 HBCU Dutchess Radio, welcome back. We are continuing our coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and response. I'm your host, Jared Carter, and we are next up with our next distinguished HBCU president. He is the distinguished president of Morehouse College. Dr. David Thomas joins us again. First, thank you so much for making time for us, brother president. I would be remiss without asking how are things on the campus in Atlanta at large with the numbers seem to be, if it's even possible, moving beyond the realm of scary at this point. On campus, things are, and by the way, thank you for having me on the program. On campus, things are well. We've evacuated all of our students and only essential faculty and staff are present each day. And we started our online program. We've moved everything online and that's going very well. So in the context of where we are today, we think Morehouse is in pretty good shape. Good shape, and that's the thing. Morehouse has been at the forefront of a lot of decisions on cancellations and moving things online and providing safeguards for faculty and staff. But one of the unique things about you is that you made a call to not cancel but reschedule commencement for December. So what were some of the things that led you on the path to do something a little bit different from what a lot of HBC has done which is to say, we do have a date for this into the future. What was it, or what were the conversations like with your stakeholders to make that call? Yeah, great question. It's very simple. And, you know, my original thought was that we would simply push this year's commencement to next year and have a double commencement. But I thought about leadership at Morehouse and our student government and class presidents really provide leadership here. So I basically called the head of our student government, the head of our senior class or the president and talked to them about it. And they talked about the need for this class of 2020 to have their moment. And that then led us to look at when could we do that? And that's how we came out with on the weekend of December 11th through the 13th, we will have the graduation for the class of 2020 because they thought it was really important for that class to have its moment. And it's an important class for Morehouse because they've actually had five presidents in four years because they came in during a presidential transition and then we had several interims and ultimately I arrived. So it's a class that's really been with Morehouse through kind of ups and downs and they really stuck with us. So that's how we arrived at the fact that we need to give them their moment. It makes a lot of sense. And for Morehouse in particular, because of what you talked about with the transitions and with your arrival, you guys wanna on a really strong run of fundraising and partnership building and positive coverage in the media. And even a pandemic doesn't change what Morehouse means to all of us, even those of us who didn't attend, that doesn't change. But are there ways that you and your team and the brothers who are graduates and the students continue to engage your donors, your foundations, your partners when you don't have the benefit of saying, hey, come to campus and participate in this or be with us at Crown Forum and all these other things when you don't have that typical Morehouse infrastructure, you don't have the travel that you can do. Are there things that you think that you can keep doing to keep that mystique going that help raise a lot of money in a short period and help galvanize a lot of support? Yeah, another great question. Well, first of all, let's start with the fact that we are not operating from the assumption that there will cease to be a time when 2,000 plus young men are here on this hill receiving their undergraduate education. That said, we're also, this is also a moment where we're looking at, well, are there new opportunities for us to expand what Morehouse can do? I mean, in a matter of a week, we moved our entire offering, academic offering online. Or there's some ways we can capture that and expand our reach beyond the 64 acre campus of Morehouse College. But we're planning that there will continue to be 2,000 young men on this hill in the future once we get through this coronavirus moment. And the other experience that we've had is this has been a moment to really galvanize the Morehouse community. So for example, within less than a week, we raised over $200,000 to support Morehouse students. To help them evacuate the campus and place themselves in living situations where they could successfully engage Morehouse online. And we're gonna use this as a platform to increase support for Morehouse College. A lot is being made of the stimulus package that was recently signed by the president with a, you know, for coronavirus support. And about 1.5 billion of that is scheduled or targeted for historically black institutions. But there's been recent analysis that suggests that even this amount of money, you know, shared between our sector may not be sufficient to offset some of the losses that we'll have with enrollment drop in and costs associated with trying to get your campus disinfected and things resituated to just to get back to normal operation. Are you concerned about some of those issues? Are you concerned about what enrollment patterns may look like? Are you concerned about staffing and revenue building? And if some of those things will have to change even when we're back online, hopefully by this