 HPC judges radio welcome back, continuing our COVID-19 pandemic coverage within the HPC community today are very, very distinguished guest is the president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. Please don't call it sex cock. Dr. Bill Wheeland and Madam President, it is indeed an honor to have you on and always an honor to talk with you. I figured it would be a good opportunity to hear from you at this point in what was once the academic year to talk about what things may look like when operations and business attempts to get back to business. And for many, many of our HBCUs that will include accreditation work that will that will include submitting reports and scheduling site visits from your perspective. How has the pandemic first impacted operations in your shop and what has that meant to some of your member institutions, HBCUs and otherwise. Well, thanks so much for the conversation today, Jared. We have been spinning just like our institutions have trying to stay in front of this pandemic and all of the changes and things that have to happen. The first thing that happened was the Department of Education gave us permission to waive a lot of the requirements were already in place. So we began with the 25 institutions that were scheduled to have reaffirmation visit this semester by extending their accreditation for one year. So that those visits that were not able to be held are going to be rescheduled over the summer, fall and spring and they'll be on next year's agenda. They remain accredited for these 12 months. They'll be off one year and the next reaffirmation will be nine years from now rather than 10. So that was the easiest thing we've had to do so far. Then we had special committees, those institutions that are on warning and probation, for example, or who are at the end of their monitoring periods to decide whether they lose membership or not. We are trying to go on and reschedule those visits because they were scheduled to be on the June board meeting agenda. That's one of those dark clouds that's hanging over their heads that I know that they want off and so do we because that impacts giving, enrollment, morale, a whole bunch of stuff. So those are moving forward. We had one of those, but we have moved those to a combination of virtual visits and onsite visits. We've arranged so that we have a staff member who goes on each and every visit. So we're arranging that the staff member and at least one of the committee members, preferably the chair, actually go onsite. The thing that has slowed us up with that one is that states are now starting to put in the shelter in places and we don't know how long those are going to last. And so we've scheduled some, we've had to reschedule those that we rescheduled already. And so it's crazy, but we're doing those. We are trying to, well, we have rescheduled our own board meeting from June to August, which creates a challenge for those institutions that had request for program approvals to begin in the fall because the board meeting won't be until after the fall semester begins. So we're trying to figure out how we can deal with that. But our summer institute that's scheduled for July, I've claimed that we're still going to have it in July because I'm saying this is going to be over enough for us to have it. I'm just tired of rescheduling meetings. But it's a moving target with every day that comes along and every decision that is made not only by the White House but by each of the governors across this country. It changes the way we do business. But we're trying to keep up. I've been having lots of conference calls with lots of different groups to say the what ifs. One of the issues that arose was since the semester is pretty much a bust, can we give pass fail grades where we had been giving letter grades? And so we've given the authority to do that as long as the institutions have a pass fail policy in place, which they should all have. They may have to adjust that policy for this particular semester. And one of the things that I'm heartened by is that most of the senior institutions are saying that if community colleges, for example, grant pass fail grades, they will honor those as transfer credits moving forward. Because every institution, two and four year public, private or for profit is in this mess together. And so how to annotate that on a transcript is going to be the challenge of the registrars, but at least everybody's kind of come to the acceptance that if a student earns a pass grade, then they will have met that requirement. Don't know how the licensure people are going to deal with that because generally they don't accept pass fail grades. But that one is not my challenge. I'll let somebody else handle that when I have enough of my own. And then of course staff is staff is working from home. So we've been, you know, if I never have another virtual meeting, it really will be okay. So you're a social butterfly. You prefer to be in with the people. I understand that. Indeed. Let's talk a little bit, just a little bit more about the logistics of this because you brought up something interesting about the question about grades and what kind of clearance you guys are able to authorize about that. And we've seen so many schools stand up online distance learning. One of the things that concerns me is that are more students going to expect and a more college is going to try to go to distance learning and just having online degree offerings. Is that something that's going to have to be cleared through your shop? And how long does that process take if we have to go in that direction in the future? Interestingly enough, we did give exceptions or we did accept notification from institutions, pardon me, that had already been approved for online learning, but we're going to expand their offerings. So we did that and that was over 600 of our institutions. So in our region, most of our institutions are doing that anyway. There were about 75 institutions that have not been approved for online learning for whom we gave waivers. Now, whether they will continue to do that after this waiver is over, which should be the end of the calendar year at the latest, then they will have to start getting approval. The first time you offer an online course, we do have to approve that. But after that, you don't have to notify us once 25% of a degree program is offered online and you have to get approval for the program once 50% of it is offered online. A lot of people don't. