Education

Reuben E. Brigety II, vice-chancellor and president of the University of the South, Carla Koppell, senior advisor for diversity, equity, and inclusion and distinguished fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, and Jamille Bigio, senior fellow for women and foreign policy at CFR, discuss how insufficient leadership, outdated curricula, and alienating school climates leave future foreign policy experts ill-prepared to address the social forces contributing to fragility and unrest globally, and provide their recommendations for a comprehensive educational strategy that improves national security and strengthens U.S. diplomatic capacity.  Read the CFR discussion paper on the topic, authored by all three speakers, here. FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at the Council on Foreign Relations. Today's meeting is on the record. The video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org. And as always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's discussion is focusing on transforming international affairs education to address diversity, equity, and inclusion. I commend to you the discussion paper that we circulated in advance on this. It was made possible by the generous support of the Compton Foundation. Jamille Bigio will moderate today's discussion with her coauthors. I will introduce Jamille first and then turn it over to her to introduce the rest of our distinguished speakers. Jamille Bigio served as director for human rights and gender on the White House National Security Council staff in the Obama administration. She also advised the White House Council on Women and Girls on international priorities and First Lady Michelle Obama on adolescent girls' education and the Let Girls Learn initiative. From 2009 to 2013, she served as senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, Melanne Verveer. And she also was detailed to the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy and to the U.S. mission to the African Union. And she is a senior fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy program at CFR. Women in foreign policy is a priority for us, and we are doing an immense amount of work on these issues. So Jamille, over to you to take the conversation away. BIGIO: Thank you so much for that introduction, Irina. I am so thrilled to be able to join Ambassador Reuben Brigety and Carla Koppell in our conversation today. It was my honor to coauthor the paper that we've shared with you all, and I'm so inspired by the incredible work that both Reuben and Carla are doing on these issues. And I'm thrilled that we will have the opportunity to hear more about that today. So just very briefly, Ambassador Reuben Brigety is an American diplomat who has served in various leadership roles across the State Department as well as in academia. He currently serves as the vice chancellor and president of the University of the South. He is also my colleague at CFR where he serves as a senior fellow as well. Carla, likewise, has incredible leadership experience across the U.S. government, at USAID, at the U.S. Institute for Peace, across civil society, and in academia, which is her current role, where she is at Georgetown University as a senior advisor on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues and a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. So you both are joining us with an incredibly rich experience as practitioners, as academics of thinking about why diversity, equity, and inclusion matter to national security and foreign policy. And you are looking directly on the frontlines at what it means to bring attention to these issues into academia in a way in which it has historically not been addressed. So, I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you both now. I would love to start with the first question. So, in our paper together, the opening thesis is that it matters to address diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. It matters to our foreign policy and national security. And what we're seeing, especially over the last year and more, is that it not only matters to our foreign policy interests but what's happening domestically has impacts on our global standing. So I would love, Reuben, if you could talk to us a little bit more about why we should be thinking and caring about diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. BRIGETY: Sure. Good afternoon or good morning, wherever in the world everyone finds themselves. It's an honor for me to be here on this panel with my good colleagues, Jamille and Carla, and always great to be supporting CFR. So if I may, let me start by addressing the counter thesis, which is that it doesn't matter. Not only does it not matter, talking about things like diversity, equity, and inclusion in the context of questions of security is simply yet another left-wing progressive, liberal intervention into things that where it should not be. And that is a nontrivial assertion. That is a legitimate point of discourse. In fact, it's the starting point, I would argue, which is part of the reason why we wrote this paper and why it's important for us to actually interrogate that question. And so there are, at a bare minimum, two ways to think about why questions of DEI are indeed legitimate and important security issues. And you can divide them along essentially questions of hard power and soft power. And obviously, since we're talking to a group of academics, just for the sake of refreshing what we mean by those terminologies, hard power and soft power is not simply military versus nonmilitary. It's a question of the ability to actually coerce as a means of getting an adversary or another actor to do what you want them to do as opposed to the ability to attract through modeling, through example, to get an adversary or an interlocutor to do something that they would not otherwise do. Hard power being the former, soft power being the latter. And in the context of hard power, the principal reason it's important for us to be thinking about matters of diversity and inclusion is because they're incredibly relevant on both the strategic and tactical levels. Strategically, one of the things that we know is often a challenge in terms of our ability to assess yet engage other actors, particularly adversaries, is this question of mirror imaging. That is presuming that actors will see a problem set similar to the way we see them or see them from our own perspectives. And it is therefore incredibly important and vital to be able to get into the mindset, the worldview of the people with whom you're trying to influence, whether that be in terms of big-picture strategic questions on democracy versus not, on questions of peace negotiations or not, or whether, frankly, very tactical-level questions about how do you engage with an interlocutor if you are a Provincial Reconstruction Team or you are a rifle platoon commander who has to make their way through a village. And it stands to reason—that's what we stand to reason, but also example—that the more people you have who can intuitively understand those alternative mindsets and worldviews, not only because they studied them but because they've lived them, whether it be from a particular religious perspective or gender perspective or ethnic perspective, the more likely you are to make correct analytical decisions both in terms of big-picture geopolitics and also in terms of very immediate tactical considerations. That's one of the reasons, for example, that we know, as an example, that special operations units have been much more successful when they have women deployed with them, whether they be as intelligence officers in the field or in operations that require direct action, in part because it gives them access to half a population they otherwise would not have access to in many parts of the world. So beyond the hard power question, there are also some very important soft power questions. Now one of the most brilliant observations of Joseph Nye when he was developing the view of soft power wasn't simply that attractive power is a way of influencing, it is that the vast majority of what we do, both as individuals and as nations in terms of advancing our interests, is much more through attractive power as opposed to coercion. You can't coerce everybody all the time because it also creates a whole set of other difficulties. And so, for us as Americans, and I speak as an American, the greatest attractive aspect of our country is that we are not a country by virtue of our ethnicity, we are a country by virtue of all of us adhering to a certain set of ideals. And in fact, that power of example becomes all the more powerful precisely because it is accessible to a wide range of people and increasingly accessible to an increasingly wider range of people throughout the course of American history right to where we are today. And as the president is fond of saying, the strength of America is "not the example of its power, but the power of its example." And he could not be more right in that regard. And so our ability to both live boldly and fully into questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion in which we demonstrably recognize lift the human dignity of everybody at home, certainly. And to the extent that we do not do that or have not done that, it has been used against us, whether it be the ways in which the Soviets routinely, you know, brought up Jim Crow segregation in order to undermine American efforts of credibility during the Cold War or whether it be the example of our own Capitol being sacked on January 6 by people who were from a particular viewpoint carrying the Confederate flag through the halls of Congress and wearing t-shirts, like, "Camp Auschwitz" and other sorts of things. And so, let me kind of conclude by saying this. We are at a major inflection point not only in American history but increasingly in global history where half a century beyond, essentially, the great decolonization movements that started around like the 1950s and 1960s to living now fully into, second generation civil rights activism here in the United States of America, where worldwide these questions of who belongs and how are being reevaluated and reinterpreted for another generation. And so it is incredibly important not only for our policymakers to be able to understand that and navigate it, but for us to be able to raise a new generation of foreign policy makers who have the capacity to navigate these very challenging issues. BIGIO: Thank you, Reuben. An incredibly helpful layout of why these issues matter to advancing our own foreign policy and national security priorities and just understanding what happens in the world. And then a helpful bridge to Carla to the question for you—Reuben ended by saying how important it is to ensure we are training the next generation of leaders to have a more comprehensive understanding of the world and the tools that we have to influence it. So Carla, where are international affairs education programs today at addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion issues? How well are academic institutions doing on this question? KOPPELL: Well, first of all, good afternoon to everybody. And I want to add my thanks to Reuben for organizing this conversation. It's an issue I am passionate about, and I really appreciate a spotlight being shined on this conversation. The quick answer would be we have a lot to do, but I'll give a little bit more expansive answer than that. I think Reuben teed up beautifully what the challenge is and what the issues are and why they are relevant to the way that we educate the next generation of leaders and why we need to pay attention to these issues in foreign policy today. And the gaps in the current education of our next generation of international affairs professionals is myriad. A survey of public policy international affairs schools found that for the hybrid schools, public policy and IR schools, there was less than 10 percent that were even talking about gender and culture with their students. Less than 7 percent of schools were talking about race and ethnicity. Less than 5 percent were talking about other dimensions of diversity like ability, age, origin, religion, language, etcetera. Those statistics are alarming given the extent to which the challenges related to marginalization and exclusion loom large today. And what they mean essentially is that students are graduating with a complete blind spot with regard to the overwhelming research indicating that if you're working in the fields of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, that inequity and marginalization are helping to create polarization and create state fragility. If you're coming out and working in the field of development, you are unaware that hundreds of millions of dollars in economic development are foregone because of gender inequality, LGBTQ exclusion, and the marginalization of populations. And if you're working in humanitarian affairs you are not prepared to confront the fact that older people and people with disabilities are unable to receive the kinds of services they need in times of crisis. The challenges are several fold. So we know that there are blank spots in terms of the curriculum and the coverage of issues in existing classes. We also know that classes that speak to these issues specifically, are very few and far between. And for those who want to go out into the world and specialize in these areas, it's very hard to get that kind of specialized education. But we also know there are other challenges underlying those curricular gaps. We know that the academy does not have the kind of diversity among its professors, students, and staff that are needed. And we know that that creates a vicious cycle because often people of diverse backgrounds are interested in doing research and engaging in those topics in their professional lives as well, and so they bring that richness to the conversation. We know that school cultures lack the kind of vibrancy and inclusiveness and sense of belonging that's necessary to build the kind of cadre that will offer us the diversity of opinion that Reuben referenced in terms of how we build the strongest possible national security infrastructure for the United States. And further, the schools are not drawing on the full range of scholarship because we know that the vast majority of scholarship that people are reading are coming from one dominant segment of the population, certain parts of the world, and one set of perspectives. Finally, I would conclude by saying I think that the challenge for us is really to revisit not just the composition of classes and the instructors and students that teach and take those classes, but to really revisit the way we think about international relations, to look at the kinds of narratives that are born of history, and turn those on their heads to really look at contemporary issues, think about how diversity, equity, and inclusion interweaves with those contemporary issues, and bring forward the debates of this century in a robust, strategic, and courageous way. BIGIO: Thank you, Carla. Powerful to both diagnose where the challenges are and to start to lay the groundwork of what are some proactive steps that academic institutions can take and professors can take within their own courses to really bring these issues to bear and integrate these issues in a new way to better prepare the next generation of leaders. So there's two pieces that I want to touch on with you both before we open it up for questions. So one, you both kind of talked a little bit already about some of the recommendations that we had laid out in our report where we talked about the need to demonstrate leadership, to update curricula, and to create an inclusive climate. But these are also recommendations that you are both living right now in your roles as academics and that you have worked on challenging these issues in your roles as practitioners. So I would love to hear from you both about your current work and your reflections and what recommendations you have for the academic community based on those experiences. So Reuben, if we can start with you. BRIGETY: Sure. Let me start with leadership. I tell my students all the time that—we're America, right, so everybody's a leader. Not exactly. And I tell my students all the time that leadership is the ability to bring people together to solve a problem that they would not otherwise do. And leaders are not born, they're made. You can learn. You can learn skills but also crucially you can practice the virtuous disciplines that are required to be a strong leader and the most significant, which is courage. Winston Churchill said that “courage is the most important virtue because it's the one that enables all the others.” And quite frankly, in the context of many of these questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they are conversations that require us to be courageous. Courageous enough to raise issues. Courageous enough to listen. Courageous enough for all of us to challenge our preconceived ideas of who we understand ourselves to be, who we understand our community to be, and what we understand our field to be. In addition to my work here at the University of the South, I've written extensively on matters of diversity and foreign affairs. I've had the great opportunity to engage the senior-most people in our government, in the uniformed military, and intelligence services on these sorts of questions. And one of the things that I always emphasize is that we have to start from a perspective of courage to be able to have these conversations because everybody's afraid of saying the wrong thing. Everybody's afraid of having a certain perspective that may not coincide to whatever the norm of the group may be. But it's essential. It is absolutely essential that you start from there. And the other thing is that these conversations and the willingness to wade in them simply have to be supported from the very top of any organization. Because otherwise people will get the signal that these things are not terribly important. That is a lesson that I have seen and I have learned time and time again. And the final thing that I will say is that even as you prepare to be courageous in these conversations, when you start talking, you'd be surprised how open many people are to actually engaging productively, particularly if you mandate the importance to listen. Let me say the final thing and that is what happens in the absence of leadership, in the absence of courage. It's not that these problems go away. They don't. In fact, if anything, absent a constructive means to actually have a reasonable conversation, they actually get worse. That's what  you're seeing in the Department of Defense right now, which is why the secretary of defense has ordered a department-wide stand down to actually have serious conversations about extremism. And one of the things I hear from my friends in the military as these things are happening is how much there is there that was unacknowledged with regard to really pernicious perspectives on who counts as fully human or not in ways that are quite dangerous not only to cohesion but also potentially to spilling out beyond the military as we saw on January 6 and those places. And so all of which is to say that it is vital that leaders of organizations that otherwise may not be thinking about these things take the time to educate themselves, that they support those in their organization to continue to have these conversations, and to lean boldly into understanding what it means for us to think critically about matters of DEI in our speech, in our field, and our organizations. BIGIO: Thank you, Reuben. Incredible to have that frame of not only how to think about it but also how to talk to students about it, which is so critical with this community. So Carla, the next piece that we thought about was updating curricula and how do you really tackle curricula, which is something you are so focused and leading incredible work on. Please? KOPPELL: Thanks. So first of all, I wanted to sort of just reemphasize what Reuben said about leadership. There's absolutely no substitute for solid, forward-leaning, and explicit leadership. I also wanted to draw forward an implicit point in what he said which goes back to the first round of questions, which is about sort of force readiness and cohesion as well. You see that unfolding in the U.S. military today. When we talk about how to move curricula and individual classes, I think the first thing to recognize is that this is a moment of opportunity. The discourse that's taking place, the national discourse that's taking place has opened a lot of eyes and a lot of willingness to try to move the agenda forward. And so I think there's a big opportunity for change right now. I think the second needs to be our goal, and our goal has to be to touch all students in every school. So