively extended office hours, a chance to talk to faculty, to see their fellow students. So those would be Zoom sections with an opportunity for a more intimate engagement. And faculty are trying to think about various ways that they can create those relationships. One of the things that we encourage all freshmen to do is to sign up for a Berkeley Connect, which is a mentoring program and 14 of our departments, or to take a freshman seminar, which will be an opportunity to meet with a faculty member and 12 to 15 other students in a more intimate setting. And those will all be remote so there's no issue around them. They'll be offered a different time. So I strongly encourage freshmen to take advantage of one of those two means to create connections and community. So before I turn to Sharon with the same question, though I'll add a little bit to it, Kathy, I wanted to follow up on something you said because we're getting a lot of questions about timing of courses, particularly from international and out-of-state students who wonder if they'll be time shifting. But are you saying that all the courses will be recorded so it doesn't really matter what time zone you're in? That is our intent that even if a professor lectures live and once that kind of experience, and when I say live, I mean live, not necessarily in person at all, because all of our courses over the size of 25 have to be done remotely, that all those will be recorded and available for students to watch either because they can't watch in the timeframe that it's live or the opportunity to go back and review and go over the material again in that way. Large courses will be looking for opportunities where discussion sections can happen at different times during the day so that we can meet and accommodate students. And as I said, the 30 gateway courses, the 30 gateway and other courses that are offered at the semester in the cloud will be online in a way that students who are anywhere in the world can take those. That was the intent of having those courses. And they are major math, Chem 1A, a number of STEM courses plus five of our American Cultures courses which is a university requirement. So a number of different courses across the spectrum are gonna be available in those four maps. Great, Sharon, I'm gonna come to you now and you should unmute yourself if you haven't already. Bringing to bear some of your expertise on that, the heart of these questions and these concerns about the relationship between a member of faculty and the student. What are your own thoughts about this and what kind of confidence do you have that to the degree possible, that element of an education could be preserved? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think one of the opportunities that this pandemic and the changing conditions is presenting to us is the chance to think in a creative and fresh way about this question. We can't just assume that students are gonna come to faculty office hours in person and hope for a connection. Faculty are thinking actively about how to make that happen. It's like the responsibility is for being creative in this area is really obvious now. And I've heard some great ideas. There was a discussion on a faculty email list just this morning about different ways that faculty can make sure that students in their classes can find study buddies, study groups. They can't just leave that to students anymore and hope that it happens. They're creating that opportunity. It's really neat to see that happening. And I think that's a shift that's gonna stay with us after the pandemic is over. I think the question that you read first, Dan, also asked about how students can get a research opportunity with a faculty member. And boy, that's something that is gonna continue just like it always has. We have this wonderful undergraduate research apprenticeship program where students can apply for opportunities to serve as a research apprentice to a faculty member help with their research. There are similar programs where students, undergraduates can sign up to do the same for graduate students, help with their research. That's gonna go on just like always and the application process was online before. It will be now. And that's an opportunity to connect with people one-on-one, two-on-one, three-on-one in small groups over Zoom, if not in person. And we know that academic departments are seeking ways to make sure that every student is aware of all of their opportunities to connect in small groups with other students, with graduate students and with faculty. Got it. Lisa, I wanna follow up something with you, particularly around graduate students. And we're getting questions about will faculty be offering in-person office hours or will those also be online? And if that relationship is important for undergraduates, it's certainly even important, if not more so for graduate students. So will there be in-person office hours? Will there be in-person opportunities for those students who will either be in university-provided residences or living here in the city of Berkeley? Right now, there is not the expectation that office hours will happen in-person. Most classes, even if they're not in-person, not most classes, some classes may have activities even if they don't have the entire class in-person. But I think it's important to note, students should just sign up for office hours. And as a faculty member, I can tell you there were many times that I sat by myself during my office hours. And many faculty now actually have online sign up for office hours. So if there's one thing I can urge the students on the call to do is just go. When I was an undergraduate, I never went. I always thought I needed to have a good question and I didn't have a good question. And that was a huge loss for me. And so the best thing to do is just go to office hours, talk about what you like about the class or questions that arose for you from class, or just ask the faculty member to tell you something about themselves. We are here because we love teaching. We're here because we really want to engage with our students, undergrad, or graduate. And so even virtually, you can make that connection and build that relationship. And so I would strongly urge you to do so. Otherwise, we'd get lonely. Thanks for that. A couple of more questions from the instructional