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, so it's two approvals, but one notification. For the first time you do it, it's notification up to 50% and then it's approval for 50% of the program. This is just a point of personal inquiry of mine. A lot of people don't even remember or realize you were a college president. So what would you do? Twice. Twice, right. So what would you do if your campus was facing, oh man, we had to send a whole bunch of students home. We had to stand up a bunch of online learning. This may be a thing that we have to just do going forward. Is that something that you would say I need to jump on the state authorization and all that kind of stuff right now? Or is there more work to be done in looking at that? Well, I would not just jump online long term unless I had enough training programs in place of my own faculty to know how to do that. Easing into it is a lot more effective than just kind of jumping in and sink or swim. So I would take that route of let's ease those into it and continue to offer some online. There are a lot of folks who just don't learn well online. I'm one of those. I can't stand reading a whole bunch of stuff on a computer and not having that social interaction. I'm serious. There are a lot of students, even the younger folks that have grown up with technology who just, you know, concentration spans aren't that long. Self-direction is not that great. You know, they need the help and support of real people pushing them. And so I don't know that most institutions are going to go totally online from here on out. I think there will be many more that will have a combination of programs available online and others that are available on site. It's also difficult with science labs and some of the professional, you know, plumbing, welding, those kinds of things. It's tough to do those things online. So I don't know that there are any institutions that aren't currently totally online that will move in that direction. But I do think that there are some who will put more online than they currently have. One of the big questions that in some of the conversations I've had with presidents is not to say that the rules should change, but they are inquiring about how the rules may be interpreted a little bit differently in terms of standards and principles in the midst of a pandemic. So if everybody is going through hell, does this period, even though you have a one-year kind of buffer period with everything that people are projecting about enrollment being down and some costs that may have to come out of campuses to deal with faculty and staffing and some other stuff, do you think that the principles will change because everybody is going to face some kind of difficulty financially, most of all, after this is over? I don't think the principles will change, but I think the way they're interpreted will. This is not our first rodeo, unfortunately. It's the first health pandemic, but we had the recession in 2007 that did the same thing to institutions that upended them forever. What we ask institutions to do is to document what happened and how they dealt with it. That's what's going to make the difference. I know that the auditors are working on how to write footnotes in audits that will explain this having happened. That's above my pay grade. I don't do audits. But making sure that they explain what happened and when it happened, it's going to be difficult to blame decreased revenue on stuff that happened before the pandemic hit. Correct. They're going to have to be very, very sure that they are able to document the impact that the pandemic had on budgets, on enrollments, and everything else. We had a statement that our board put out right after the 2007 recession that explained that you're still responsible for your institution and it's still the board's responsibility to make sure that there's enough money there to keep things going. It is going to mean that institutions are going to have to make some hard decisions. They had to make them in 2007. They're going to have to make them now. Looking at loss of auxiliary resources, for example, with dorms and women board charges, those are operational losses that they're going to have to explain. Losses to the endowment is one thing, but actual operating losses is something else. So what we're telling them is define the program and explain it as best you can, giving real numbers. It may mean on the other end that they end up taking more money from their endowments than they currently have, and that may throw them off because they'll end up taking a larger percentage than their policy allows them to take. So they're going to have to document why they did this and get the board's approval for it. So it's not that the standard has changed, but explaining how you dealt with it has. And there'll be a whole lot of leniency, I'm sure, since everybody is going through it for at least this year. After