President Bacow, now recovered, shares own experience
having COVID-19
Harvard President Larry Bacow announced in an email to the
Harvard community on March 24 that he and his wife, Adele Fleet
Bacow, had been exposed to the spreading coronavirus. More than a
week after they began working from home and limiting their outside
contacts, both started experiencing the symptoms of COVID-19. Now
recovered, he shared their experience with the
Gazette.
GAZETTE: How are you and Adele feeling?
BACOW: We are feeling much better. We were very fortunate. We
never experienced any of the respiratory problems that sent so many
people to the hospital. For us, this felt a lot like the flu. Not
fun, but certainly not life-threatening, at least in our
case.
GAZETTE: What were your symptoms?
BACOW: We both started off with a cough and then that progressed
to having a fever and chills. I also had whole-body muscle aches.
Everything hurt. I felt like I was 120 years old almost overnight.
And then lethargy — just how you feel when you have the
flu.
GAZETTE: What was going through your mind when you learned you had
both tested positive?
BACOW: Well, we’d been very, very careful, and I was a little bit
surprised, in truth, because Adele and I had not seen anyone except
each other for close to 10 days before we started experiencing
symptoms. We were completely isolated in the house. One reason we
had taken such precautions is because I live with an autoimmune
condition that makes me very susceptible to any kind of infection.
In fact, some people questioned why I actually got tested. It’s
because I’m immunosuppressed. So I was at risk. And when we tested
positive I thought, “This is going to be interesting.”
I was also worried about being able to
discharge my responsibilities. When I was at Tufts, I had gotten
quite ill in 2004 when my autoimmune condition was first diagnosed,
and I had had to take a month off of work. I realized that I needed
to look after my own health. I wasn’t good to anybody if I wasn’t
healthy. But beyond that, I realized I also had to give others
permission to take the time they needed to recover if they got
sick. So when I tested positive, I tried to model the behavior I
would hope to see in others by being a good patient and doing what
I was supposed to do. And I’m fortunately blessed with a great
team. They didn’t miss a beat and filled in behind me and just kept
everything moving forward in my absence.
GAZETTE: Were you able to do any work at all, or were you off the
grid entirely?
BACOW: As president, you are never completely off the grid. I was
looking at email, although not terribly responsive to it. I would
have one call a day with Patti Bellinger, my chief of staff, and
with Bill Lee, senior fellow of the Corporation. And I would
receive daily reports from both Katie Lapp, [executive vice
president and chief administrative officer] and [Provost] Alan
Garber. And if I needed to, I would talk to them by phone as
well.
GAZETTE: What kind of response did you get when you let the Harvard
community know in an email that you and Adele were
sick?
BACOW: We must have received a thousand responses, from students,
faculty, staff, and alumni, in some cases from all over the world.
We were both quite touched by the response.
What was a little strange was lying in bed
sick watching CNN, if I recall correctly, and having them report on
me being sick. That was a bit of an out-of-body experience. Once it
made the national news, we started hearing from old friends and
family from around the country and around the world.
GAZETTE: What are you doing to keep yourself occupied during this
social isolation? Have you been binge-watching anything or reading
anything in particular?
BACOW: It’s a struggle just to keep up on email. I haven’t really
had a chance to read anything for pleasure. In the irony
department, our son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughters
called us up a few weeks ago. They live in New York City. They were
working remotely and wanted to know how we would feel if they came
up and lived with us during this experience. We said, “Of course,
we’d love to see you.” Well, they literally drove up here the day
the two of us came down with our first symptoms. They have been in
the house and we’ve been FaceTiming them and engaging in social
distancing. The big distraction is having our 2½-year-old
granddaughter and our now 8-week-old granddaughter with us. We hope
as we emerge from the other side of this in a few days that we’ll
actually be able to play with them. That will be our
distraction.
GAZETTE: Now that you are feeling better, what is a typical day like
for you working from home?
BACOW: Since I’m just recently recovered, I’m not sure I have a
real routine yet. I have not started exercising again, but that is
something I hope to do in the next week. I’m still trying to take
it easy because I’m getting my strength back. So, for a typical
day, the first thing I do is look at email that came in overnight.
And then usually I have a series of phone calls and Zoom meetings,
like everybody else. Sometimes those are calls with my direct
reports. I’m checking in with the deans and the various vice
presidents. I’m also talking to public officials. I’ve had phone
calls with the governor, and officials in Cambridge, Boston, and in
Washington, D.C.
I’ve also been talking to my presidential
peers. The Ivy League presidents have been in close touch largely
via email, and I have also spoken to a number of them by phone. I
make a point of speaking to MIT President Rafael Reif regularly,
and I have spoken to a number of other presidential colleagues in
the area. I’ve also been in touch with [former Harvard presidents]
Drew [Faust] and Larry Summers. So, I try to reach out to people
who either have previously dealt with situations like what we’re
dealing with now, or because they’re dealing with them in real
time.