realm and then we're going to turn to housing for a bit. And Kathy, I'm going to come to you first on these. And they're pretty much yes, no questions. First, are we able to guarantee at least one in-person class option for freshmen? The answer is no, partly because many of the freshman classes are very large. And even discussion sections, we're looking at ways in which we could offer some of those. But the reality is that given physical distancing and the cleaning regime and the size of classrooms that we have, that is going to be a challenge for any of our students. So the answer is no, we can't guarantee. What I can say is I think it's really, as I said before, it's critical for freshmen to try to get a birth and connect section or a freshman seminar because even though they'll be offered virtually, they will allow for that kind of connection and interaction that is so important. Let me also come to you with a timing question. We're getting a lot of questions from parents and students who are trying. It seems to figure out, should I come to Berkeley? Should I not come to Berkeley? So when will students know if they are required to be on campus in person? Or whether they can benefit from being on campus in person because of the nature of the classes that they're at? That's a great question. We are aiming to make decisions and make public at the end of the first week in July. So around July 7th or 8th, a clear roadmap for students. So which classes will be 100% remote? Which classes might have a mode where part of it is synchronous and other parts are asynchronous? Which classes are 100% in person, assuming public health guidance allows it? And then what other possibilities there are? I think there's going to be opportunities, as Sharon said, activities in some classes. So we know of a number of classes where the class is largely remote, but faculty are planning on three or four local field trips or planning on three or four in-person opportunities for students. So there will be some opportunity, again, assuming public health guidance allows us to. And we're trying to code each of those 6,000 classes as to which modality will be available for students so they can make those decisions. And continuing students will have an opportunity to readjust their phase one enrollment in that second week of July. And then new students will have an opportunity to enroll in about the third week of July and then phase two for everybody happens after that. So that's sort of the timeframe. July is when this information will be available. Got it. And I just want to remind everybody who may have joined us a little late at the end of this event, I'm going to be putting up on the screen a list of websites where you can go immediately following this event for detailed information. And those sites will be updated throughout the summer, as we just heard from Kathy. There are certain decisions that have yet to be made and we're cognizant that there are a lot of questions for which there are not yet answers. So we want to be sure to provide you with those resources. Steve, I'm going to come back to you. And I think this next round of questions about housing is probably going to be all Steve Sutton all the time, given your position as Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, but I invite my colleagues to pitch in if any of these overlap with your own areas of expertise. So Steve, the first is our incoming freshmen that do not get an offer of housing allowed to participate in on-campus instruction. Yes. I mean, if they are living off campus, they can still participate in on-campus instruction. They don't have to live in the residence halls to be able to do that. We know that we're going to have many students living in the residence halls that are returning students, meaning that they've lived with us before. They're continuing students. They were Berkeley students perhaps last year, the year before that. So yes. And then we have another question here about housing. Will the housing charge go up since there is only one to two students per room? We're working very closely with the Office of the President on the housing rate. At this point, the rates have been set. They're set, the housing rate is set by the campus. The tuition and fees are set by Office of the President, the Board of Regents. So we know that given the circumstances, we're looking to adjust our rates accordingly. So we're still working through the details of what those rates are actually going to be. But should people expect to see some increase in the cost of university housing due to the change setup of university housing in the fall semester? The plan is not to penalize, if you will, students by charging them more because of the pandemic. If anything, we will adjust those based on the square footage that students would have in their rooms. We have so many different types of rooms and so many different types of rates, quite honestly, that we're looking at all this just to make sure we can be as fair as possible because of the adjustments we need to make in housing. Next up, why is Berkeley prioritized returning students over freshmen and especially out-of-state students who are less equipped to find off-campus housing and live on their own? Yeah, that's a great question. And many folks are concerned about that. I mentioned at the beginning with my remarks that we are going from about 8,700 beds to approximately 6,500 beds. We know there may be some students that aren't able to live in university housing. We're doing a couple of things right now, Dan. We actually are surveying students. We'll have a couple of surveys. So I encourage each and every student out there that when you get something that pops into your Berkeley.edu mailbox that is asking you for information, please fill that out. Join those surveys at very brief. Just take a couple of minutes. We really need information from you because we know that people's plans and circumstances are changing all the time. And so we plan to be very flexible with our housing assignments. We do feel like it's important to honor those students that wanted to come back and live in university housing. But we also know that some of them may change their mind and choose not to come back and live in university housing. So we also have a priority list of how we are going to make room