this year, I'm not sure, because they will have had a year to make some of those hard decisions. They may have to cut staff, they may have to drop programs, they may have to re-engineer some of their processes, put on hiring freezes or cut benefits. All those furlough employees, all those tough decisions that they had to make back in 2007 are probably going to have to be revisited because of the pandemic. One of the things I always tell people, it's actually pretty difficult to lose your accreditation from the standpoint of you guys give a number of years to say, all right, you're on warning, all right, you're on probation, all right, you're on probation still. So there's always steps to, all right, you're on the doorstep of getting kicked out of here. But for some of those schools that are dealing with what seems like irreversible financial conditions, you're saying that even this won't give them a door out of there. Because you only got a certain amount of months where you can say, all right, your recruitment was impacted by this, your spending was impacted by this, everything before that don't even try it. Exactly. I mean, I can't speak, well, I can, but I won't speak for the evaluators. I don't get a vote in this process. This is a peer review process, but I can't imagine that they're going to buy into an argument that says, my budget for the FY19 year was impacted by the coronavirus. I don't think so when this is FY20 that you're in now. It will impact the spring of 20. There's no doubt about that. And I think everybody understands that. And the evaluators will be looking for documentation to show what exactly happened, what was the impact of it, and how did you go about dealing with it? That's all we ever asked him to do. And just to clarify, some of those things like collegiate athletics, you know, the NCAA says, well, you know, we won't feel the season, or it's not safe enough to feel the season, that won't be something that would be, you know, an example of something that, you know, the committee would say, okay, we got to, you know, you got to relax that. No, we don't deal with NCAA requirements. Okay, so it's just a matter of, is the school in position to meet each of these standards, including with intercollegiate athletics? Well, if intercollegiate athletics is a part of their operating budget, and there's a big hole in it because of the revenue, I would think that there'd also be a savings from the expense side. But whichever it is, they need to be able to explain that this is the reason that's right for the for the loss and or the gain. One of the things that you guys do is to provide a lot of training, a lot of instruction to schools, whether they're in a, you know, in a sanction period or not to say, Hey, there's always resources, you can always come talk to us and figure out how you can not be so intimidated or threatened by an accreditation cycle. You know, a reaffirmation or a reapplication if it would be that. Is that something that's still going to be I know, I know you hate the zoom thing that's going on. But is that something that is that is that something that's still available with members of your committees and teams to do for schools, especially now, because you don't have so many, you know, class and operational things going on on campus. Yeah, we have we have gotten that far. Jared, thank you. That's a great idea though. I do know that at our December annual meeting, you know, there will be sessions on, you know, budgeting and the COVID-19 of the impact. We hadn't thought about it before that because I've got all these other things going on. But we might be able to get met, be able to get Donna and a couple of finance readers together to do a podcast of some sort. Absolutely. And I'd love to be helpful if I could. And then the final. Keep that in mind. The final question, Madam President, and I'll take you back to your your time in the presidency. If this were you and let's say your school was facing something that that could could draw a sanction from an accreditor, what would you be doing at this point with nobody around really no support to help you with it? What would you be doing at this point or encouraging your people to be looking at to prepare to try to mitigate it or at least be able to broaden the explanation of why there's a problem? Well, one of the things the next deadline that is arising is in September for those institutions that are on the December 21 agenda to submit this compliance certification. And the question that has come up there is what about the assessment cycle because they will have missed an entire semester's worth of assessment. And so our direction has been put a statement in there and said, I only have nine and a half years. I don't have 10 years of assessment because of COVID-19. Everybody's going to understand that. So I think what if it were me, I would say, well, let's sit down and talk about the standards. Where are we in our reaffirmation cycle and how can we best document whether we are in compliance or not? I mean, that's what this whole process is. It's a process of documentation. And, you know, any rational person is going to be able to understand that this is a big issue over which I had absolutely no control as president. But I still am responsible for keeping the institution whole, you know, now that it's hit. And so all we can ask you to do is to document the impact that it's had on finances, on the academic program. You know, what has it done to your grades, for example? What has it done to your transfer policies? I mean, it's impacting everything. So, I mean, that's the best that I can do is to, you know, write a good, make a good case for why I am in compliance or not.