I’ve been on calls with the Association of
Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, and the
American Council on Education. Last weekend we had the governing
boards meeting on Zoom. We had a full meeting of the Board of
Overseers and a meeting of the Corporation.
“With spring break coming up we were concerned that if we
did not act quickly our students would disperse and likely come
into close proximity with other young people in various parts of
the world, and that when they returned to campus we could face a
full-blown outbreak here.”
GAZETTE: Looking backward, when did the University start monitoring
the coronavirus?
BACOW: In early January, Harvard University Health Services
started paying attention to what was going on in China. We have
students from China, and we have a fair number of faculty and staff
who travel to China for their own scholarship, so we started
monitoring what was going on there. We also started issuing
advisories to members of our community who were returning to campus
from China on the steps they should take to ensure that they
remained healthy. Then we started issuing advisories discouraging
travel, first to China and then broadening that to other hotspots
throughout the world as they became apparent.
We were very, very attentive to what was
going on. We were also in close contact with the members of our own
faculty and staff, some of whom are among the world’s foremost
experts in infectious disease, virology, epidemiology, public
health. And they themselves were in contact with their colleagues
in China and in other parts of the world, and started advising us
on the risks we were facing going forward. We very quickly started
convening a crisis-management team to follow these events and to
start doing some preliminary planning. Katie Lapp convened that
team, which engaged the administrative deans, the vice presidents,
and others from environmental health and safety throughout the
University to start planning and thinking about what we might do if
we saw this virus, both in the Boston area and especially if we saw
it on our campus. Giang Nguyen, the director of Harvard University
Health Services, also quickly put together a scientific advisory
group. We have also been blessed to have Alan Garber, a physician
as well as an economist, as our provost. Alan has published
scholarly papers on the management of pandemics. So we drew upon a
tremendous amount of expertise in trying to prepare for this virus
and to make some intelligent decisions along the way.
GAZETTE: Harvard was one of the first institutions to de-densify its
campus and transition to online learning, and there was some
pushback at first. Can you talk about that decision-making
process?
BACOW: Our thinking was driven almost entirely by a handful of
considerations. One was just looking at the spread of the
coronavirus, both in China and then in Italy and Spain, and trying
to learn from the experiences of those countries. Second, it was
driven by modeling, which we and others did, which suggested that,
if this virus was as infectious as we thought it was and as
dangerous as it appeared to be, we could face a very real crisis
going forward. At that time, we believed that young people were
less at risk than the elderly or those with pre-existing
conditions. More recent data suggests, at least in the United
States, that you’ve got a higher incidence of severe illness in
young people than in some other countries. So we were looking at
that. We were observing what was going on with a few cruise ships
near Japan which function effectively as petri dishes and imagining
what would happen if we got an infection in our dormitories where
students live in close proximity to each other.
With spring break coming up, we were
concerned that if we did not act quickly our students would
disperse and likely come into close proximity with other young
people in various parts of the world, and that when they returned
to campus we could face a full-blown outbreak here. So we thought
it was important to act before students went on spring break and we
mobilized resources very quickly. Our Harvard University IT
department under Anne Margulies [vice president and University
chief information officer] quickly geared up to be able to get
everybody on Zoom, to start educating faculty on Zoom, and to make
sure that we had the IT infrastructure to sustain teaching in large
numbers and having meetings on Zoom. Similarly, our vice provost
for advances in learning, Bharat Anand, and his colleagues started
to assemble resources to quickly educate faculty in online
teaching. Each of the deans worked tirelessly with their faculty
and staff to prepare. They are the real heroes of this process. And
then we issued a notice to students that we were going to ask those
who could move out to do so and not to return to campus after
break, and that we were going to move all teaching
online.
I knew that we would be criticized by some
for possibly acting prematurely. But there was a point in this
process where we watched the incidence of cases in Massachusetts
over a four-day period go from, I believe, 13 to 28 to 42 to 91,
which is clearly an exponential growth rate, albeit from a small
base. It was a growth rate that had been repeated in almost
precisely the same pattern in every other country that was a week
or two ahead of us. So there were flashing red lights. And I
quickly realized that the cost of being wrong was asymmetrical.
What I mean by that is that if we acted prematurely, as some
thought we were, then we would inconvenience many, and we would
probably squander a lot of resources. But if we waited too long to
respond, that cost was likely going to be measured in human life.
And so the decision actually wasn’t that difficult. Implementing it
was. But the decision to tell students to leave and to not return
and to transition to online learning seemed pretty clear. We also
recognized that by acting quickly we might make it easier for other
institutions that were faced with similar decisions, but without
access to the same expertise that we were blessed with, to act
quickly as well.