assignments for those students that have applied for housing. And this again includes students that are low income, students that are in academic cohorts, such as the Berkeley Hope program or the Fiat Lux or the Regents and Chancellor Scholars. Student athletes are also on that list. Students who need an accommodation or register through the Disabled Students Program. And so this was carefully developed using that equity lens I talked about early on. But again, we know that these circumstances are changing all the time. And so we fully expect that many students will choose to not live in university housing tomorrow, even though they think they're living there today. Got it. Here's a question we're getting a lot out of people asking this one. Here it is. If we decline to residence hall assignment in the fall, will we still be able to get housing in the spring? We always have a fair number of beds in the spring for students that want to live in housing the second half of the year, that didn't live there in the first half of the year. Again, this really is going to depend on how many students decide to live with us in the fall. And we are hoping that the conditions will change to the point that we can increase our density in the residence halls. But really that's going to depend on public health guidance. We don't know yet. So speaking of Steve, you mentioned a number of occasions and you all have things could change. And obviously we're all cognizant. Things could change. A vaccine gets developed, who knows. Or things could change for the worse. Any one of you here just talk to me how your working group has been thinking about that. How would we roll back if we needed to? And how would we adapt if in fact the coast is clear come the spring semester? Lisa, let me turn to you first on that one. I think all of our conversations have really focused on the fact that this is an iterative process. The planning is ongoing where we're not going to be done. We're not going to make these decisions and have finished. Things are outside of our control as a number of people have mentioned with in-person instruction. We've made plans to have courses that are 26 people or fewer, including the instructor. Right now that's not possible under public health guidelines. It's entirely possible. It won't be possible in August or it will be possible in August and things will change in October. So I think all of us just really, I appreciate uncertainty is hard. I think this has been very difficult for everyone. But I think we all have to have a little bit of generosity and grace with one another and just appreciate that we're learning as we go. And as Oscar mentioned, we're in this as a community and we have to work together. We have to keep each other safe. We have to keep each other well. And we have to be flexible and appreciate that much of what is going to happen is outside of many people's control. And so that's how we're thinking about planning and we're really baking in that nimbleness and the ability to pivot in whatever direction the pandemic takes us. So you mentioned Oscar's name and that's exactly what I'd like to turn to with the next question. We're now sort of shifting our general area to student experience and support. Oscar, how do you foresee the engagement of students in clubs and organizations? It's one of the things that always blows my mind about Berkeley. We have a thousand, so more than a thousand student clubs and organizations. How's that all gonna work? How do we provide for that part of the experience given this hybrid setup that we're gonna have in the fall? Thank you, Dan, for that question. And first, I'd like to say that that is a really important issue for me personally as not just my cancer but also as a current Cal parent. So when I think about all of these questions, all of this uncertainty, I certainly am feeling it from the standpoint of an administrator and as someone who's talking to my own child, my own student about what's gonna happen next. I really, I think it's important to just highlight that we are really scenario planning. There are multiple scenarios that we are exploring around a mixed modality of presence on campus, around an all remote scenario and understanding that we are first and foremost taking the wellness of our students and our staff and our faculty as a number one priority. And that means that we are going to be first and foremost making sure that we are aligned with the public health directive because that is ultimately what lets us determine what can happen. Right now, we are in the process of understanding what our capacity is around instruction, in-person instruction, including what that physical need is. And as we move forward, we're gonna also do that with regards to other types of activities that you wouldn't expect to happen at a university, including student activities. But I will say, first and foremost, we're going to make sure that we are taking the wellness, the health of our campus community members as a priority, as the highest priority. And that might mean that we're gonna have to make some decisions as well as what can and cannot happen on campus, including not just around instruction and research, but also about all of those other co-curricular and extracurricular activities that our students so much value and also other members of the campus community, including staff and faculty. So in my correct understanding, should we understand that in terms of all the extracurricular and co-curricular activities, whether it be clubs or sports, all of that is an abeyance at the moment that we don't have not yet decided. Is that correct? I would say that we are in process right now as we speak, but I also wanna make sure that we maintain a realistic lens about what can and cannot be done. So I just wanna make sure that we always remain focused on understanding that the wellness, the health of our community is the highest priority. Got it. I'm wondering if there's anything you wanna add to that about, because we are getting a lot of questions about the student life, the experience beyond the classroom. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love, Dan, about being at Berkeley is it's such a creative place. I mean, our staff, faculty, students are so creative. I mean, I just look at what happened in the spring and the recreational sports facility, for example, was still able to provide students with personal consultations around health and fitness for individuals, they offered online workout classes. And so there's so many areas that cut across all of our units of staff that are working on plans to still provide a high level of student service for students that wanna be engaged. You know, and I also just think about what happened in the spring when our students couldn't have a graduation. So they just created one through the Blockley graduation using Minecraft. So that's just a great example, I think, of how so much of what happens in the student experience, in the student engagement arena is really driven by what students wanna do. Steve, you mentioned staff and that leads me to another question that's being asked a lot and it goes along these lines. Do you have any information about residential life staff and on-campus housing? How will staff and student employees in the residence halls be supported to ensure their safety and mental health since these staff members are critical to building community in the residence halls? Yeah, well, I think a lot about residence life staff, you know, I came up through my own experience being an RA when I was in college and I was a resident director early on in my career. So I know what it's like to live with students and have a job in a residence hall. And so there are a lot of things that we're doing and we're gonna make sure that all the RA's and the RD's have the tools that they need to do their best work. So much of a dance starts with communication, making sure that they understand what the limits are of the job and what they need to do. For example, if a student is not feeling well and they think that they need to be tested, we get them connected with University Health Services right away, right? There's an advice nurse that's on call 24-7 that a student can contact. Many times the RA assists with this. We're always concerned about the mental health and wellbeing of not just our students but our staff as well. So we're gonna make sure that they have the support beginning with the training that they have in August and providing them the tools and the support so they can be successful in their work and also just provide them support so that when things go awry, if they need to step away to focus on their own wellbeing, we'll do that. Steve, more housing questions. They're just, they're really flooding in. You can see all the uncertainty that we've been dealing with over the summer is not isolated to campus, obviously, that parents and students are struggling through these extraordinarily confusing times. And here's an example. If freshmen students in state get housing, can they visit home and their family over the weekends? Also, will students be allowed to visit friends in other dorms? If yes, what is the point of quarantining upon arrival if they can come and go as they please? So we have a question about visiting family. We have a question about walking, maybe across the street to visit friends. And if the answer is yes to either of those, then what the heck are we doing this person is asking? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think we need to be realistic here. I mean, the student experience is gonna be different than it typically is, right? And we are going to encourage students to really maintain that physical distancing, encourage them to wear face coverings. Kathy mentioned earlier about the cohorts we're gonna develop in the residence halls. And so that really is gonna be their peer group, the focus of their engagements. So we're still working through what it might look like in terms of students moving to and from buildings. Again, we have to get the guidance from our public health officials. One of the things we're eagerly waiting for is for the state of California to issue its guidance for higher education, which we expect to come into this week or early next week. And then we will really break that down in terms of how that will inform what our practices are going to be. So does it hit both parts of the question or was there another part? I think you got both parts. One was sort of, well, whether students will be allowed to travel home on weekends. Yeah, I mean, we're not gonna tell students what they can and can't do. I think it's gonna be really important that if they choose to do that, we're gonna wanna know that, we're gonna wanna test them when they come back. So that ongoing testing is gonna be really critical. I mean, we're working with some world experts, as one of my colleagues mentioned earlier, and there are gonna be kiosks around the campus to be able to test individuals who are actually on the campus. We're gonna have a high level of testing in the residence halls as well. One of the reasons that we are ending face-to-face instruction at Thanksgiving is because we know that folks, students, are gonna wanna go home to their families. And we don't wanna say once and then come back after folks have traveled all around the country, in essence. So that is one of the primary reasons why we're changing the instructional mode, come Thanksgiving, many college campuses are doing this same thing. Kathy, I'm gonna come to you with the next one. I'm just gonna start to bounce around now. I'm just gonna follow wherever the questions lead us, the questions that are coming in through Facebook Live now. And somebody asks if classes are asynchronous, meaning that you can watch the lecture at a time other than when it was delivered, can a student enroll in two courses that overlap? So I would say that is something to have a conversation with one's advisor about because two things happen. One is you may then end up with an exam that is on top of each other. So that is one of the challenges in terms of planning, that the exam schedule is based on the time of the class. And so I would want you to look at that possibility and not get yourself in trouble when it comes to finals. And there are some prohibitions in the way you enroll that don't allow for that. And there are some courses that actually do allow for that. So it really is an advising question to talk to your advisor about whether it makes sense. Can I say something, Dan? I wanna make sure we don't not cover a little bit that a lot of the student support program will be offered even if