not everyone needs to be an expert, but everybody needs to know that diversity, equity, and inclusion issues matter. We can no longer have students graduating thinking about countries as homogeneous units without any heterogeneity within them and not understanding that people see, hear, and experience things differently. And only by touching everyone to explain that do we create a different kind of mental awareness when people go out into the world. What does that mean? That means weaving attention to these issues into the core curriculum from intro to IR on forward and making sure people understand that it's a dynamic process that needs to be revisited on a regular basis that is dynamic both for students going out into the world and for instructors as they move through the years. We cannot be teaching the way we were taught. It is a very, very different world. Then we also need to create opportunities to grow experts. I started out working on these issues around gender equality though I work broader gauge today, and there was a terrible shortage of people who could come into the workforce ready to help us achieve the kind of transformation in the practitioner universe that we needed. That holds us back because we need to be able to realize this kind of change. So when we're talking about this we need to revisit our core curriculum. We need to make sure that the scholars that we are having students read are of diverse backgrounds and present diverse perspectives. We need to think about the intersection of every issue we are talking about and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues because for every issue we discuss in the classroom, there are dimensions that are relevant. We need to invite these kinds of conversations. We need to make sure that the guest speakers that we bring in have different types of backgrounds. We need to make affirmative efforts to bring the conversations and the experts in who can really bring these dimensions to life even as we serve those who are already passionate and need to be taught how to operationalize. BIGIO: Thank you, Carla. And what's powerful to know is that you and others are producing tools of lists and resources and references that's all on hand so that when you talk about integrating DEI issues into intro classes or other classes, there are lists of all of the readings and all of the topics and suggestions. KOPPELL: Can I just add briefly? So I'll put in the chat the link to the syllabus guides that we produce because what that does is it makes it easy, as Jamille says. You want to diversify those who are talking about realism in your classroom, we're providing you links to people who are talking about realism of diverse backgrounds and the intersections of realism with feminist theory or the status of indigenous populations around the world. But the other thing I would say in addition to the resources, which I will share, is that there are examples across the country and around the world of schools that are working on undertaking this transformation. So we put in place a gender, peace, and security certificate. GW, Tufts, and Texas A&M have similar certificates. Harvard just put in place a two-week intensive on racism in the making of U.S. strength in the world. University of Washington is putting in place similar coursework around this. There are examples from every type of university in every part of the country that are making these sorts of changes, and so for those who are out there saying I don't know how to start or I don't want to be the first, you should recognize that you're already not the first. There's a lot of models and a lot of lessons to be learned from those who are really challenging themselves to move this agenda forward in different ways. BIGIO: Thank you. So the third area that we highlighted is an inclusive climate and recognizing that what's happening as part of students' experience is not just in the classroom with their coursework but is about the entire climate of the educational institution. So Reuben, I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections on what does it mean for international affairs schools and colleges and other broader academic institutions to actually create an inclusive climate? BRIGETY: Sure. Well, let me talk about universities broadly speaking, and then I'll talk a little bit in particular with regard to international affairs schools. So I wrote a piece that was published in Time magazine last June, which maybe our organizers can put in the chat and I'll do it if they can't find it, June 19, that was titled something like "The Righteous Revulsion Driving the Demands for Racial Change in America." And basically what I tried to do was to put in context what was happening with regard to the George Floyd protests and why it mattered for American higher education going forward. And my basic thesis was that we are seeing a profound generational difference between the students that we are teaching and the administrators who run the schools where they go to school. Now, in some ways, this has always existed, right? This isn't Socrates, right? But in an American context it is particularly poignant now. Because what you have is a generation of young people that are in our classrooms that are two generations removed from Brown v. Board of Education who grew up listening to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in kindergarten and reviewing it every Martin Luther King Day, who do not understand why we are still having to confront these issues. These are things our grandparents have [inaudible]. And not only if you start to, just across the kind of the very basic, obvious issues of differential treatment to people of color, particularly Black men and law enforcement, and you begin to pull the string it raises all kinds of other questions about other kinds of persistent inequalities that continue to exist and make you ask the question why if you're serious about interrogating the facts on their merits. So on the one hand you have these young people that are networked together, that are digital natives, that have increasingly sort of been raised with these issues of DEI in ways which they couldn't even articulate at the time when they were in preschool or elementary school, up and against, often, university administrators that are my age and older that are not as comfortable talking about these things. If anything, we're raised in the context of being colorblind and then also with regards to gender issues have learned to have women in the workplace but have not really kind of leaned in fundamentally what that means in terms of thinking broadly about gender and inclusivity. And so we are having a situation, quite frankly, where administrators need to be learning from their students about what they're experiencing, why it matters, and open their eyes accordingly. We've had a couple of very painful instances of this at Sewanee just this past year. There's a Washington Post article that was written just about a month ago—I ask the organizers to put that in the chat for those who haven't seen it—and one of the things that clearly we have learned in this case is that on a campus that is named the University of the South where 90 percent of our American undergraduates are white, where our students and our administrators, as a result of some of these particularly challenging instances, have had to finally kind of really hear and really listen what our students of color are experiencing in ways that many of our white students or white administrators are simply just blind. I mean, how does the fish know that it's wet, right, if the entire system is made around a particular worldview in which you simply have to be comfortable. Now in the context of international affairs environments, I would say a few things. First of all, in the U.S. context, there's obviously historically disproportions of inequities about studying which disciplines and why. There are lots of reasons for that. But what that means for schools of international affairs, in particular, when you're looking at professions and pathways where there are clear dominant demographics of those who are senior, it means that you have to make clear that you're having examples that students can look up to so they can see themselves in success. It means that you have to—nothing drives diversity like diversity. And so you really have to double down to ensure that you're inviting both students and staff and taking untraditional pathways and untraditional pipelines, as it were, toward ensuring you're helping people that this is actually a reasonable path for you and here's how you can succeed it. And then the final thing that I will say is, again, it goes back to this question of leadership. You couldn't have a more robust, controlled experiment with regard to the significance of creating diverse environments in the foreign affairs space than looking at the Trump administration and Biden administration side by side just from the last hundred days. And that is not, by the way, a Democratic versus Republican assertion. It is specifically the Trump administration versus the Biden administration. A Trump administration, as we know, that prevented, by executive order, government agencies from doing diversity and equity training versus the U.S. State Department now under President Biden has created the first-ever chief diversity officer at the State Department, our good friend and colleague, Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, that is made at a point to ensure that there is broad diversity of highly capable professionals fulfilling senior positions across the national security establishment. And when I say it's not a Democratic-Republican issue, it's also important to—I mean, look, the first secretaries of state and the first national security advisors of color were appointed by Republican presidents. The first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of color was appointed by a Republican president. And the reason I say that it's so important is that this question of DEI cannot be a partisan issue. It is a central aspect of a global landscape that will be set, as we discussed, particularly the American context, and just as you teach natural sciences as part of a core liberal arts curriculum because you can't understand the world if you don't understand basic science or basic mathematics, increasingly, the world in which we are operating with a plethora of not only the diversity that exists, but diversity that is at the table that is insisting on being recognized from everything from professional requirements to political issues, requires us to be able to open the aperture of what it means for us to understand who belongs in this space, what issues are relevant, and why. BIGIO: There is so much there, Reuben, to unpack and absorb, and I'm sure our participants will have a lot of questions to follow up. Carla, do you want to say anything in response before we open it up to our participants? KOPPELL: No, I think it'd be great to have a conversation, please. BIGIO: Wonderful. So I would like to invite you all to join the conversation with your questions. Please limit yourself to one concise question. We will do our best to get to as many as possible. And Veronica will give instructions on how to join the question queue. STAFF: We will take the first written question from Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome at CUNY Brooklyn College. She asks, "Given that the issue isn't one of lack of data, knowledge, information, and analysis on inclusion, what prevents meaningful significant change? And how have leadership and courage produced quantifiable change? If you could provide some examples with statistics." BRIGETY: Sure. I think there are three things. First, leadership, as I mentioned. The second is inertia. And the third is opposition. I won't dwell further on leadership as I talked about it, but let me sort of talk about inertia a little bit. You know, the best definition of systemic racism that I've ever heard is a system that continues to produce differentiated outcomes based on race even if everybody inside the system is not racist. Any number of examples that one can cite about that from who gets certain scholarships or what political appointments tend to look like just based on established professional or other networks, to fundamental issues of access to high school or secondary education based on zip codes or how education is funded in this country on the local level. And the reason that matters is, for example, last night, Senator Tim Scott, in his response to the president’s speech to Congress, said that America is not a racist nation. Now, I am prepared to accept their proposition in the context that America is not filled with a bunch of racist people. And yet, we continue to see differentiated outcomes that are highly correlated to race, everything from healthcare outcomes to disparities in familial wealth to access to higher education to differential treatments in the legal system. To also, by the way, representation at the very highest levels of American industry in most Fortune 500 CEOs to also, frankly, the composition of senior appointment to the State Department. And so one has to continue to interrogate. I'll give you another kind of very basic example. So I wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs online in 2016 based on some data that came out of the National Security Council just before the end of the Obama administration. And the data suggested that in the entire foreign policy establishment of the United States of America, there was no place, other than the civil service of USAID, interestingly, where the level of diversity upon entry matched levels of diversity at mid-ranks and match levels of diversity at senior ranks across the entire foreign policy establishment—the intelligence agencies, the uniformed military, State Department, Commerce, etcetera. And so unless you believe that women and minorities are simply not as good as white men, and therefore trite at a higher level, something else has to be happening because the data don't lie—it's clear. And so, one, you could be forgiven if you don't take a hard look at those things to say, "Well, you know, we're still meeting our mission, right? Maybe we're still sailing. We're still sending diplomats overseas, whatever, so what's the problem?" And that's inertia. When you don't fully try to unpack what's happening and why and then try to figure out, to Carla's point, how you could actually have even better operational successes if you're paying serious attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the final bit is opposition. One of the challenges with these kinds of conversations is that you are often preaching to the choir. And it's important to note that there are nontrivial numbers of our fellow citizens who do not accept this proposition. Tucker Carlson, one of the most widely watched and influential pundits on American television, just last week used his platform to give credence to replacement theory, the idea that we are somehow importing a whole bunch of other people who will change the electoral demographic of the United States. And as he said, quote, "Why should we," we meaning not them, "stand for that?" And so this is a serious point of contention for the idea of what it's going to mean to be American going into the next part of the twenty-first century and how are our institutions going to reflect that in ways that are not only consistent with our values but also supportive of our interests. And in terms of examples of how these things have been advanced, again, I would say that I give the Biden administration incredibly high marks for ensuring that we have, throughout our government, agencies that reflect the excellence and equity in America. And again, that need not be a partisan issue. It shouldn't be a partisan issue. One hopes that we can come to consensus around this issue set so that we could have legitimate debates about tax policy or health care or whatever else, right? But this issue that all Americans ought to be valued and we ought to ensure that they are through our policies and programs ought to be noncontroversial. KOPPELL: Within the educational context I would add a fourth category, which I think is fear and hesitancy. So I think you do see instructors who are interested in pulling this material to a greater or lesser extent into their teaching, but they aren't sure how to identify the right scholarship. They got their PhD in something and didn't do any of the reading around this, and they feel that they're expected to be the highest level of expert to bring in this issue and these are issues they're not that familiar with. They're worried about managing difficult conversations and how to move that agenda forward in ways that still enable them to control and lead the classroom. And so I think what you see is a need to help buy down the risk for those folks and enable them to start to adopt the kinds of teaching practices that are more inclusive, bring in the issue sets that deal with DEI concerns by, you know, for example, showing them the material that is out, the scholarly material—and I put the link to that in the chat—by giving them examples of where this material has been tackled, by showing that there are results and I think, to Reuben's point, by letting students lead us in educational institutions forward because they're ready to do that. Around the country you see, I talk with deans all the time, it is the students who are pushing the institutions, and they are moving the agenda forward. Their leadership is critically important because the times are different and the future is theirs. With regard to data and information about this, we're doing something interesting at Georgetown, and I don't have the data yet, but we did surveys of all the syllabi to see what the reading and coverage was of these issues and the diversity of people that were being assigned. And we're on our second semester doing that now in one of our flagship programs. I'm really interested to see what progress will have been made because that will start to open a window into how you use the discourse, the public discourse today to make change within the academy. I think we're going to see some real progress around that. Critical will not be just bringing in diverse scholars to read about exactly the same things we've been reading about but with a different author, but to start to look at these intersections and really bring the fullness of the dialogue and the discourse forward. And I would conclude with an example that speaks to what Reuben was saying about you think you're being successful, so you don't know what you're missing. When I was at AID, I went to visit a project that actually measured how much a project benefited from investments in women's empowerment in addition to investments for child's health to reduce stunting. And the project as a whole was super successful. So people could have gone home saying, "Yes, all was well." And then when they looked at the data, what they realized was that the project was 5 percent more successful when they invested in gender equality in this case. And so what that meant was if they had never done that measurement, they would have thought they were being as successful as they could be when in reality they were leaving enormous gains on the table just by not paying attention to the issues of inequality and marginalization. And that's the kinds of losses that are often invisible but essential. BIGIO: Thank you both. Veronica, will you bring in the next question? STAFF: Great. We will take the next spoken question from Beverly Lindsay. Please accept the "unmute" prompt. Q: Can you hear me? BIGIO: Yes. Q: I'm Beverly Lindsay at the University of California multicampus, meaning Riverside, UCLA, and Orange. My question is specifically for the president. I've been a dean at two universities, a tenured, full professor. And I sit on tenure and promotion committees not only in the United States, but in England and various parts of Africa and Asia. What the data clearly shows is that women and people of color consistently receive lower evaluations by their students and by their peers. They also have more difficulty on challenging issues—publishing—in what are referred to as top-tier universities. And I know that there are new presidents of color such as yourself, Black presidents at Rutgers, Ohio State, Illinois, Davis, etcetera. But what would you say as a president that you would do or you would recommend so that the faculty who are coming up for tenure and promotion end up consistently receiving lower evaluations from students? That's constantly in the data, but there's bias in those evaluations. So how do you try to ensure and take that into account when they're not tenured, full professors, such as myself, a Black woman, sitting on the tenure and promotion committees? BRIGETY: It's a great question. Let