 HBC judges radio welcome back to our presidential series conversations with our distinguished leaders of historically black colleges and universities today our esteemed guest is Morehouse college president Dr. David Thomas first to discuss with us new details about the transformative gift to the college from billionaire philanthropist and tech exec Robert Smith so Mr. President first an honor to be back on with you last week you revealed new details about the gift that will come to the college and specifically its student support initiative for the elimination or reduction of student loan obligations talk about those new details and what it means to you and what it means to the college Well the new details are that since Mr. Smith made his initial commitment we have developed a an initiative or program called student success that essentially allows us to invite other donors to other donors our potential donors who've expressed interest in Mr. Smith's gift to reduce debt and deal with issues of affordability but this program will allow them to do is to support the college around the efforts to you know deal with the affordability of our college education and for example we've had people express interest in addressing issues of affordability but not wanting to necessarily do so in the same model that Mr. Smith is following with where he relieved the debt of an entire class regardless of the occupation that they're going to go into we've had some people express interest for example in addressing the debt of students who might go into high social value creation occupations but low pay at the entry level an example is teaching this program would allow us to customize you know various ways to address affordability to the donors wishes and also to the donors capacity for contribution but at the same time have that donor feel like and realize that they're connected to the broader effort to address issues of affordability that Mr. Smith's gift really has been catalytic for or talk about the the nuts and bolts of a gift like this because I think that people who are lay persons on higher education would assume oh more house got $34 million that that changes everything and in a lot of ways it does from public relations and marketing standpoint certainly but because this is a targeted gift or targeted reason how much education have you had to do with some of your alumni stakeholders are just external groups that support more house educating them on what this actually means that there are restrictions that come with this yeah this isn't a new gym that we're getting what is what kind of education do you have to give people to understand right that's a that's a great that's a great question and a great point and we have had to educate various members of our community in our constituency about the fact that while this gift will be given to the college to administer it is restricted to eliminating the student related college education debt for the class of 2019 the money will come to the college and then we will release that money to the various institutions that own the debt service of each of our students whether it's Sally may our various banks no check the other thing we've had to educate people on is no student or parent will actually get a check with their name on it the money will go directly to the institution and extinguish their debt so our students and their families or their parents are beneficiaries but they're not recipients of the money right and of the 34 million dollars we expect that with the exception of a small grant that's included to support research longitudinal research which we are imagining now as a 10 year study on how this debt impacts these and these individual students or this debt relief other than that which is about $400,000 by the time we get to the turn of the year all of the money will be dispersed and so more house will not be sitting on a cushion of $34 million it's so important to know because people people see that and they've seen that video right and they think oh man more house got it made now right so it is important to outline that but but even more so for another story which hasn't made the rounds but it's certainly a conversation that I know you know the college wants to have and a lot of folks that love it dearly want to have so a letter was circulated recently that talked about faculty concern about furloughs financial issues certain staff layoffs support for cost living increases is that something that you can affirm came to your attention and if so what yeah what do you expect that the administrative response will be and how will the college and its leadership work with the faculty body to address some of these yeah here very there's a there there are a number of complexities whenever you start to talk about finances but I'll try to keep them to a few simple points if you look today at the landscape of higher education and liberal arts colleges that never moved in the direction of creating alternative streams of revenue to tuition the model of simply being a tuition driven college is under great pressure and we can look across the landscape of higher education and we see liberal arts colleges making major cuts and in some cases even losing their accreditation or going out of business so what we've done at more houses really look at our financial model and identified the fact that we are serving a population that has decreasing ability to pay the full sticker price of more houses education and their adjustments that we didn't make after the recession of 2008 that have gotten our cost structure out of equilibrium and so we're in the process of engaging in some cost reduction measures as well as some revenue raising measures and have decided that this year we really need to get that equilibrium in place and what that's meant is our having to impact salaries through furloughs and a reduction in our benefits and also some cost reduction measures we're also looking at a series of revenue raising measures that have to do with our facilities and greater utilization of them in ways that will bring revenue to the college we're looking at developing new programs that will attract new audiences, adult education, online certificates and ultimately what I hope will be degree programs that are targeting populations beyond just the bachelor's students who come in spend four years on the hilltop here at more house as well as intensifying the efforts around fundraising for general scholarships and dollars that help us that allow us to increase our capacity in areas like technology, infrastructure, etc. so we're engaging in a set of measures I think what the good news is for us in the approach we're taking or the positive is we're not laying off faculty the positions that we are going to eliminate are positions that we know that we can absorb they're not student facing positions so we've been very careful not to do what many institutions have done where you're doing across the board you know what I call the cheese slicer approach elimination of positions and then you eliminate critical positions that impact the quality of student life we're not doing that but we are taking a set of measures to create more financial equilibrium and we think doing that will help us put the college on a very positive fiscal trajectory we're not laying off faculty