they're offered remotely. Our Student Learning Center, which serves about 10,000 students a year, switch to remote tutoring and instruction with their peer tutors and with the professional staff in the spring, they have really worked to refine how they're teaching and how they're covering that. They're running the summer bridge program for about 330 incoming freshmen entirely online this summer. And they've really created means of helping students who need academic support. And it's particularly important for first year students to get that kind of support. And many other advising offices and offices in the equity and inclusion space that support students have been working very successfully remotely. And we just wanna emphasize that they're all, they'll all be open, even if they're not open in person. They are open and available and supporting all the advisors and counselors in the Tang Center, which is our health center are available. So there's a robust support framework for students. So I know we've talked a lot about an instruction, but I wanna just emphasize how critical we feel the academic support programs and the community support programs are, and they will be available one way or the other. Lisa, I wanna come to you because what Kathy says brings to mind or also reminds me of some questions that have come in about this area. Obviously graduate students, many of them play a very important role in undergraduate education as well. Do you see any change in the role and responsibilities of graduate students in that context? Well, graduate students are in the interesting position of sitting at the intersection, they are students. And so they're taking courses and having those concerns just like undergraduates, but at the same time, they are instructors. And in the spring, it was challenging to manage both of those positionalities that they hold. So we're doing our best. Kathy mentioned that we have this remote instruction fellowship program. There's something called the GSI, Teaching and Research Resource Center, GSI's Graduate Student Instructor, that's the acronym we use at Berkeley. They're there to support people in their instruction. All students have to take a class before they can go into the classroom. But we're very mindful and aware of the fact that graduate students are holding a lot of caretaking of students in their different roles and that we have to be sure to provide them with the supports they need in order to be able to be successful both as students and as instructors. So if please go to their website and we have office hours and we have other consultants that can help you and there will be other supports in the fall for students as they move into instruction and also for them as students. So Sharon, I just saw in the chat, you're having some noise in the background. Are you okay to talk? Can I ask you a question? It's fine Dan, go for it. Okay, thanks. You know, one of the things that's coming up a lot is this idea of community and connection and belonging. Talk to us a little bit from your perspective and based on your expertise about this idea of virtual communities and how they're built and their import and their significance. Yeah, so this is one of the things we had to discover in the spring when so many classes and groups that meet regularly had to suddenly go remote and meet through Zoom or other media like that. And people discovered all kinds of techniques for drawing participation out of students who might be sitting quietly in a big lecture hall but in a Zoom could make comments in the chat or use the automated raise your hand feature so they didn't have to raise their hand in a big lecture hall. All sorts of new opportunities emerged for people that was really interesting to watch. So it's not an accident if community emerges. It's a technique to build it in these remote environments but we have learned a lot about how to do that and the same guidance that works to make a class successful in a Zoom format also works to make a club or a group meeting successful. There are check-in activities. There are things like sharing your pronouns which Oscar and Lisa and I are doing right now if you can see them. There are breakout rooms where by design or randomly you can put small groups of people together to chat and get to know each other. And our students are beginning to use these techniques too for their clubs and organizations and student government. Great, I thought you were mid-sentence there, sorry. Steve, it brings to mind something else that I question I skipped over earlier because we are talking about community and all of the ability and potential ability we have and the potential there is to create these sort of virtual communities that Sharon's been talking about. There's still a lot of interest in sororities and fraternities and a lot of questions about whether they'll be open and whether students will be allowed to live in them and if so, how will distancing and those sorts of spaces work? Yeah, I mean, we'll work very closely with fraternities and sororities. They're not under necessarily the organizational structure of the campus of student affairs, for example, but we're still working to find out what their plans are. I mean, there are still many units across campus that are still trying to figure out what it is that they wanna do, what they can do, vis-a-vis the public health guidance. So that is something I think is still to be determined in the future. So just to be clear, is there then a button so we manage expectations appropriately? Is there a possibility that fraternities and sororities won't open come fall? There could be, yes. Again, that would not be a campus decision. We would work with them and advise them that really would be up to the agency of those individual houses, but we certainly are working with all housing units whether fraternities and sororities, I-House, Bowls Hall, the co-ops to just make sure that we've got as much communication as possible between all of our different organizations. As I mentioned earlier, we are looking at the isolation and quarantine spaces being in our residential campus housing units versus those off-campus units, partly because we have close to 9,000 beds and they have much smaller sizes. So it's easier for us to accommodate that. Got it, Steve, let me stick with you for a couple of