GAZETTE: How do you feel the University went about supporting
students and others in the transition?
BACOW: Obviously, we were asking a lot of students and others in
our community to move so quickly, and people across the entire
University pitched in to help. It was a mark of the strength of our
community that individuals volunteered to assist students as they
moved out. We also tried to provide financial support to help
students with travel, storage, and other expenses. Staff in the
College worked day and night, literally, to implement this decision
and to address issues as they arose. They had thousands of
questions to answer and problems to solve. Around 6,000 of our
undergraduates moved out in five days or so.
We have had to quickly make a transition to
online teaching and learning, and it’s also a transition for
everybody working remotely from home, with very few exceptions.
We’re so grateful for those members of our community who are
looking after the students still in residence. We are really
grateful to our employees who are continuing to make sure that our
buildings are safe and secure. Everybody has been touched by this
crisis. I’ve been really encouraged by the willingness of both our
faculty as well as our students and all the people who are
supporting them to, almost on a dime, master the technology
necessary to teach online. There’s been so much goodwill on the
part of people willing to learn new ways of teaching and
learning.
GAZETTE: In your experience as Tufts president, is there anything
you can compare this to?
BACOW: I lived through the 2008 financial crisis, and there are
certainly some similarities between this crisis and that one, but
also some important differences. The big similarity is that each
one affected the economic environment in which we operate. And, in
each case, we saw a decline in our endowments. In each case we are
seeing a likely decline in philanthropy in the short-term and a
decline in corporate and foundation support.
We will also see an increase in the demand
for financial aid for our students. We’ve seen great anxiety among
our employees, faculty, and staff, as well. And in each case we’ve
also seen the community really respond positively, with people
working hard to help out others less fortunate. That’s been very
heartening.
This crisis is much harder than 2008
because it affects our ability to deliver on our core mission. We
are a residential research University, and right now we basically
cannot have students in residence. And the capacity of our faculty
to deliver on our research mission is at the moment compromised
because we’ve had to shut down our libraries and archives, and most
of our laboratories and facilities that actually support our
scholarly work, so there are challenges here that we never faced in
2008.
“I
recognize that I’m not going to get everything right. But rather
than try to do everything perfectly and be paralyzed by
uncertainty, I think it’s important to be able to act, and act
decisively.”
GAZETTE: Even amid those challenges, there are efforts happening
across the University to address the pandemic. Can you speak to
some of the collaborations and work happening with Harvard scholars
and experts from around the world to try to tackle the
coronavirus?
BACOW: One of the very first things we did, well before it was
clear that the coronavirus was going to be this extraordinary
crisis for our nation, was to develop a collaboration with our
colleagues at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health. This
is a major scholarly collaboration based at Harvard Medical School
and run by Dean George Daley that engages all of our teaching
hospitals, along with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty in other parts of
the University, and our colleagues at MIT, BU, the Broad, and the
Ragon Institute. It also engages people in the life sciences
industry here in Massachusetts. Harvard is at the center of this
activity, focusing on developing rapid diagnostic tests, which are
critical for how we manage this crisis going forward, and new
vaccines and therapies. I’m incredibly proud of the way that our
faculty, our graduate students, our research staff, our colleagues
in industry and in the hospitals have all come together so quickly
to focus all of the resources that Harvard and its neighbors can
muster to try to address the challenges created by
COVID-19.
GAZETTE: What has Harvard’s engagement with Cambridge, Boston, and
the state been like through this process?
BACOW: We’ve been working with the city of Cambridge, the city of
Boston, and the state to try to be helpful in a variety of ways. A
number of our individual Schools, for example, tried to make
resources available to assist in homeschooling. I can’t say enough
good things about what our Graduate School of Education has done in
this area. We also made the Harvard Square Hotel available to first
responders and health care workers who may not be able to travel
easily back and forth to their homes, in part because they fear
infecting their own families. And we have made additional
facilities available in Boston and Cambridge for the same purpose.
We’ve collected personal protective equipment from our laboratories
and made it available to area hospitals for health care workers who
are still trying to take care of sick people in an environment in
which personal protective equipment has proven scarce.
There was a recent
article in the Harvard Gazette that details the variety of other ways that we have been
trying to work with the state and our local communities.
Our alumni around the world have also been
terrific in offering their assistance. We’ve had a number of them
help to arrange shipments of personal protective equipment from
different countries that’s now being distributed and made available
through the governor’s good efforts to ensure that the supplies go
to where they’re needed most.
GAZETTE: With the economy in such disarray, how are you thinking
about the endowment and future payouts?