me offer a few things. First of all, look, we're all academics. We are supposed to be able to be persuaded by data in argument. And so the first thing you have to do is demonstrate the data, right, lay it out. And that leads you, again, to kind of some very basic questions. Are we simply saying that all of our women and faculty of color are just not as good as the others? Or is there really something else happening here? And interrogate it fearlessly. You know, one of the things as you probably know that has been done in a number of universities is that they've actually eliminated teaching evaluations from tenure files precisely because of the level of biases that you're speaking of, particularly as it relates to women. It does not mean that teaching is unimportant, it just may mean that there are other ways to evaluate it—peer evaluations to peer coaching and context, teaching in the classroom, and things of that nature. The other is—let me kind of start from the opposite end of the pipeline as I have a bit of an experience in this regard, and that is how do you ensure you're getting women, people of color, or other minorities into your pipeline to teach in the first place. So when I was dean of the Elliott School, anytime we had a tenure track search we did two things. One, each search committee had to go through implicit bias training. And the second thing is, and I told every search committee, if you return to me a shortlist that is comprised exclusively of one demographic whatever that might be—all white men doing security studies, all women during gender studies—if you return to me all one demographic, I'm going to consider it a failed search and tell you to start over because that is evidence to me that you have actually not done the work necessary to fully understand the diversity of the field out there. And there was some hemming and hawing and whatever, but you know what, it really worked. And we had some unbelievable candidates who are women and people of color in nontraditional fields, for those demographics. There's going to be arms control or macroeconomics or whatever else, whose resumes stood up against anybody else in the world. But again, it comes back to leadership, right? And in the absence of a senior leader who says these things, I would say that those who are in communities like yourselves that have a level of seniority and are therefore bulletproof by virtue of being full professors, ask these questions boldly of your leadership: "So we hear that, you know, this guy Brigety at University of the South or this, you know, Carla at Georgetown, they're doing this stuff, right, why aren't we?" This is increasingly the state of the art. So why are we not there? BIGIO: It's powerful to hear you, Reuben, talking both about leadership and the ways in which you use your tools to really incentivize a change in behavior. No one wants a failed search, and that is a real incentive that delivers on the message that you are sending to your faculty. Carla, do you want to add to this? And I’d like to also direct everyone's attention to a resource Carla shared in the chat as well. KOPPELL: Sure, so I put in the chat one of the compilations of all the research. I know that the question was aimed specifically at Reuben, but I did want to just mention super quickly some other things that have been done across the country and around the world. So one is to turn evaluations around by adding questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion issues into course evaluations. So, are course instructors dealing with these issues? Are diverse scholars being assigned? And a number of schools have put those evaluation questions into place. A second is asking for diversity statements in applications. Not are you diverse or how do you add to the diversity of the community, but what is your view on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues? And what would you contribute in trying to advance an atmosphere of inclusion and belonging on campus and selection processes? A third thing, which is happening in a number of campuses, is looking at how to value mentoring and service to the community to a greater extent in tenure and review processes because the research also shows that women and people of color tend to provide more mentorship to the students and yet that's not valued in the promotion process. Additionally, pointing to the research that talks about the bias in citations, in the valuation of authorship, and in the promotion and review process will be an essential part of showing people the data. There is compelling data that you can find on the website that I pointed out to everybody, and so that can be an important component of the discussion as well. And further, there are now experiments underway to refashion the tenure and promotion process to take out the gatekeepers who may be biased. So if you have a single individual who is shunting off candidates early in the process because they don't think they make the grade, how you disassemble that process to enable everybody to have a voice in selection and promotion. BIGIO: Thank you both. Veronica, can you bring in the next question? STAFF: Great. I'm going to triple up on some related questions in the chat here to get through as many as possible. First, Caroline Holley at Farmingdale State College writes, "As an instructional designer I'm keenly aware of ways in which our heritage of racism and colonialism pervades elements of course designs such as text, images, and assignment structures. Can you suggest resources or suggestions to help create and evaluate a course through diversity and a decolonization lens?" And in a similar vein, Steven Jones at Georgia Gwinnett College asks, "As we diversify our syllabi and reading lists, how do we avoid potential charges of mere tokenism?" And thirdly, from Gregory Gause at Texas A&M University, he writes, "In terms of recruitment of students into professional schools of international affairs, what can be done to increase the pool of students from historically underrepresented groups who are interested in applying? Ambassador Brigety, if you could share any policies that you found effective when you were dean at the Elliott School, and Ms. Koppell, if you could share any successful policies for increasing the pool that Georgetown has taken, that would be great." BIGIO: Thank you, Veronica. So Reuben, Carla, we've heard about recruitment. We've heard about tokenism issues. I'm curious and welcome your thoughts. BRIGETY: I will leave to Carla the first question about decolonizing the curriculum. She's infinitely more versed in that than I. But let me address recruitment and tokenism. With regard to recruitment, you have to start from kind of essentially two places. And the first is, where do these communities from where you want to recruit find themselves as relates to your discipline? What I mean by that is it takes either a certain level of economic comfort or a certain level of familial familiarity or, frankly, a certain level of imagination to see yourself as a foreign affairs professional if you have no other idea what that looks like. Because you were able to do a Model UN thing when you were in high school and your parents took you to Paris when you were sixteen. And by the way, you've got an uncle who was a Foreign Service officer and you just really liked the Tom Clancy series, right? You want to be Jack Ryan, right? Pick your thing, right? Jack Ryan. Who's Jack Ryan? An Irish-American guy invented by an Irish-American guy, Tom Clancy, right? I mean, he's a great author. I read Tom Clancy as a kid. It's one of the reasons why I went to the Naval Academy. But it takes a certain leap of imagination to see yourself in that space. And also, crucially, I know this is true in the African American community. I know it's also very true for first-generation students. If you can't see yourself making a living in this space and you're the first amongst your family or first in your community to go to college, like, “Well I don't understand why you're doing this international affairs thing, why don’t you go get paid,” right? Go be a doctor or an engineer or go get an MBA or something, right? And so, frankly, we need dramatically more robust outreach efforts at the high school level in communities where you're trying to convince students that this is a viable path and you had to, sort of, stick with it over several years. We did actually a fair amount of that when I was dean at the Elliott School. I would often do video chats or anytime I'd go to visit to do donor engagement, fundraising, I'd often go to a high school or go to, sort of, a community event in other cities to talk a bit about foreign affairs. I know lots of others, my colleagues who did the same. So, that's the first thing. You have to continue to prime the pump and drive the pipeline over time. And that is a retail effort. It just is. Now back to what we were saying before, you could say it's not worth the effort and just deal with whoever's coming across the transom, and by the way, we're still making our numbers in terms of people in seats and whatever else. But that again, that does not do justice to the effort, the intergenerational effort, again, to diversify our foreign affairs establishment. And to this issue of tokenism. The very idea of tokenism presumes that the best of knowledge belongs to some demographics and not to others. If you brought in another, kind of, five scholars to be read, who were not part of the canon, but who you thought had interesting things to say but they're all white men, no one would accuse you of tokenism. And so I would respectfully submit that what matters are the ideas and that there are a lot of other people that are not traditionally in the space who have really good ideas. They simply have not been given the chance. I'll give you a very basic example of this. One of the things that we did when I was dean at the Elliott School is I said we're not having any [inaudible] anymore. You cannot have a public event where everybody is of one gender. And if you do, I as dean, reserve the right to cancel it. And so we had a couple of cases where someone said, "I just, you know, I was getting the best people in the field." Like, well, go back and try again. And they did and guess what? They found like really amazing people, both women and people of color and others. I said, “Look, if we were in Nome, Alaska, maybe I could understand. But GW, the Elliott School of International Affairs, is the best location of any foreign affairs school on the planet,” with all due respect to my friend, Carla, at Georgetown, “right smack dab in the middle of everything. There's zero excuse for not bringing in diverse voices.” But you simply have to have somebody who's going to put the foot down and say, you know what, this is what we're doing. BIGIO: Thank you. Carla, please. KOPPELL: So, from a pedagogical perspective, I think when you're confronted with material that has bias woven into it, the most important thing you can do is confront that bias and discuss it with your students and provide literature that offers the counterpoint. Pedagogically, I do a lot of work on case studies using simulation exercises to really enable people to bring forward themes related to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues and bring forward their perspective with regard to those themes. And I think the students really enjoy that. We also do a lot of engaged activities that enable them to, sort of, operationalize their thinking around these issues. What we know is that at the end of the day students appreciate the effort to discuss these issues more than they care about the perfection with which we confront them. That is they are more upset if we ignore them than if we are a little bit awkward or ham-handed in the way that we raise them on a regular basis. A colleague said to me, and I think it's really important for us all to remember, that academic freedom doesn't give you the right to not teach students things they need to know to be successful in the professional world. That's not what academic freedom is about. And so figuring out how to confront issues of bias and racism in the formation of the international system and how the international liberal order needs to move forward is part of the way we need to deconstruct and find a better platform for advancement over time. And I think that the most important thing is to engage students in the discussion whether the material is flawed or perfect and force them to think about how to build a better mousetrap in the years ahead. BIGIO: Thank you both. Some very powerful reflections as we look across these three categories—recruitment, tokenism, and decolonizing our syllabi. I see there's other questions about financial aid, which is another piece, tacking on Reuben, as you talk about the retail of trying to increase our pipelines of diverse students into universities and thinking about kind of what the other tools are and can be used to help in recruiting them and help in and enabling their participation. BRIGETY: Can I say one thing about that, Jamille, because here's the thing. I mean, the reason you have a strategy for anything is, amongst other things, to decide where you want to deploy your resources—time, money, whatever—and a strategy helps you to prioritize what's important. And so if you're not prepared to put resources behind diversity, financial, intellectual, temporal, etcetera, then it is not a priority. And quite frankly, that's the way the world is going, certainly in the United States. So as an example, right, so here at the University of the South our Board of Regents two years ago, prior to my arrival, made a decision that we would meet full financial need for all students. A number of universities do that, most don't. That is a nontrivial financial commitment. Now, why would you need to do that? Not only does it improve access for students of any race to have access to your education but look, the average Black family when you control for everything else has one-seventh the wealth of the average white family in the United States of America. And that has direct ties to a series of policies from everything from who gets to own and retain land to redlining for housing, which we know is where most Americans have most of their wealth, to access to jobs. All sorts of things. And so it's all connected. And if you're going to figure out how you're going to begin to address these issues then you simply have to make it a priority and that includes financial priority. KOPPELL: Jamille, I forgot to speak to the question directly about how Georgetown is engaging, and I wanted to just say that we're sort of at the beginning of a process. I think it kind of combines what Reuben is talking about, about trying to do a better job of meeting financial need and also engaging to a larger extent with the Washington, DC, community and the feeder schools that surround us. What we're hoping is that results in more students of diverse backgrounds locally coming to Georgetown to the School of Foreign Service, but we also know that by engaging more closely with the community and putting our community in touch with Washington, DC, we have benefits for the climate at our school. So apart from whether or not you change the composition of students accepted in an attending Georgetown, you're also creating connective tissue that otherwise didn't exist. And I know that Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, interestingly in the same place, have both really taken strides to engage more with the local community with benefits both for the sense of belonging of students at the school and also for the extent to which the students are matriculating there. So I think there's a lot of promise in that work. There's also a great deal more outreach going out to minority-serving institutions from both the State Department and AID with Foreign Service officers serving in capitals around the country. And for those who are in various parts of the country it's worth looking if there is a Foreign Service officer posted nearby because they are very much all about trying to recruit and introduce people to the international affairs field. And I think there's an opportunity to bring in somebody who is a working diplomat or development professional to talk about how you do construct a career in this area and how that career unfolds. So there are resources out there to draw on. BIGIO: Thank you, Carla. And speaking of resources, I'll point folks in the Q&A tab. Heidi Hardt from UC Irvine has shared some resources that she has done and with others on diversifying syllabi and on panels. So thank you, Heidi, for sharing those resources. Veronica, I think we have time for one more question. STAFF: Sure. Reynold Verret of Xavier University of Louisiana. President Verret, I believe you had your hand raised. Do you still have a question? Q: Well, it was a general question. As we are trying to broaden the pipeline, is there any possibility of drawing more broadly than from the traditional disciplines given that the Foreign Service and international affairs space needs students from traditional STEM fields, from fields that are not even from the humanities. We know that, especially in the disarmament field, that students who are more technological have been applied, but the traditional route to the Foreign Service, to the cultural aspects of the Foreign Service as well, tend to draw from a rather a narrow pipeline of students. And I'm wondering whether that's an avenue that we should be exploring? BRIGETY: It's a great question that has both merit and challenges. I'll try to explain what I mean by that. So first of all, when we're talking about foreign affairs professionals, at least when I talk about it, I'm not talking exclusively the Foreign Service. And in fact, one of the great things about being a young person who's interested in these things right now is that you can have a vibrant full career as a foreign affairs professional and never work for your own government. You can work for NGOs, work for multilateral organizations, increasingly work for private firms, banking, consulting, whatever. They need to have the skill set, so that's great. Secondly, you're absolutely right, that, as opposed to studying political science, history, whatever, that there is increasingly a need for people that have technical skills. Especially as we see things like, cyber threats or climate change or as you said, arms control issues that require particular technical backgrounds. Here's the challenge. That is sort of like a double-blind, double-loop challenge because we already know that minorities are underrepresented in STEM fields. And then to have minorities with STEM disciplines that are going into some aspects or foreign affairs is another challenge. The good news is that we increasingly have women and people of color that are succeeding extraordinarily in this field. I think of Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, who's our new undersecretary of state for arms control. An African American woman who is sort of like a prototypical of this kind of new generation of women and people of color making pioneers in what was, certainly throughout the Cold War, an all-male, all-white field in terms of arms control. And Frank Rose, similarly, who also was an assistant secretary of state in the arms-control bureau. So I think the question is how do we actually get those stories out so that increasingly people that have computer science degrees but don't want to go work for Google or that are interested in doing biology but don't want to go do a biology PhD or don't want to do bench research their whole lives and instead actually want to go and see much of the world, can understand that that is a viable career path for them. And that sounds like a CFR task force to me, Irina. BIGIO: That's great. Well, I wish that we had more time to continue this conversation with you, Reuben and Carla, and with our participants. But I will take this moment, first, on behalf of myself, Irina, and the CFR Academic team, to thank you, Reuben and Carla, for joining us today for your incredible leadership and for all of the insights that you've shared. Thank you to the participants, to everyone who has joined today and keep a lookout—Irina will be sharing all of the links that we put in the chat so you all will have those resources. So thank you all again, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. (END)

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, will speak on the considerations schools face in terms of reopening, taking into account their individual needs as well as public health and CDC recommendations. Jacob Carpenter, education reporter at the Houston Chronicle, will discuss best practices for framing stories related to this topic. Carla Anne Robbins, adjunct senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times, will host the webinar.