more health and safety questions. First, from a parent, are you expecting, or maybe a student, are you expecting students to rely on providing their own reusable masks or will the campus be providing masks and other forms of PPE, personal protective equipment? Yeah, I know through Goal Bear Orientation we will have some masks provided by a campus partner that we have. I also know as the Vice Chancellor of Administration has ordered masks, but again, I would encourage students to come with their own masks, probably a few masks if they can actually wash and reuse. I think it's gonna be important to have those face coverings that they, you know, as part of their own, a PPE if you will. And got it, that's another thing. Got it, and just time for a couple of more questions and then I'm gonna sort of go around our virtual room and just ask for closing thoughts as we step back from this conversation. And Steve, just the last specific question, frequency of testing. How often will students living on campus be required to get tested for COVID or will there be any requirements at all? Again, that's, I mean, there'll be requirements when they show up to live in the residence halls. We will test them. And then if we need to retest them, we will retest them at this point in time. And I guess I wanna turn to my colleagues. We've not talked about a specific number of testing frequency for our students. I know our public health group is recommending if there be ongoing testing of all members of our community, which I think is probably what is the best thinking that we're getting from our working public health office. Do others wanna chime in? Yeah, maybe I could add that we really need to follow public health directive. And I think our ability to engage students in testing really also is directly connected to that. As you can imagine, we can't be out there checking if everyone's checked, everyone's been tested or not. I think that is something that is really, we really need to rely on our public health directive on what guidance we need to do and what is required from the public and higher ed institutions. Yeah. So let me go around. We've run out of time, we'll run a little bit long here. Cause I'd really like to get closing thoughts from each of you have been engaged in these issues about how we return safely to campus and fall for a long time. A lot of information here, a lot of questions we didn't get to, but again, we'll be sharing information about websites where parents and students can go for answers to the questions we didn't get to. But Kathy, a closing thought from you please. Well, I just say we're excited about the fall. We're excited about this freshman class, this transfer class and welcoming you. You are the most diverse class. We will be bringing to Berkeley in a long time. You have remarkable talent and skills and we can't wait to get to know you, whether it's in person or in our virtual space. So congratulations again and go Bears. Lisa, final thought. Same thing, just congratulations. We appreciate that this is difficult. Know that there are lots and lots of people really working hard to make this as good of an experience as possible for you to support you, to be here for you. Please reach out if you need help if you have additional questions. We are all here to try to make your experience as wonderful as possible and go Bears. Go Bears, Oster. Just wanna thank everyone for being here with us. You are a remarkable, amazing group that will join a remarkable, amazing community and we are resilient and we will find ways to navigate through these challenges together and work things out as we can. And that to me epitomizes the creativity of what Berkeley is. So thank you and congratulations. Beautiful, Sharon. So I know this is a hard and confusing time and we've talked a lot about working and planning and changing, but we're all in this together. Other colleges and universities are going through the same thing, but you picked Berkeley, we are so happy to have you and the reasons you picked Berkeley are still good reasons. And Steve, you've carried a heavy load both throughout this hour and over the course of the spring and I guess you've got many long days ahead of you between now and the restart, but a closing thought of you. No more housing questions, Dan, for me? Oh, there are more housing questions and we'll be posting them on the web in the days ahead. Well, I wanna add my congratulations to the congratulations of my colleagues and all of us have had a chance, had the pleasure to work at Berkeley for many, many years and we know that transitioning to college, transitioning to a new community is not easy under the best of circumstances. And so this is a challenging time. We know that, but we're here to support you. We are working literally on a daily basis to try to make sure that we can get this right. And so we wanna hear from you if there's ideas that you have or additional questions. I know you're gonna see some websites in just a minute. I mentioned the survey earlier, so please fill that out when you get that. We need your help so we can provide you the best experience possible. Go Bears. Go Bears indeed. So let me ask my colleagues, we could put up on the screen the list of the websites that we've been promising. These are sites that are gonna be remain updated throughout the remainder of the summer and into the fall because of the constantly changing environment and conditions that we're all living in these days. Generally speaking, the news.berkeley.edu site is a good landing place. It will have comprehensive information and you can go from there to any of these sub-areas, but having said that, information about research is next, student life and that includes everything, but instruction, housing, financial aid, registration, all of those detailed questions will have an updated FAQ in the days ahead that will incorporate questions that we did not have time to today and then finally instruction. The instruction, you could go to the registrar's site which is search for registrar at UC Berkeley. And with that, I wanna thank our panelists for fielding a pretty wide array of questions. Thank all of you for joining us. We look forward to seeing those of you who can come to campus come fall and in the meantime, please stay safe and keep your distance. Thanks for joining us.