fall, is there gonna be a new way that we think about higher educations? There gonna be a way, a new way that we think about Morehouse operationally. Yeah, you know, you're a very skilled interviewer. To not have graduated from Morehouse, that's high praise from you, brother. Okay, because at the end of many of your, you know, the way you phrased it at the end of many of your statements, the answer is yes, yes, yes. And like a good interviewer, the next unstated question is, and so. Right, right. Because, yeah. You know, people ask me what I'm most concerned about, and the reality is, you know, in the very short term, Morehouse has responded, and I should say the Morehouse community has responded extraordinarily well to the immediate crisis. We evacuated the campus without incident. Our faculty, alumni have all stepped up. All of our students we know are in safe places. Our online, we went online last week, and we're able to look at student attendance and, you know, classes are happening. If you ask me what I'm really worried about, it's about the fall. The country will go into recession, I believe. And I'm a, you know, 30 plus years as a business professor and my PhD is in business. I think we will go into recession during the last recession in 2008. Morehouse lost more than 25% of its enrollment by the time we were three years post-2008. And, you know, that's because given our distinctive mission, the families we serve, they're more vulnerable to these kinds of moments in our economy than the majority population. So I am worried about how the coming recession is gonna affect our student population. And, you know, I think we've done some things in anticipation of that, that will help us, help our students and our families. But I think for historically black colleges, like Morehouse, you know, this is a very critical period in terms of how the economy is gonna impact us. Good news, we've been working with legislators in Washington. There is a carve out in the stimulus bill for historically black colleges. At Morehouse, I've made it very clear to my folks, we don't only want the HBCU money, we want, you know, any money in that bill that we qualify for. And I think, you know, the good news there is as I've read the bill, I think it can be helpful to colleges like Morehouse. The final thing I would ask you, and this is more on a personal note, you would think with all the coverage and all the good you've been able to do and all the money you've raised and all the energy you've generated from inside the Morehouse community, you're still less than three years into this thing. I'm very much less than two years, I'm actually, I've been three years, I'm actually two years and three months minus three days. January one, right, that's it. January one. 18, I believe, January one, 18. That's right, January one, 18. And the things that you've had to deal with, I mean, just the presidential transition, rebuilding and building new trust and let's bring some of our old folks back together and let's put this thing back together in the way that people were used to have seen it. And now you got a pandemic. Do you look at your successes and failures and say, there are some lessons I can take from those things and apply them even in a moment like this that no one has ever seen before. And we're still in the midst of it. Do you think that there are things that you've learned at Morehouse that you've done right, that you've done wrong and you'll say, even with this big hill to climb yet, I think that even in my brief time, we'll be able to make some positive things happen still, even with something that we don't know what the end will look like. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's no question. One, the world needs Morehouse. Every time I talk to you, you tell me that, I love it. Right, you know, you think about where the world is today. The world needs Morehouse. The values of Morehouse, leadership, service, being transformational in challenging the status quo. And also the Morehouse idea, which is the expectation of blackmail excellence, that it's not an exception that blackmail or excellence it's an expectation. And part of the reason why people are drawn to Morehouse is most people have never been at a place where that's an expectation. And the world continues to need that. And men who come out of Morehouse and moments like this, you know, I think make that even more resonant. You know, the other things I've learned is the strength of the Morehouse community. I mean, if there are very few schools that within the course of seven days raised more than a quarter of a million dollars to support students who had to evacuate their campuses. And, you know, I'm talking about schools much bigger than Morehouse and much richer. And the reason we were able to do that, right, is because of, you know, when we galvanized the Morehouse community to support Morehouse, they defied gravity. And so one of the things that I'm thinking about is, you know, how do I grab that energy and use it to help us move to the future of Morehouse, because this is a moment that's shown that it's there. And, you know, the other lesson I've learned is our students are amazing. I've worked with our student leadership to help us make some of our hardest choices. You know, for example, about graduation and making sure that we're successful going online they've been amazing. So, you know, it's been a crisis, but for me it's been a very reinforcing and reassuring moment for all the reasons that I came to Morehouse to begin with two years ago.