The 2021 Virtual College and University Educators Workshop convened professors from across the country for substantive expert briefings and group discussions on foreign policy issues, to learn about the wide variety of CFR and Foreign Affairs academic resources available, and to share best practices and educational tools for bringing international affairs into the classroom.  

Anita L. Barkin, co-chair of the COVID-19 task force at the American College Health Association, leads a discussion on the role of colleges in disseminating vaccines and provide rollout recommendations for campus communities. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at the Council on Foreign Relations. Today's meeting is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We're delighted to have Anita Barkin with us to talk about the planning for vaccine rollouts. We have shared her bio with you, but I will give you the highlights. Dr. Barkin is co-chair of the COVID-19 task force at the American College Health Association, known as ACHA for short, and a member of the board of directors for the Healthcare Georgia Foundation. Previously, she was a district nursing director of the North Central Health District. She oversaw operations of the district office, thirteen county clinics, and the Hope Center. She also served as director of Carnegie Mellon University Health Services for twenty-seven years. Dr. Barkin is a board-certified nurse practitioner and an ACHA fellow. Over the course of her career, she has held offices in local, regional, and national college health associations, and the Georgia Public Health Association. And she previously served as chair of the nursing session of GPHA and president of ACHA. She is a leader in pandemic planning for colleges and universities and this is the perfect audience to address today. So Dr. Barkin, thank you very much for being with us. Will you begin by talking about the role of colleges in disseminating vaccines on campuses and in their communities and provide your recommendations for campuses and what they're doing in their communities? BARKIN: Certainly, I want to, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to join you and your members this afternoon and discuss this very timely issue. And there are lots of questions that folks have out there regarding the vaccination rollout. If I may start by going through the PowerPoint presentation I gave as kind of a warm-up to our discussion. [To CFR operator] And so, yes, you can move to the next slide, please. So, we'll start with a short introduction, overview of the approved vaccines: what does the phase distribution plan look like? And then discuss some of the action plan items that we're recommending for institutions of higher education. Next slide. So currently, there are two vaccines approved under the Emergency Use Authorization, the EUA, and that is Pfizer's vaccine and Moderna. Now, if you look at them, the efficacy is about the same for both and even the dosing schedules are very similar. Pfizer is intended for use in sixteen years and older individuals and Moderna is eighteen years and older. They are, however, already starting trials to see what happens in younger folks. And so I think we'll see some information coming forth on the applicability for children and young adults, as well. There are some challenges with the Pfizer vaccine in terms of shipping and storage in that they–—that requires an ultra-cold freezer temperature of minus ninety-four degrees approximately, where Moderna is easier to store and ship and it's stable in a refrigerator for longer. And you can order less of it, fewer doses, and that's a big advantage for smaller organizations or smaller schools that really couldn't make use of 195 to 975 doses of Pfizer, in addition to the fact that the storage, as I said, storage capabilities are quite challenging with the Pfizer vaccine. Next slide. So two facts about COVID mRNA vaccines and those are—that is the technology that has been used to develop the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is that the—and these are circulating, and so I thought it was important that we address these two particular issues. First of all, the vaccine cannot give you COVID-19. mRNA does not use live virus. It is a small fragment of the RNA that prompts the cell in the human body to make the protein. It does not affect or interact with cell DNA. It never enters the nucleus of the cell where the DNA genetic material's kept. Once the cell breaks down, it gets rid of the mRNA. And as soon as it's finished using the instructions to make the protein piece. So there's a lot of misinformation out there regarding how it works and its ability to interfere with cell DNA so I want to put those two myths to rest. Next slide. And there are more vaccines in the pipeline using different technologies. AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax are all in phase three clinical trials. And we need lots of vaccine in the pipeline. The limitations on the ability to manufacture enough vaccine to vaccinate the U.S. population quickly is really going to be dependent on having a variety of vaccines available to immunize the population. Next slide, please. So there are three questions that are yet to be answered. Does vaccination stop asymptomatic transmission? How long will the protection last once a person is vaccinated? And how will vaccines deal with various mutations that are making their way on the scene? Next slide. So especially relevant to the higher ed population are two phases of the ACIP recommendations. ACIP is the Advisory Council on Immunization Practice. And this phase structure was accepted by ACIP and rolled out. In phase 1A, the jumpstart phase, first group to be vaccinated says high-risk health workers and first responders. It is important to know, and ACHA certainly was interested in ACIP understanding and being very explicit in its intent to include healthcare workers on college campuses and first responders on college campuses. So if you have a health service and EMTs or paramedics, first responders on your college campus, they do fit into phase 1A of the distribution cycle, so they should be first in line. In phase two, you'll note that it says K-12 teachers and school staff and childcare workers. That has been interpreted to also include faculty and staff of colleges and universities. So “teacher” used in the broader sense of the word. And so we are seeing some places where faculty and staff are being vaccinated. And that is most commonly happening in schools that have—schools with health care professionals: medical schools, nursing schools, dental schools. But in, for example, in West Virginia, they have gone ahead and distributed vaccines to college campuses so that faculty are covered under phase two. So now that's jumping ahead of the phase-in recommendations of ACIP, but I do want you to know where this all falls in the conversation as it relates to higher education. Next slide. So the vaccine rollout plan from a federal standpoint was to—that the vaccine would be rolled out and managed at the state, tribal, territorial, and local level. And that states would be responsible for promoting confidence and uptake. The second set of partners that were engaged on a federal level were private corporate partners like CVS and Walmart. And some CVS and Walmart sites have received vaccines and many others haven't. And the major role that they anticipated CVS would play was especially in vaccination efforts for nursing homes and other conjugate settings, like prisons. Next slide. The federal plan has presented a number of challenges and missteps. There's been no unified nationwide government plan or strategy as a result of the decision to move this to the state level. There has been miscommunication and miscalculation on how many doses states would receive. States are already experiencing lack of human and financial resources to manage the rollout. And so many states are struggling, more so than some others, dependent on what their resources and human capabilities are. This is resulting in inconsistencies across the country in the prioritization of residents to receive the vaccine, how to alert people to sign up, promoting vaccine acceptance, and configuration of immunization sites. And I think you—just one example that I will give you is, for example, in Georgia, the governor decided to expand phase 1A to include individuals who are sixty-five and older. And that was a jump ahead of what had been planned by ACIP. Other states have not done that. So we're seeing a lot of inconsistency. As I told you, WV, you know, West Virginia has gone ahead and distributed to colleges and universities to immunize their faculty which fell into the second phase according to ACIP. So we're seeing a lot of inconsistency. The states are overwhelmed. Complicating the matter is a surge in cases, which is overwhelming the healthcare systems in states. So there's a shortage of personnel to even conduct these mass vaccination clinics. And I think also what we're seeing is a lack of funding for public health over the years has come home to rest. And the lack of funding in public health has resulted in strained resources in terms of the ability to conduct mass clinics and to inform the public about the benefits of vaccination and the safety of these vaccines. Next slide. So what can institutions of higher education do, given that there is all of this confusion about the distribution? It varies from state to state. How do we proceed? How do we become proactive in this situation so that when that vaccine becomes available to our populations, we have already worked to inform resistance to vaccination? Well, right now, our advice to institutions of higher education would be to immediately develop a comprehensive communication plan and health promotion strategy that increases vaccine acceptance and confidence in the community. And you need to do that while continuing to reinforce the need for ongoing public health strategies for mask wearing, social distancing, and hand hygiene. All of those strategies as mitigation strategies that were in place in the fall need to be continued and reinforced in the campus community, while also providing this information that will facilitate vaccine acceptance and confidence when the vaccine becomes available to you. And just some general principles about good communication. You want to communicate often and in a transparent manner. Anytime you receive updates on what's happening with the vaccine or your ability to access vaccine for your populations, you need to be communicating that and remain current. And also establish an advisory group that's comprised of diverse members of the campus community and student leaders. What messaging is going to resonate with the different populations that are on your campus? And who are those individuals on your campus who serve in leadership roles, who are respected sources of information and trust, who will be out there and willing to communicate their confidence in the vaccine and in reinforcing the public health messaging? Next slide. Of course, maintaining close contact with the appropriate public health authority to discuss planning and distribution of the vaccine is critical because these decisions, at least under the current strategy, and this may change with the new administration. The new administration may decide that they need to create and develop a national strategy for more consistency across the state lines. But right now, as it stands, it is critical that you be in touch with the local appropriate health authority, public health authority for the location near your campus. And you need to do some advocacy work upfront. Public health authorities need to understand the role that healthcare providers and first responders play on campuses. And I think many are aware of the important role of student health services on campuses, but some may not be. And understanding that they are providing patient care, they are at risk for exposure to the virus from their population, and that they need to be considered in the vaccination plan when that distribution occurs locally. The other thing that ACHA has done is to explain and advocate the importance of vaccinating college students before the end of the spring term, if at all possible. We have identified the end of the semester as a mass migration event. Students go back home, not only to different communities within the United States, but they are traveling internationally. And we're not sure what the travel requirements will be for international students. Their countries, their home countries, may develop travel requirements, and vaccination may be one of them. So if we can get our students vaccinated before the end of the spring term, right now, the way ACIP phased-in vaccination program is structured, college students would kind of be at the end of the line, unless they have a comorbidity or a pre-existing medical condition that pushes them further up as a high-risk individual. So we're trying to lobby for students to be vaccinated before the end of the spring term. And that advocacy at the local level will be critical because these decisions are being made at those local levels. Next slide. You need to start thinking right now about your institution's ability to serve as a distribution site for vaccination. This is a resource intensive activity. And certainly, colleges have experience with mass vaccination programs. Certainly, that experience comes with the meningitis outbreaks that we've experienced on college campuses where mass vaccination strategies were employed. But it takes a lot of resources to pull off a mass immunization strategy. And there are some particulars that come with mass immunization as it relates to the COVID vaccines because we need to think about social distancing, having people six feet apart, which typically we wouldn't have to worry about with other types of mass vaccination events. We need to worry about having the ability to react for an anaphylactic reaction, a severe allergic reaction, and rendering the appropriate care. You need to have your protective equipment, masks and gloves and gowns. And there's also paperwork that's involved because we will need to be informing the state of who has been vaccinated and then tracking who needs the second vaccination. So, there are certain specific criteria that would apply in a mass immunization event for COVID that will need to be taken into consideration. If after you assess your institution's ability to do so, a conversation with your local public health is important, right? ‘Hey, we believe we have the resources available to do this.’ And then they will expect you to fill out paperwork to apply to be a pod for a vaccination. We did—during H1N1, many campuses acted in this role as a pod for distribution. I know that at Carnegie Mellon, we vaccinated students, staff, faculty, and their family members during that event, and so it was a great help to our local public health in Allegheny County. But if your resources do not allow you to move forward with a mass immunization event on campus, it's important to have discussions with local public health and with a network of surrounding providers to see who can act as a referral source for vaccinating community members. The other option is to consider hiring a company to provide the on-campus experience vaccination. And then, of course, you need to continue to assess the effectiveness of your current mitigation strategies and adjust them accordingly. Next slide. These are a couple of resources available on the ACHA website. Our COVID resources are open to the general public so you don't have to be a member organization to access these resources. The first one is specific to mass vaccination guidance. The second document listed is a consideration for reopening in the spring and includes everything from how you—considerations for opening your health department, your mental health counseling services, and communication processes, and athletic considerations. So it's a broad umbrella in that document. So I will leave it there to kind of kick off the discussion and open it up for questions and answers. FASKIANOS: Terrific, thank you very much. That was really comprehensive. And I know we want to invite you all now to ask questions, to share what you're doing on your campuses. So if you want to click on the Participants icon at the bottom of your screen to raise your hand there. You can also click on—if you're on an e-tablet, on the More button in the upper right hand corner to raise your hand there. And we also have a Q&A box where you can type your question if you would prefer. And I see that our good colleague Mojubaolu Okome has her hand raised and if you could identify your institution to give us context, that would be terrific. And please remember to unmute yourself. Q: Thank you. My name is Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome and I teach political science at Brooklyn College, which is a commuter campus and an institution of modest means. So one of my concerns is that it does not seem as safe this—I mean, the presentation is wonderful, but it does not seem to be tailored to the needs of commuter campuses. And anyway, for the spring semester, we're still doing online education mostly. That's one thing. The other thing is if we have a—I know we have to focus on the U.S., but we have international students. And if there is no worldwide strategy on this vaccine, I mean vaccination, I fear that we're just going to be facing increased challenges because people are traveling back and forth. So I wonder the extent to which there's going to be a difference in strategy by the incoming administration on whether or not the U.S. should still do unilateral decision making and administration of whatever strategies there are, or multilateral. Then the other thing is, for poor institutions with commuter students, what kind of strategy is going to work, really? BARKIN: Okay, well, let's start with your first comment about commuter campuses and being online. So if students are online, there still is an opportunity to use social media platforms and your internet to educate your student population about the vaccines, vaccine safety, and strategies, public health strategies for keeping themselves as safe as possible. The other thing you might consider for a commuter campus is a drive-through clinic. So if you have large parking lots, students can sign up and drive through. Now, obviously, that's going to require you to develop some kind of a sign-up structure or engage public health and see if they can help you with the drive-through clinic. Because it is resource intense, and our public health departments are under a lot of strain. So how much assistance they're going to be able to provide institutions of higher education is really in question. And whether you can even secure the vaccine to conduct the mass immunization strategy, again, it involves a pretty significant conversation with your local public health. In regard to the challenges we face with international students, I'll give you one example of a challenge that came up with ACHA in the fall. The Chinese embassy had determined that they wanted to put testing requirements in for Chinese students who intended to return home for the winter recess. And the testing requirement was going to involve test results that were delivered within seventy-two hours of departure, which, in many locations around the country would have been extremely challenging. We heard from our partner institutions that have Chinese students who were struggling with this requirement. We did contact the Chinese embassy and we advocated for them to consider either forgoing or loosening up, changing that requirement to allow for more time. They really didn't change their strategy. But they did say that they were receiving a lot of concerns, not only from colleges and universities, but from Chinese students saying that they were having difficulty meeting the requirement or they were concerned they couldn't get the result in seventy-two hours. Now, fortunately, they did assure us that they would work with every student to help them through the process. But I think it certainly supports the point you're making. One issue is what if a student manages to get one shot of the vaccine here in the U.S.? What happens when they're due for the second shot and they're back home? Will they be able to access that same vaccine? These are questions that we certainly are thinking about, you obviously are thinking about, and it would require a national and international conversation. So I know that isn't an answer to your question, but I think that your concerns are well-placed. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let's go next to Nicolle Taylor. Q: Hi, thank you so much for this opportunity, really appreciate your time. I serve as the chief business officer at Pepperdine University and work closely with Dr. Lucy Larson, who is our medical director. And I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on the first responder description that you gave earlier as to where they fit in the phases. First responders, we have a public safety department on our campus. And so would all of those folks who are—I understand administration is probably separate than officers, but is there even a further differentiation to, EMT service versus dispatch or something like that? BARKIN: Yes. So, again, the decision ultimately rests with your local health authority. But the way we are interpreting the first responder is anyone on your campus who serves in a capacity that they would be first on the scene for a medical emergency or responding to a student injury, accident, illness. So we would include—if your security forces, your police department, are serving in that capacity and have that role, then we would include them in that phase 1A, according to our definition. However, again, I have to say that it largely will be dependent upon how your local health authorities interpret that. But you can certainly advocate for that. And I think the way you advocate is by giving them real examples of how your security staff, police department, EMTs function on your college campuses because public health, all public health folks, may not be aware of how medical services, emergency services are delivered on college campuses. So I see your role as an advocate and as an educator in that regard. Q: That really helps. I apologize, I appreciate that. Can I ask you a follow-up question with a different population? FASKIANOS: Sure, go ahead. Q: We have a very limited number of essential staff who are working on campus, whether that is in a facilities role or in something related like that. Would those folks fit into the phase two definition that you were describing when you talk about teachers and staff? And then I'll certainly yield the floor. Thank you. BARKIN: Yes, there is not—if you go to the ACIP guidance, they spell out kind of whom they include as essential personnel. I think that what we have heard from some public health sources is that there is a real interest and concern about getting our educational systems back up and running. And so to the extent that we can make, again, make a case for the importance of having specific staff, employees engaged in critical functions for the university, you certainly can advocate and make that case, even though you may receive one answer in California and someone in Georgia may receive another answer. It's certainly the advocacy and the explanation behind it is important. And so if you have those relationships established with your local public health, it's worth making sure that you continue to nurture them and stay in close contact with them. But I think there is an interest in that and it would fall under essential workers in the second phase. Q: Thank you. So Richard Arnold, who is a professor at Muskingum University in Ohio, wrote a question: "I live in Ohio was under the impression that college faculty did not fall under the teacher category. Does this vary by state or can you just clarify on that?” BARKIN: Again, it very well may vary by state. I can tell you here in Georgia, faculty have been told that they do fall under the teachers group. I can tell you that in West Virginia they have already started to vaccinate faculty. So it could very well be that Ohio makes a different decision. And that's part of the problem with the rollout. As I said, without a firm national strategy, you have lots of iterations on the theme. And the interpretation for this has been placed in the hands of the states. Now what I will say is this. And again, I'll use Georgia as an example, simply because I'm real familiar with the Georgia public health system. Governor Kemp made a decision to expand 1A to include sixty-five and older. So if you have faculty and staff who are sixty-five and older, you can certainly message to them, in Georgia, at least, 'Hey, this decision has been made by our governor and this is how you can get in line for an appointment for vaccination.' So I think the institution has to stay abreast of the decisions that are being made by the governor, by the state departments of public health, so that if there is an opportunity for folks to get vaccinated who, maybe it's not a faculty designation, per se, but it's some other designation, maybe anyone over the age of fifty-five with another health condition, you want to be putting that information out because the more folks that get vaccinated, the safer your community becomes. We know that. And so this does become an advocacy point. And I think it's more—it's been a struggle to get the vaccine out. And if you— there is information that I've looked at recently where they've actually ranked the states in terms of who's doing a better job of using the vaccine that has already been shipped to them. And there's great variation on that. So I would say that, yes, you need to be in communication with your Ohio officials and say, 'Hey, I've heard that, in other states, faculty are being included in that teaching category and beyond K-12. What's happening here?’ And that may be an advocacy point for you. FASKIANOS: Anita, is ACHA doing any kind of—do you have any plans to do a sort of a tracking project that would sort of collate what all the states are doing to be a resource for the colleges across the country and administrators? BARKIN: We have not developed any kind of toolkit that we are currently using for those decisions. When ACIP—and these decisions were just made recently. And the ACIP just firmed up that phase distribution process in December. And we were at the table and we were advocating for, as I said, anyone in college health and emergency medical services to be included. We also are looking at and making the case for schools, professional health schools, dental schools, medical schools, nursing schools, and saying to them, 'You know, if you vaccinate those individuals, they can help you with mass vaccination clinics.' And that was not spelled out in that phased distribution process. But now we're calling attention to it. And this is another advocacy point for folks on the call. If you have a dental school, if you have health professional schools, on your campuses, you can make that case to your public health authorities and say, 'Look if you help us get these folks vaccinated, they can provide—they will be a pool of human resource for you as you develop you mass vaccination clinics and as we get more vaccine in the pipeline to the public.' But lowering our resistance to vaccines will be critical. And there are populations that are more likely to resist vaccination than others. And we know that the African-American population holds a high degree of skepticism about these things based on historical events. And some—I saw a very good PSA done by Howard University that featured leadership, student leaders, diverse population, talking about why they're getting vaccinated, kind of in front of the camera, to try to build that confidence up in the community so that when that vaccine becomes available, people are ready and willing to accept it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I'm going to go next to Rey Koslowski, who has his hand raised and so if you can accept the unmute prompt. Thank you. Q: Hi, Rey Koslowski, I am a professor of political science at the University at Albany, part of the SUNY system. And we're actually going to have a—I guess, it's a drive-through mass vaccination beginning on our campus tomorrow. BARKIN: Great. Q: Yeah. And things have moved very quickly this week. And seeing messages from our United University Professions, our union, President Fred Kowal, saying basically, that when that definition of teacher was put out to say we want college professors as well. And what has happened is that the state put out its list and it's for professors or faculty who are teaching in-person classes. So that's the way it's working for us. Now, if you are teaching online, no, but for example, our campus, thirty percent of our classes will be in-person or hybrid this spring. But here is the thing that has happened—which, as I said, it went very quickly—but on Tuesday, the I guess it's phase 1A went to including people sixty-five and older with comorbidities. And there's a website where you can sign up, the New York State Department of Health, and friends of mine started trying to get in there. One got an appointment in March. And then, if you missed out and didn't get in, got booted out for whatever reason, you waited and another one got in April, and by Tuesday night, no more slots at our university, and they would get it at our university through the State Department of Health. I'm somewhat skeptical about your suggestion that we might be able to inoculate students because, as I understand it, as this 1A has redefined and opened up to sixty-five and older in so many states, we're up to about one hundred fifty million people who are eligible as this happens, and I don't think the production rate is getting anywhere near that to be able to handle that. My question for you is actually about, in a sense, triaging and thinking about those prioritizations. Could a negative antibody test be utilized in prioritizing? Because, again, the question's that somebody has been infected with the coronavirus, perhaps has been asymptomatic, do they have some immunity ready and perhaps shouldn't be prioritized? For example, again, with some students, if they have a negative antibody test, maybe that they haven't had COVID, for example? BARKIN: Right. Well, that's certainly an interesting thought. However, I can tell you that in discussions with—in presentations that I've heard from the FDA and the CDC, they've said that to do any kind of testing to determine who's qualified to get COVID, to get the vaccine, is not going to be practical or feasible. That it adds another layer of administration, resource, and expense. So while it's an interesting proposition, it's really not a feasible one. I share your concern about how much vaccine will be on the market by April, May, which we would commonly call the end of the spring term. But what we are saying is that the reason that college students should be prioritized is because that is a mass migration event. And that the advantage to vaccinating those students in terms of preventing infection and outbreaks in the communities to which they're returning and the countries they are returning to outweighs concerns about—or outweighs the idea that they're in the main healthy and their chances of sustaining serious consequences as a result of infection are not great. So we are making the argument that these people are highly mobile, they have the opportunity to spread disease, right? So it's a mass migration event. We should prioritize that. Now, whether we'll have enough vaccine on the market, who knows. Moderna has promised eighty million doses for 2021. Pfizer is far less than that. However, we are looking. AstraZeneca is pretty close to ending their clinical trial and may be considered for EUA as early as before the end of this month. I think that we need to get more vaccine in the pipeline, and it's going to take more than just Pfizer and Moderna to do that. So, yes, I hear your concerns. I wonder about the feasibility. But what we're saying is there's good reason to prioritize college students because of because of that migration. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to go to Pearl Robinson next, who chatted her question. But, Pearl, do you just want to ask it? Pearl is at Tufts University. [Pause] Okay, I will read it, then. "As someone who personally benefits from the strategy outlined that seems to be promoting special treatment for privileged educational elite, who stands to lose from higher education's gain?" BARKIN: Okay, I'm not understanding the question. FASKIANOS: I guess it is, by putting the higher ed community first, there are going to be a lot of people in the community that are disadvantaged and are further back in the queue. BARKIN: Okay. Well, first of all— FASKIANOS: Pearl can jump in and clarify if she wants. BARKIN: Well, first of all, I don't know that we can call all members of the campus community privileged and elite. And I think that there is—but there is a good bit of concern about ensuring that there's equity in this distribution process. And so, I think that we're not asking for institutions of higher education to be placed above people, but that there be consideration for where you get the greatest mitigation effect from vaccinating different populations. We are—I would argue that it is going to be tough to penetrate underprivileged populations, populations of color, they—and that is part of the problem here is the, again, the messaging, the communication about safety, the outreach. There's a lot of work to be done to bring people to the table, especially communities where we know there is greater resistance historically to vaccinations, areas where folks are disadvantaged in a number of ways in terms of transportation and shelter. That is a big part of why they put essential workers in so early, because we know the folks who are essential workers, your grocery store employees, the folks who are serving us in fast food restaurants, there are a lot of minorities that are working in those capacities. Custodians, custodial staff. So, that was an attempt to ensure that we get people who are working in those types of situations covered. So it is a very difficult situation to maneuver. This is a complicated issue and nothing short of having a lot of vaccine and enough vaccine is going to remedy it. I can tell you even here—I am seeing a lot of frustration by people trying to—who now are qualified as sixty-five and older, trying to call in to get an appointment. Well, if I'm an economically disadvantaged sixty-five year old or older and I don't have transportation to a clinic that is an hour away, I may get the appointment, but I can't get there. Q: May I speak? BARKIN: Go ahead, I am sorry. Q: Oh, yes, I just had to unmute. I just wanted to—I thought it was important to raise this issue. So I teach at Tufts, and I am African American. Last spring, I heard that our university was trying to get this opportunity that you're talking about. And already, people were saying we're in a situation where this is a zero-sum game, limited amount of vaccines, the communities where the disease is in higher incidence, where you have a problem trying to persuade people to take it, quickly, the available vaccine is taken up. And so it's like the privileged people who know how to lobby and everything, they grab up what's available and then later on, somebody says, 'Well, that's too bad.' And then somebody else says, 'Black lives don't matter.' So I just wanted to put that on the table as we're thinking about this. BARKIN: Right, and if you– Q: And I will benefit from this policy. BARKIN: Well, I think if you—and you probably may very well be aware of this, but if you look at the CDC site under an ACIP site on how they made these determinations, the ethical considerations are outlined there. And many certainly speak to what you are pointing out. And it is a real, difficult, and complicated matter, especially when states are, at this point, not well enough resourced to address those issues. And we can say, 'Oh, yes, these populations should have access to vaccine and we should be able to educate them about the safety issues and certainly talk to them about public health strategies in addition to the vaccine.' But saying that and actually doing that are two different matters. It requires a lot of resources and our states have not been well resourced in that manner, nor has public health. I mean, public health in Georgia, we serve the folks who are those disadvantaged individuals that you are talking about. And for many of them, the transportation issues are overwhelming even to try to get to an appointment. How they access vaccines, how they can—whether it is online, some health departments have online forms. Well, you have to have a computer, you have to have adequate internet. And we haven't even addressed the issue of rural areas where internet capabilities are pretty compromised. So yes, I appreciate your comments and, as I said, the ethical considerations in that discussion is available online through the CDC. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I think we have time for one question. If you all are looking at the Q&A questions, there's some—Craig Klugman has put in there—people have shared what's going on in their communities. And Craig Klugman has cited an article, Inside Higher Ed, that talks about—I'm not going to click on it because I'll be taken out of this—but how faculty and staff outside healthcare fields become eligible for the vaccine, I believe. So I'm going to take the last question from Diana Newton, who is at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who asks that you speak to the health risks to a campus community where the large majority are vaccinated, but a small minority refuse to receive the vaccine for a variety of reasons. And I wanted to tack on to that. I think in your presentation, you talked about asymptomatic. And what do we know really about if you get the vaccine and asymptomatic transmission? Because I think that there's not a lot of clarity around that. It may be there has not been enough—we do not know enough about it. So that would be great. BARKIN: We still do not know enough about that. I just was on a call with, as I said, with leadership in biologics at the FDA. And those three questions that I have in my PowerPoint were the three questions that they said keep them up at night. So they feel that the vaccine will handle the mutations, but they are not sure about the asymptomatic transmission. And when you talk about herd immunity, which is referencing the first part of this. What if we have students who get vaccinated and some who refuse to be vaccinated? What does it take to create a safe environment? I think that, without a doubt, we are going to be wearing masks and social distancing even after folks become vaccinated for some period of time until these questions are answered. What does it take on the herd immunity side? I've heard number percentages from sixty to eighty percent of the population, somewhere in that range, they feel that this rigorous surveillance, rigorous testing can stop. College campuses have set up these robust testing strategies which have been critical, I will tell you, in mitigating against outbreaks and identifying cases early on and containing those cases to a smaller number. And we are advocating for twice a week testing in terms of surveillance and certainly testing students upon arrival. But I think we are going to be in this cycle for a while until we get more experienced with a vaccine and the scientists can determine and our epidemiologists can determine how this is all playing out in terms of asymptomatic transmission and the effectiveness of the vaccine. How long we are protected. FASKIANOS: Well with that, Dr. Barkin, thank you very much for being with us and for your presentation. I have gotten a few questions about whether or not you would be willing for us to circulate it to the group because they would like to share it with their administrators on campus. So that's fantastic. And if there are any other resources you would like to share with me that we can disseminate to the group, we'd love to do that. BARKIN: Yeah. FASKIANOS: But it's really—thank you very much for this. This is obviously—it's changing quickly. BARKIN: [Laughs.] Yes, it is. FASKIANOS: And so we just keep on the news every day. And just as we discover more about this awful disease and how to deal with it. So we really appreciate it. And we hope that all of you will continue to follow us on @CFR_Academic on Twitter and go to CFR.org, ThinkGlobalHealth.org, and ForeignAffairs.com for resources on COVID-19 and much, much more on international affairs. So I hope you're all staying well, good luck with the beginning of your semester, beginning of 2021. And again, Dr. Barkin, thank you very much for being with us. BARKIN: Thank you. I enjoyed it and stay safe, everyone, out there. I'm happy to share the PowerPoint and any additional resources I think would be helpful. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. (END)