BACOW: We are looking at literally every expenditure within the
University. The deans and the vice presidents are all working with
us at the moment to limit spending and to ensure that that we are
coming into alignment with what we know are going to be diminished
sources of revenue. We’ve already spent a lot of money that we
would not have otherwise in helping students go home. We are
rebating room and board for students throughout the University. We
have seen a decline in continuing and executive education revenues
— a precipitous drop. So the immediate effects are significant
already. And then we’ll see what the market delivers to us in
endowment returns going forward.
The good news is that we anticipated that
at some point we would face a recession. We were cognizant of the
fact that we were already in the longest peacetime economic
expansion in history. Several years ago, we began planning for the
next recession. We didn’t know when it would come, but we knew that
it would arrive at some point, and so we created a recession
playbook, produced by our financial planning staff under (chief
financial officer and Vice President of Finance) Tom Hollister’s
guidance, with the participation of all of Harvard’s deans and vice
presidents. We also tried to make sure that we understood the
lessons of 2008 so that we could be better prepared the next time
around. We took measures to ensure that we had more liquidity than
we had going into 2008. We built reserves. All these things will
help cushion the impact, but the impact will still be felt. The
city of Cambridge and the city of Boston have already put
restrictions on construction projects right now, so construction on
the campus is on hold at the moment. Lots of things are going to be
delayed, and there will be belt-tightening across the
board.
GAZETTE: Challenging times demand tough decisions. What is it like,
as the leader of Harvard, to have to make such difficult calls? Are
there examples from history that you draw on?
BACOW: This is a time when I actually think it’s helpful to have
been through some things like this before. At one point during my
10 years at Tufts, I made up a list of about a dozen crises of
different sorts that I had to deal with, ranging from 9/11, which
occurred 10 days into my presidency, to a major power failure in
Medford that forced us to operate the university for eight days
without any electricity, to the financial crisis of 2008, to
getting sick myself in 2004 and being hospitalized multiple times
in a six-month period.
I think having been through all that gives
me some perspective. I sometimes say that one of the challenging
things about being a university president is that all the easy
decisions get decided before they get to you. That means that
almost every decision I get to make is a 51/49 decision — if I’m
lucky. Sometimes it’s 50.0001 versus 49.9999. The no-brainers have
all been decided previously. So I’m used to having to make tough
calls.
It helps to have been through challenging
circumstances in the past. I’m also blessed with fabulous
colleagues who help me understand the consequences of different
choices. And then, like any other person, I just try to do the best
that I can do. I recognize that I’m not going to get everything
right. But rather than try to do everything perfectly and be
paralyzed by uncertainty, I think it’s important to be able to act,
and act decisively. And when you need to engage in error
correction, to do that quickly as well.
GAZETTE: What are the implications for higher education as a result
of the pandemic? Are there any silver linings?
BACOW: Even the darkest clouds have their silver linings. We’ve
seen a lot of wonderful work on behalf of so many people from
across the University trying to help others less fortunate. These
efforts don’t surprise me, but it’s still wonderful to see. We’ve
also seen both faculty and students experiment with new ways of
teaching and learning, which I suspect will have long-term
consequences for us. I suspect many of us have realized that we
don’t need to travel nearly as much as we once did to attend
meetings. Many of those meetings can now be held using technology —
that will help us reduce costs and also reduce our carbon
footprint. I also think we have realized people are immensely
flexible. And while we all miss the social environment of being
together and working together, people are still finding ways to be
very, very productive from home. As we look forward, I hope we can
build more flexibility into how people work at Harvard. That’s
going to have long-term benefits as we think about how we organize
work, not just within the University, but throughout
society.
I also think some of the relationships that
have been forged between institutions that are collaborating now to
address the challenges posed by the coronavirus will prove durable
as well. I just look at how we’re working with some of our
colleagues in China right now, not just at Guangzhou Institute of
Respiratory Health, but at other Chinese universities. I suspect
we’ll build off those relationships going forward. So I think that
there are going to be many positive benefits. That said, I wouldn’t
wish this on my worst enemy.
GAZETTE: Is there a message you’d like to convey to the Harvard
community, recognizing that the full impact of the crisis is yet to
be felt?
BACOW: First of all, I would thank people for their patience and
for their flexibility in adapting to circumstances that none of us
have ever lived through. I would also ask people to give everyone
the benefit of the doubt. So many people are working so hard right
now across the University, working nonstop trying to address a
dizzying array of questions, of uncertainties, and we know it’s
inevitable that we’re not going to get everything right. We haven’t
gotten everything right today. But people have worked really,
really hard to adapt and to adapt quickly in the face of new
information. I would hope that people would trust their colleagues
and trust that the institution is going to do the best it can
possibly do. And I would hope they know that when we make mistakes,
we’re going to try to correct them as quickly as possible. And then
we’re going to try to take on yet another new set of challenges,
because the challenges are not going to go away. They’re going to
be with us for some time to come.
|