Esther Brimmer, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, leads a discussion on international student contributions to academic communities and the U.S. economy, and declining international enrollment. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Erica, and good afternoon to all of you. Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for being with us. Today's meeting is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Esther Brimmer with us today. We have shared her bio in advance with you, so I will give you just a few highlights. Dr. Brimmer serves as the executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Her distinguished career includes three appointments within the U.S. Department of State, serving most recently as the assistant secretary for international organization affairs from April 2009 to 2013. Prior to joining NAFSA, Dr. Brimmer was professor of practice of international affairs at George Washington University's Elliott School. She was also an adjunct senior fellow for international institutions here at CFR, and a senior advisor at McLarty Associates. Previously, she was deputy director and director of research at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and was a member of the faculty there. So Dr. Brimmer, thank you very much for being with us today. NAFSA recently published a report on international student contributions to U.S. colleges and universities. I thought it would be great if you could give us an overview of the report's finding on international students' contributions to the U.S. economy, and talk a little bit about their academic and cultural value to campuses and local communities. BRIMMER: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you today. It is great to be with you. And I look forward to the conversation with everyone here on the webinar. I am very happy to join you to talk about the important contribution of international education and the state of the field at this moment in time. Now, as you know, NAFSA is the world's largest professional association dedicated to international education with around ten thousand members at three thousand five hundred institutions and around one hundred and fifty countries. And we're proud to provide public policy leadership with the field and to advocate for a better world through international education. At NAFSA, we see firsthand how international education is critical to the development of strong diplomacy, global affairs, and technological and medical advancements. International students create jobs, drive research, contribute to our classrooms, strengthen national security, and become fantastic foreign policy assets around the globe. They are good for the U.S. and good for the world.  Now first, let me take a moment to talk about the benefit that international students and scholars bring to their institutions and their classrooms. They bring academic value and talent as well as cultural value to their campuses and communities. Especially for students who are unable to study abroad, the very presence of international students and scholars internationalizes a campus, creating value for their American counterparts. And indeed demand from international students for classes in, let's say science, technology, engineering, mathematics, for STEM classes, actually can help their institutions offer more and a greater variety of courses to all students. And tuition from international students can also help offset budget deficits and provide opportunity for needier students. International students also contribute to the economic vitality of their local communities, and local businesses benefit greatly from their presence.  Economic contributions, which are felt at the institutional and local level, are also felt nationally, and are dramatic when compared to other sectors within the economy. Now, as you indicated in your introduction, last month, NAFSA completed our latest analysis of the economic value of international students and their families. The more than one million international students who studied in United States colleges and universities contributed $38.7 billion and supported nearly 416,000 jobs during the 2019–20 academic year. This is a substantial contribution, considering that international students only make up 5.5 percent of the overall enrollment in U.S. higher education. And indeed, the U.S. Commerce Department currently ranks education as the sixth largest service export of the United States. You can get more data on that and the data that underpins those figures at NAFSA.org/economicvalue. And you can go in and you can actually go examine by your state, by your congressional district, and we also provide an institution-by-institution breakdown, as well. So people on the webinar can go check their own states if they would like to do so. Now, disturbingly, this year marks the first time that our dollar and jobs calculation has declined in the over twenty years that we have been conducting this work. The dollar amount declined 4.4 percent and the number of jobs declined 9.2 percent from last year. We also calculate that the economic value of international students attending U.S. community colleges for the 2019–20 year and just for community colleges, that is about seventy-nine thousand international students, and they contribute $2.3 billion that supported twelve thousand jobs. But these amounts also declined from last year by 9.8 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively. Now, certainly, the COVID-19 crisis of course impacted these economic figures. And while the pandemic was a huge part of the decline, it was only part of the loss. We estimate that the dollar impact of COVID-19 on the contribution of international students during the last academic year was nearly $1.2 billion. The analysis we complete annually is based on an enrollment report called Open Doors, which is funded by the U.S. State Department and conducted by the Institute for International Education (IIE). It is a robust and reliable report that relies on figures from the 2019–20 year. Understandably, we are all interested in how the enrollment has been affected this fall. Not surprisingly, the enrollment decline has continued. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recently reported that as of mid-October, international undergraduate enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities was down nearly 15 percent and international graduate enrollment was down 8 percent. IIE also completes an annual enrollment snapshot survey. The declines evident in this survey are alarming. This fall, overall international student enrollment fell 16 percent, with new international student enrollment falling 43 percent. Roughly half of all the new international students are outside the United States. So if the 43 percent figure falls to 72 percent, when one limits the new international enrollments to only those who are physically in the country now. And we're clearly experiencing a time of unprecedented challenge in international education and the broader field of higher education. Yet we know that international students continue to be a major source of value to the U.S. economy, and we must promote policies that reinvigorate international student mobility. A recent piece in Foreign Affairs—I definitely want to cite Foreign Affairs here. As you know, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, urges the incoming Biden administration to quote, "pursue foreign policy initiatives that can quickly highlight the return of American expertise and competence," end quote. She argues for three specific areas. One of these is an effort to quote, "again, make its universities the most attractive to foreign talent," end quote. Embracing international education is a means to demonstrate the United States is ready to lead once again and to reenter the world stage. It is sound U.S. policy, and it advances outcomes indirectly associated with academic leadership. In fact, one of the companies readying a vaccine for the coronavirus is led by a former international student and another by an immigrant to the United States. NAFSA agrees that the incoming Biden administration should take immediate steps to make the nation more welcoming to international talent. Reversing harmful Trump administration regulations and executive orders, like the proposal to do away with duration of status for students and the travel ban, must be immediate actions. The administration should also jumpstart a strategy to proactively recruit international students, gain market share, and increase the diversity of countries sending students to the United States. Power, in fact, goes even further, arguing that quote, "Biden could start by delivering a major speech announcing that his administration is joining with American universities to again welcome international students, making it clear that they are assets rather than threats," end quote. As with many sectors of the economy, education and international education will only return to normalcy when COVID-19 transmission is brought under control and people feel safe traveling. Yet much harm has been done to the international education sector during the time of the Trump administration, even before COVID. Declines in new international student enrollment reached nearly 11 percent over the three academic years preceding the pandemic, while leaders expressed xenophobic rhetoric and pushed forward harmful policies. While we must be prepared for the current administration to push forward with last minute regulatory policies, I would like to close on a hopeful note. We are happy to hear recent good news from the courts. On Monday, November 30, the federal district court in Washington, DC, granted summary judgment in a case that allows an important experiential learning program, optional practical training, known as OPT, to continue. NAFSA encouraged institutions to sign on to the abacus brief that was filed on behalf of institutions in this case. Then on Tuesday, December 1, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California set aside both the Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security interim final rules altering the H-1B visa program. The court found that the agencies did not have just cause to skip the statutory required notice and the comment period and to issue interim final rules that were immediately implementable. So that's important news for the courts. In closing, I would like to say that international students and scholars make an important contribution to the United States and the world. And turning towards revitalizing that important global connection will be important, good next step for the next administration. Thank you so much for this opportunity. And I look forward to our conversation. FASKIANOS: Thank you so much. That was a terrific overview and we will have to delve into your report for the specifics with the tracker. That is really fantastic. Let us go now to all of you. If you want to click on the participants icon at the bottom of your screen and raise your hand there and I will recognize you, or else you can, if you are on an e-tablet, click on the "More" button on the upper right hand corner and you can raise your hand there. And if you want, you can also just type a question in the Q&A box. If you could please tell us what your affiliation is to give us some context, that would be great. I am going to take the first question from Teddy Samy. Q: Hi, can you hear me? FASKIANOS: We can. Q: Okay, great. So I am Teddy Samy, I am the director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. And so we have had a lot of the issues that you talk about resonate with us, certainly. And one of the challenges we've always had is to bring more international students to our program. And that's largely a funding issue. It has nothing to do with students not wanting to come here. In fact, we get a lot of applicants, but it's surprisingly quite expensive for them to come, and so on. So I was wondering whether you've had a chance to reflect a little bit on what COVID-19 might mean for the inflow of international students, because one of the things that universities are talking a lot about is perhaps thinking more about how to deliver online programs where students may not necessarily have to come to the United States or Canada or the Western world to get an education. Can you tell us a little bit about this? BRIMMER: Indeed. Well first, thank you for your question. Of course, we will be continuing to study and learn from the impact of COVID-19, both immediately and over the long term. So you always want to be humble and recognize that we will learn in the future some things we may not yet see. But I can share with you some of the things we do see at this point. One of them is the integration of virtual learning into existing programs. So that, indeed, one aspect is to see efforts by institutions to use virtual learning to enable, let's say, two professors in two different countries to bring their students together and to have a virtual interchange and virtual courses together even though they're not able to meet together. It is interesting to note that particularly institutions that already had existing partnerships with others institutions around the world have made a rapid pivot to this sort of activity. Now, it is institutions that had preexisting relationships of some form, have sometimes turned to those to form the basis for incorporating virtual learning into their classrooms. So we see that in terms of classroom use, and that may continue. It may be, as say, supplementing or complementary to the in-person experience. Because I think after months of not seeing friends and colleagues, we realize we recognize the importance of in-person experiential learning, being in real life in a real place, and the fundamental nature of human interaction. But that said, using virtual space can, for example, help in preparations before studying abroad. Before students come into a classroom, before they come into the country, being able to use the exchange of information before and after an experience is important. Another is to make international experience as available for those students who could not travel in the first place. I do not know the figures for Canada, but I will say in the United States, only about 10 percent of undergraduate students are able to have an in-person education abroad experience. So even before COVID, we wanted to work on ways to expand access to an international experience. And indeed, the ability to bring in another classroom virtually could be used to help create international experiences for the many students who will never be able to travel abroad. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to take the next question from David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. BRIMMER: President Oxtoby, it is very nice to hear from you. Q: Nice to see you, Esther. BRIMMER: President Oxtoby was a president of my alma mater, Pomona College. Q: Right. BRIMMER: After I was there, I was there in the last century. (Laughs.) Q: We got to know each other then. It is very nice to see you and the great work that you are doing. I wondered if you could comment about your thoughts, and thoughts at NAFSA, about the sensitive political question regarding China, and some of the proposed restrictions on what students might be allowed to come from China, what they might be allowed to study, and so forth. Any thoughts about that? BRIMMER: Thank you for your question, and indeed it is one of the great questions of our time. The evolving relationship between the United States and China is one of the great international issues and the return of China to the global stage, again, is one of the world historical changes. The continued evolution of the United States as a multiethnic, dynamic society is also one of the great world historical changes that continues. So there's some really epic issues here. That said, one of the most important aspects where these changing relationships are playing out is in the educational space, because of the relationship between the United States and China on education. First, we are in knowledge economies, and the ability to educate and train is fundamental to being able to succeed in the future. Also, as many of you know, Chinese students and scholars make up the largest single group of international students and scholars in the United States. Of the roughly one million international students in the United States, 50 percent are from China and India. About 370,000 or so are from China, so it is the largest single group. That said, Chinese students and scholars make important contributions to classrooms and to research just as students and scholars from around the world to do. That said, you are seeing major competition in knowledge-based areas and real concerns about issues related to research and both the openness of research and also, the effect of the Chinese coming on campuses through some of the student associations. There's the controversy of the Confucius institutes, all of which play into a question about how one addresses important national security concerns related to research, related to concerns about whether there's espionage involved in research, these are very serious issues. But that said, the best way forward is really that continued work between the academic community and the U.S. federal government precisely because their long standing ways of managing classified information for the important research that's handled on campuses. And campuses themselves want to have vital intellectual environments and also want to be part of the solution. So I think it's important that we really look carefully at what's actually the issue, not to paint all students and scholars as threats, but rather to really use really thoughtful and analytical understanding of where the actual concern is. Faculty members, for example, need to abide by their own rules about, let's say, reporting funding from other sources. I would flag that, again, the importance of really being targeted and focused in really understanding the nature of research is important because some of the proposals, such as the idea of trying to ban all research from everybody who has some contact, let's say, with the Chinese Communist Party, how that's defined is important, because there again, you may find there are in a society that is very statist, that there may be family members who are caught up in that. So one has to be targeted, and this is where legislators, regulators, and leaders of institutions really need to drill down. And so I encourage greater dialogue amongst the different parties, rather than policy that may be planned within regulatory issues without really understanding the academic community. FASKIANOS: Great, thank you. Let's go to Masoud Kavoossi. He has written in the Q&A box, "Do you feel universities are more open to international graduate students from countries targeted specifically by the current administration, China, Iran, etc.?" And he is—sorry, I just want to give his affiliation—he's a professor at Howard University. BRIMMER: Thank you. Thank you for your question. And indeed, I think that, of course, there are thousands of colleges and universities in the United States, and so they take a variety of views. But I will say that I think there's a sense that the exchange of knowledge is important for international understanding and for the advancing of human wellbeing. Some of these international consortia that are working on developing the vaccines are great examples, good examples of this. And so actually, I think many educators are aware of the benefits of greater educational cooperation, particularly from countries that may be of human rights concerns or have other issues which create foreign policy challenges. But that said, that recognizing that actually, some of the ways of building better understanding, of understanding societies better, is precisely through education. Having less contact, not learning languages, does not help us understand what is going on in other countries any better. Now the use of sanctions and other measures are important foreign policy tools, but again, they should be targeted, focused, designed for purpose. The original sweeping travel bans that were launched in 2017 were not targeted and focused for purpose. So that's where again, the foreign policy community and the leading architects and implementers of foreign policy need to say what's actually objective and really be targeted in their actions, such that you don't undermine the greater cooperation that can allow for more openness and ideas in more societies. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to go next to Annelise Riles, if you could unmute yourself. Q: Hi, Esther, nice to see you again. I am Annelise Riles, I am associate provost for global affairs at Northwestern University. I have a very technical, in the weeds question for you and a big picture question. So the technical question is one that is obviously of great importance to all of us in the universities right now, which is whether the INS rules that we've had in the fall that have allowed international students to remain in the country, even though their classes are online will continue into the spring. And I'd like to know whether you have any information or ideas about that, because it's critical for us. And then the big picture question is about universities as emerging actors in global governance. I mean, it seems to me that with the U.S. and some other nations sort of retreating from multilateralism and the global stage over the last few years, universities have really stepped in and filled the gap in a number of ways, through cooperation around issues like environmental sustainability, innovation, peace and security, and so on. And now with what looks like something of a return to multilateralism in the United States, I'm wondering what your vision is for us as a collective global actor going forward. Thank you. BRIMMER: Oh, thank you for both questions. First, good to hear from you, too. Of course, Northwestern is a very big actor in international education. On the first question, and just to share with the majority of us, the question is we are all waiting to see whether the dispensation allowing international students to develop online education will be continued. We are tracking this issue. I have no immediate new updates, but that is definitely one of the things that we are raising, because it's absolutely crucial that it be extended and that it's imminent. So we will be—as soon as we have useful information to share—we will post that on our website. We keep regulatory updates, because we know institutions need to know that soon and students need to know that soon. But I don't have a new update as of Tuesday morning for you, because these things do move [inaudible]. But believe me, that is definitely on our radar. On your larger question, indeed, universities are important aspects for global governance, because many of the issues do have a scientific underpinning. And universities are the centers for vital research and the cooperation among them is crucial to come up with the solutions that then the political community can then build upon. And you've cited two great areas. One is climate change. And the questions of understanding climate change, the worldwide research on this area is underpinned by thousands of experts working on these issues and giving us the scientific grounding that then, again, diplomats and policymakers can build on. The other is medical. And we would have said this before, but it's even clearer very much as we look at, for example, the understanding of the COVID virus, understanding this new virus. And in both of those, universities are central to creating the body of knowledge that then diplomats build off of.  And how does that happen? So for example, as we know, the body of knowledge and then looking at actions by the World Health Organization, looking at the objectives are built, again, off understanding scientific knowledge. One of the first ones will be on the sharing of the vaccine issue, where you have both the intersection of the policy point of view, and having the United States maybe participate in that would be a development, and what is needed for actually to have global distribution of vaccines. So that interplay between scientific knowledge and policy is so important. And I would hope that as we look towards a new administration, thinking about how it approaches these issues, having that scientific grounding, is crucial. And so a vision for universities is to be at the table, to be part of the advisory community that helps leaders to make those choices and for universities to be doing that cutting edge research that's asking the next question, the question after that, that then policymakers can draw on. I will say, when I was in government, I was thrilled to be assistant secretary for international organizations, because world health does come under that portion of the State Department. And it was great to be able to go—I actually did go to Atlanta while I was assistant secretary because we wanted to go talk to CDC, and hear from experts about some of the issues that we were addressing in global fora. So understanding and being the channel for expertise and bringing that knowledge to the policymaking community is a great role for colleges and universities in the United States and around the world. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to go next to Jim Harrington, who is at Nashua Community College. He wrote his question, but Jim, I want to give you the opportunity to ask it yourself as I think it would be clearer coming orally. Q: Thank you very much, Irina. What I am referring to here is the place of international students and the long immigration history of the United States. Not all of these immigrants were students of course. But I'm referencing—you mentioned New Hampshire—I'm referencing skilled workers that were brought into the country in the 1820s to work in textile mills, and actually to build the machines to steal the intellectual capital of the British and put them to work here in our textile industries. The same thing happened in the 1890s with German steel workers that U.S. firms brought to this country at their expense. And we continue to do that. But this intellectual tradition seems to me to be a part of that in a new age. Okay, clearly, with all of the virtual education we had, and would you not? That is the question, would you not place this international student policy in that same category of economic and immigration policy? BRIMMER: I would say there may be some elements that are similar and some elements that are different. And again, I have not done the same research on the nineteenth century analogies to be able to make sure that exactly I'm following the same path that you identify, but I would maybe suggest some areas of similarity and some areas of difference. Some areas of similarity, indeed, is recognizing that having skilled people come into the United States is of great benefit to the economy. Having people come as students, or come not as students, but who come and bring their energy and talents and wanting to contribute them to the society, that is beneficial. And indeed, learning from innovations around the world is beneficial to the country as a whole. So in that sense, there is a continuity in the idea that bringing in talented people who are maybe aware of new processes, or new ways of doing things, or the intersection of those people with people here, has created a rich environment both culturally, as well economic. So there is a longer tradition there. But I would say one of the interesting areas is the exchange as well. Such that, because of modern travel and modern communications, immigrants no longer have to, let's say, cut themselves off from their home countries as they might have done one hundred and fifty years ago, two hundred years ago. So that means that you can sometimes have benefits for the United States and for home countries, as well. So that you may have international students who set up a business in the United States and set up a business in their home country. So that you are able to have—it is less of a brain drain and more of regenerating and generating connections on both sides of that relationship. So the international students and scholars may serve as bridges to prosperity both home and away. FASKIANOS: Thank you, I am going to take the next question from John Murray, who is director of international engagement at Hesston College in Kansas. Q: Hello, good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be on this call, and thank you for your work at NAFSA. We are certainly among the colleges who benefit greatly from international students. Our current president of our college is a former international student, as is the current chair of our board of directors. Globalization is indeed an important part, and obviously, COVID has impacted us greatly. Before COVID hit, and this is anecdotal rather than data driven, but we have then from the data we have observed an increase in students in other countries, Canada, Australia, China. We had an experience with two Ethiopian students who had committed to come to Hesston College, and then de-committed because they were offered full-ride scholarships to a university in China. And I'm wondering about what kind of policies we might look at. Obviously, we are able to provide full-ride scholarships, but what policies might be available to keep our universities financially competitive with colleges and universities from around the world? Because indeed, we do want to keep the brain/creative power coming this direction. And we were beneficiaries of a CAST program a number of years ago, and that was a government policy. So just wondering about your comments about policies and things we could advocate for in that way. BRIMMER: Great, thank you for your question. Because, indeed, many countries also recognize the benefit of having international students and have developed national strategies to encourage international students to come. So our good friends in Canada and Australia and elsewhere have seen increases in the number of international students in 2018-19, before COVID. And so that is important because countries have said, we want to be sure to have international students. You saw the United Kingdom actually change a policy, they had their equivalent of OPT in the UK, which was their post-graduation employment, which they had discontinued and reinstated because they realized it was an important draw for international students and they want to have international students and they are looking at increasing the number of international students. So, indeed, some of the things that would be beneficial, first would be for things to be assessed by incoming administration, would be to actually have a national strategy on international education. As I say, it is already the sixth largest service export of the United States. We handle it in several different departments. So it would be actually really beneficial, for example, to either have at the State Department or at the White House, a coordinating team, a mechanism, to bring together the different departments. Whether it's the State Department, which works through the embassies on really getting the word out and getting information out about coming to the United States to study, but also the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, other aspects that are all part of helping support having international students here. That would be really helpful. Another area would be to encourage greater diversity in sending countries, and, indeed, there have been initiatives in the past that—actually, back when he was vice president—Biden supported the 100,000 Strong in the Americas and other aspects that encourage greater exchange with students. So we would see coming up with some sort of national strategy would be helpful in terms of bringing together the wide resources of the federal government to help encourage international students here. And in the short term, we recognize that the higher education sector has been profoundly impacted by COVID, as well. And we would hope to see that in whatever stimulus bill may be moving forward, that there's an element for higher education, which indirectly will also help those who are on campus would include international students, as well as obviously American students and administrators and others. So dealing with the immediate but also really seeing this as a holistic policy of the United States would be an important development for the future. FASKIANOS: Thank you. The next question is written, it comes from Pamela Waldron-Moore. "Thank you for sharing U.S. perspectives on international education. As a former international student, I am happy to learn that the United States acknowledges the benefits of IE. I'm currently professor of international and comparative studies at an HBCU and wonder if there's an opportunity for funding in the area of internationalizing the curricula at small institutions, as well as promoting, through access to data, the expansion of education in global interest areas, such as climate change, AI, knowledge production, etc." She is at Xavier University and she is the chair of the political science department. So over to you. BRIMMER: Great, thank you. Thank you for your question. And there may be some various different resources that might be relevant, and examples that might be useful. Indeed, while earlier I was talking about our research in big research universities, there are many different ways international students and scholars contribute to the academic life of institutions of a variety of sizes. And so one of the areas I will flag is, where there's some additional resources on our website that might be useful for you, is something called the assignment award named for Senator Paul Simon, who was a longtime advocate of international education. Each year, NAFSA gives out peer-reviewed selected awards for internationalizing the campus, both comprehensive for across the board internationalization, and spotlight awards for specific programs. And we've given those to a wide variety of institutions, large and small, community colleges to big research universities. Each year, we put out a publication that details what they did. So you can actually see from different institutions saying how did they take a particular program at an institution that might be like mine and say, what examples can I draw from that? Because from what we've seen is that institutions which have the institutional commitment, can actually make choices that can help support greater international access, and not all of them necessarily draw large research. Those are some specific examples. We have been publishing it for eighteen years, so you can go back and look at examples that might specifically be helpful. Another area, as you indicated, is the role of trying to—as we all do as academics—ask questions. And so I'll say another resource that is not out yet but coming, is one that I'll say for NAFSA, we have our NAFSA fellows, and the current NAFSA fellows that just started—they run for eighteen months—will be looking at sustainability, and sustainability in climate change and international education. And so we try to say with that discrete program, how can we help generate some working papers that might be useful for the community, as well. So those are two resources from NAFSA that are up on that website. But I think that looking at, drawing on these examples because a variety of institutions as they say of many different sizes have been able to create space for international programs and opportunities for their students and scholars. FASKIANOS: Great. I am going to take a follow-up question from Daniel Kristo, who is assistant dean of graduate enrollment management at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. "As a follow-up, has NAFSA explored funding incentives, including government subsidy, and perhaps advocate for its U.S. university members to entertain universal international graduate student tuition discount, especially since international students do not qualify for FAFSA and need U.S. citizen cosigners for private U.S. loans. BRIMMER: Indeed, international students do not qualify for FAFSA, in particular. While we have advocated for greater opportunities and support for international education, funding for international education, and supporting international students that come to the United States, we have not advocated for that particular program, but in our Connecting Our World, [inaudible] we talk about some of the specific programs to help greater funding for international students. And when we were looking at the support, again, for the impact of the pandemic, we also wanted to be sure that international students and scholars were not inadvertently excluded from support on campuses. And as you know, many colleges and universities in the U.S. actually went into their own pockets to support international students, especially in the spring when the virus first hit, campuses closed, people weren't able to go home. And at that point by the month of April, just the month of April, we did a survey and at that point, institutions had spent something like $638 million of their own money to support international students and scholars. So institutions need more support to help even beyond the crisis period. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to take the next question from Karthika Sasikumar, professor at San Jose State University. And the question is—and I thought, Esther, before we started, you talked about the book that NAFSA has just released on social justice and international education, so this ties with that. "Do you find that the current discussion of diversity in U.S. higher education takes note of the contributions of international students?" So maybe you can tell us about that book and tie it in. BRIMMER: Thank you. Thank you for the question. Indeed, it is exciting in a moment of great social questioning, which is what actually leads to greater justice, to see that educators are very much part of this discussion. As Irina has mentioned, NAFSA has a new book out on social justice and international education. It is a book, there are over twenty-five authors, and it brings together both practitioners and scholars. It has been in the works for the past couple of years, and we brought it out this year, but it tries to look at how we incorporate questions of social justice into international education in our work as educators. It includes everything from theories of teaching to understanding cross-cultural dialogue to practical issues of designing programs for writing and different things. So there is a rich mix of things in the book, because we think that international educators have a contribution to make, we've long said they have a contribution to make to greater international understanding and social understanding. Those are precisely the questions and the skills we need now, to be able to talk about how we talk to each other. How do we listen to each other? And the skills we have developed with bringing together international students is also helpful on campus. We also see really interesting developments. So we see, for example, we see chief diversity officers and chief international officers begin to realize that they may have things to say to each other. There may be programs they want to do together when they are thinking about making campuses welcoming places for international students and U.S. students. So I think international educators really bring real skills to that, some of the materials we have been publishing we want to bring to that discussion. It is one of the great conversations and as educators, we are in the middle of it. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. All right. I am going to go next to Elsa Dias who has written a question. She is a professor at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado. She started her adventure in higher education as an international student, and then in graduate school she represented graduate students in the department. She has seen the effects of this administration on international students and seeing the alienation of this group. "How can universities and community colleges educate their respective campuses on the contribution of these individuals?" BRIMMER: Thank you for the question. It sounds like I should be asking you that question based on your experiences, as well. But just some thoughts, some of things that you can see on campuses, and indeed, some of the Simon award winners I mentioned earlier are examples of doing exactly that. So that's a source for additional examples. But some of the things relate to within departments, looking for opportunities to bring international students' experiences into discussions, into planning seminars to bring their voices directly into some of the classroom discussions. But also on campus, finding ways for international students to more visibly demonstrate their contributions to the local community. So sometimes, it is the ability to talk about their own countries in campus activities, to be able to help organize and contribute to cultural and other activities on campus, and to interact with the community, being able to work with local business leaders about the contribution of international students, as consumers but also as people who enrich the community. We see examples of international students and scholars, for example, who are volunteering in local schools because of their language skills, and finding ways where students may be interacting more with local communities, as well. And then inviting in communities who might not otherwise go to the international house to be able to help take the international students out around the campus to make sure that they're getting to know students around the campus. These are all parts of elements that might be useful. But as I said, our Simon award winners have a lot of really specific examples about what they've done on their own campuses. FASKIANOS: Next question comes from Tom Roehl, professor of international business at Western Washington University. "Our mostly undergraduate university emphasizes six-month exchanges of students with partner universities, which allows for lower-cost study both ways. It gives an opportunity to increase international student levels in schools not on the radar school of applicants and gives an option to establish and deepen institutional relationships. So, what would you think about it? Can there be a national policy to make this strategy more effective for students in a similar situation?" BRIMMER: Thank you for your question. And indeed, you've identified one of the important trends, which is the greater use of partnerships. Indeed, one of the other books NAFSA has published is actually on partnerships in international education that came out earlier this year. Indeed, because we are seeing examples like the one you describe, where two institutions establish a longer-term relationship so that students go between the institutions for a more extended period of time, year after year after year, so that they're able to build longer-term relationships. And indeed, many institutions have found that to be a productive model. That could be a component of a larger national strategy. It may not fit all institutions, but it can provide a real sense of stability and building a relationship for many institutions. And this point you raised about being able to have education abroad experiences for, let's say, a full semester, is a great benefit. We recognize many students are not able to take that amount of time, but finding ways to make it more possible, given the responsibilities students may be carrying at home, is an attractive model, again, providing that longer-term ability to stay more than a few weeks. And again, that can be difficult, but sometimes those partnerships can provide the structure that makes it accessible for more students. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question comes from Mercedes Ponce, assistant vice president for academic planning and accountability at Florida International University. "What are your thoughts on moving the discourse toward creating a community of lifelong learners and building bridges to prosperity, as you mentioned, rather than focusing strictly on recruitment of international students?" BRIMMER: Thank you for your question. Indeed, Florida International University is very active in the internationalization space and you publish a lot on that area as well, so I appreciate the question and your perspective. One of the exciting things I think that we often see from international students and scholars is that you become, your experience, studying in another country, creates a lifelong interest in that country. And one of the skills that we talk about when we talk about international education includes a curiosity, a willingness to deal with the uncertain and the unknown, which can be part of an attitude towards life. And that may lead you to future opportunities, looking for future opportunities. And so looking at how one can create more opportunities, even in the workplace, for these international students is really interesting. And some of you on this call are probably on the forefront of working on this, but we do see interesting examples of employers who are working with educational institutions to both have their workforce trained, but also to create opportunities. And some of them are these international opportunities that make them able to work, let's say, with an international company that's investing in the U.S. International education can create those habits of mind of curiosity that really stand you in good status for seeing life is unpredictable, and being able to deal with the uncertain is a skill we're all having to acquire if we don't already have it. FASKIANOS: I have a follow up on that. Are you at NAFSA working on connecting international educators with workforce development? Specifically, forging the partnerships with the private sector, so that those skills can be brought to the fore. BRIMMER: Indeed, it is really interesting. There is a real natural link between people in higher education and those who hope to employ people who come out with the skills in higher education. Indeed, one of our other reports that we brought out earlier this year was a project jointly with an organization called Emsi and NAFSA, which actually looks at global workforce development. And NAFSA has worked on this issue in different ways, but in this latest report, we worked with Emsi, which was able to examine—and, again, use big data here—examine both job applications and job requirements. It is what employers were asking for and what people were putting on their resumes and go through large amounts of data on this. And what was fascinating to see was that employers were looking for the sorts of skills that we also match with international education, looking for the critical decision-making skills, understanding of the larger world, the sorts of things that people need for long-term management in senior positions. And so we are quite interested in this relationship between the business community, both large and small, and working with educators. This report, which just came out a couple months ago, is another example to contribute to that dialogue. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Any other questions? I think you covered so much ground, Esther. I wonder if you could just take this opportunity to leave us with some closing thoughts. And maybe leave us on an optimistic note, too. (Laughs.) BRIMMER: Yes, yes. First off, I will borrow this from our longtime colleague who reminded us that the modern university of the past on hundred and fifty years, or the university of the past thousand years, that universities are some of the great human institutions that have survived for centuries. And that having centers of learning has been crucial for societies overcoming change. And so we will have a crucial role to play in rebuilding after the pandemic, but also on these great questions I talked about earlier, about great countries figuring out of their relationship to each other, tackling the big issues, whether it's climate change or the rise of urban populations, the urbanization of the human species, learning how we get along, the fundamental philosophical questions of life. Institutions of higher education are fundamental to answering all of those. And so I think what I'm finding exciting is hopefully now we're seeing a return to respect for knowledge, expertise, and learning. We are part of the solution. The educational community is crucial to advancing social justice and human wellbeing and we are needed now more than ever. So while on a daily basis, sometimes we feel we are grappling with such life and death issues, that it's so hard on a daily basis dealing with the pandemic, but recognizing that what we do is crucial to the future. That is my final thought. FASKIANOS: That is a fantastic thought on which for us to end. Thank you so much, Dr. Brimmer, it has been great to have you with us. We appreciate everything you are doing both at NAFSA and what you do in government service. So, thank you. We circulated in advance of this webinar the link to your report. So I hope you all—I commend it to all of you. There are obviously so many amazing resources on NAFSA's website at NAFSA.org. So you should look for the reports and books that Dr. Brimmer referenced and we will also send a follow-up note with links, as well. You can follow her on Twitter @EstheratNAFSA, so I encourage you to do so. Also follow us @CFR_Academic on Twitter and please continue to come to CFR.org, ThinkGlobalHealth.org, and ForeignAffairs.com for resources and direct your students there. I hope you all are having a good end of semester such as it is, and we hope that you are able to enjoy the holidays safely. And we look forward to reconvening in 2021. We will be circulating—we will be reconvening in the new year with a new slate of topics. So happy holidays and, Esther, thank you again. BRIMMER: Thank you. (END)

Charles Hopkins, director of teaching and learning at CFR; Jean E. Abshire, associate professor of political science and international studies at Indiana University Southeast; and Steven Elliott-Gower, associate professor of political science at Georgia College, lead a presentation of World101, CFR’s multimedia library of regional and topical issues that explain the fundamental concepts of international relations and foreign policy. FASKIANOS: Thank you so much, Erica, and good afternoon to all of you. Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Today's meeting is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic, and as always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. CFR is committed to serving as a resource for educators and students of all disciplines by helping develop the skills and knowledge about the world needed to prepare for a wide range of careers and participate in an informed citizenry. Today, we're delighted to have Charlie Hopkins, Jean Abshire, and Steven Elliott-Gower, to present an overview of World101, which is CFR’s multimedia library of regional and topical issues explaining the fundamental concepts of international relations and foreign policy. Charlie Hopkins is director of teaching and learning at CFR where he works with instructors in both high school and higher education to use the Council's educational resources. He began his career teaching history and social studies both in the United States and abroad. Jean Abshire is an associate professor of political science and international studies at Indiana University Southeast, where she also coordinates the International Studies Program. Dr. Abshire teaches a range of introductory courses in these areas as well as advanced courses on European politics, Asian politics, nationalism, comparative public policy, and seminars on topics including globalization, genocide and political grassroots movements. Steven Elliott-Gower is an associate professor of political science at Georgia College. Dr. Gower teaches honor classes in international relations, international political economy and global issues utilizing high impact practices such as role-playing simulations. Thanks, all, for being with us. I'm going to first start with Charlie Hopkins to give us an overview of World101. So, Charlie, over to you. HOPKINS: Thank you so much, Irina. I'm just going to share a couple of slides so folks can see what the site looks like. So, as Irina said, we created World101 as a way to help students and everybody understand how the world works. Because we know that understanding is so important, not only for students' studies, but also for them as citizens, and in the careers that they'll have in our rapidly changing world. As we said, it's about teaching the fundamentals of foreign policy and international relations. And we approach that by trying to find ways to tell stories about those topics that are engaging and interactive for students and for all learners. As was mentioned at the top, CFR is a nonpartisan organization; we have a nearly hundred-year history of that. Our goal with World101 is not to suggest solutions or to argue a particular position, we're looking to equip students with the knowledge they need so that they can participate in those conversations and to have informed conversations about that sort of thing. We see World101 as being useful both inside and outside of the formal classroom, as well as for everybody's life and work. One great example of that: we heard from a former editor of Newsweek recently, and an editor of Newsweek is someone you expect to have a really broad base of knowledge, but he said, even for him, sometimes he'll come across things that he feels like he needs to go back and have a quick primer on something. And he's found World101 to be really great for that, even for him in his role where he's dealing with these kinds of issues all the time. Also, with an academic audience, I always like to underline World101 is completely free, so you don't need to ask students to shell out on top of their textbook costs. And there's no account or login needed, so you don't have to coordinate with your library or pass out passwords. Students can access it no matter where how they are going online to get to it. So World101 is organized into units. The first unit is what we call global era issues, and these are the kinds of things that are animating the headlines every day, that are faced by world leaders and policymakers, and that are shaping our lives. You can see here a list of all the modules that we've got. And these are things—climate change, migration, trade—that are in the headlines all the time. We also in the last few months have added another module for our most recent global era issue, COVID-19. And there we highlight both some of the things we've already written that have turned out to be quite relevant for COVID-19, and we've also produced some new lessons specifically about this new issue for us. Unit two, "Regions of the World," takes a look at some of the themes and challenges that different parts of the world face. We've divided the world into six regions, and for each region, we look at that region through six lenses that are listed here. It's a really great setup, because it allows students to really quickly get an overview of a lot of different kinds of issues and the themes in different areas, and it really promotes comparison. So, if you wanted to look at—what is—what are economics in East Asia like, and how are they similar or different from economics in Africa? What are the issues in that in that lens that each one, each region faces, it's a really great opportunity to introduce that. Unit three has my favorite title of all, "How the World Works and Sometimes Doesn't." We're having this webinar at a really great moment for World101, we're right in the midst of rolling out unit three. We released "Building Blocks," which is the first module, which talks about things like sovereignty and nationalism last week, and tomorrow, we'll be launching "Forms of Government," which is the second module. Over the next few weeks, we'll also be releasing modules on global governance and conflict. So, if you want to know when those come out, sign up for the World101 email newsletter, and I'll say more about that at the end. We've got three more module—pardon me—three more units coming up. Early in 2021, we will release a unit on historical context for foreign policy and international relations. And then we also have units coming up on approaches and tools of foreign policy, and one on the making of U.S. foreign policy, of how that policymaking process works here in the United States. So that's kind of the big overview of how it's structured, but I want to go a little deeper into one module just to give you a sample of what these resources really look like. So, I want to go into "Globalization," which is one of our unit one modules. And so every module starts off with an introductory video, it's something that can stand alone, they tend to be—we try to keep them short, which makes them really flexible—three to five, sometimes six to seven minutes. So, they're not going to take over an entire class period, they're not going to make up an entire assignment between classes for students, you can add them to something you're already doing. So the video can stand alone, or it can serve as an introduction to the rest of the module. And so in that spirit, I wanted to take about three minutes to watch this video together. So, Erica, if you could do that, thank you. HOPKINS: Every day, we knowingly or unknowingly experienced globalization, the worldwide movement of people ideas, money, goods, data, drugs, weapons, computer and biological viruses, greenhouse gases, and more. This isn't new, people and goods have always moved around the world. The Silk Road, a network of trade routes stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to East Asia, facilitated the spread of fabrics, spices, art, weapons, technology, ideas, and disease over thousands of years. What is new, however, is the scale, velocity, and range of these flows across borders. Think about the speed at which an infectious disease like Ebola or Zika can spread around the world, or the reach of a financial contagion, like the crisis of 2008. Look at your smartphone and think about the global coordination it took to produce. The interconnectedness of the modern world allows ideas, behaviors, styles, products, and news to spread more quickly and broadly, than in any other period of history. But globalization's effects are complex. What represents an upside for some people might represent a downside for others. Technology, for example, allows billions of people to contact friends and access news from around the world. International supply chains, the networks that turn raw materials into finished items, produce and distribute goods more quickly and cheaply than ever. But the pace of technological innovation has also led to the automation of manufacturing processes, which eliminates jobs. Trade is another example. Between 1970 and 2015, global exports and imports of goods each multiplied more than fifty times. More imports lead to increased consumer choices and reduced prices, and more trade can strengthen ties between trading partners and promote peace, security, and growth. But more trade opportunities and technological advances mean many corporations choose to shift their operations to countries where the labor and natural resources are cheaper, and the individuals and companies that can take advantage of international resources experienced outsized gains, which widens the growing gap between the rich and the poor. The effects of globalization, both negative and positive, are a reality. No one can opt out entirely. But governments have many options for responding. They can choose how open or closed they want to be towards trade, investment, visitors, immigrants, refugees, internet traffic, and more. Governments can also contend with globalization through collective rather than national responses. A set of international institutions and other arrangements has emerged to manage globalization. Although some countries view globalization as a threat to local identity, culture, or social and political norms, no country can be entirely self-sufficient. The challenge is for individual governments and the world collectively to promote globalization's benefits, while effectively helping the individuals and countries that globalization hurts the most. So that's the introductory video for the module. And as we say, that sort of sets the stage, but we've got some other lessons as part of the module as well. For example, we have one called, "It Takes a Village to Make Your Medicine," where we explain the global supply chain behind many, many pharmaceuticals, and talk about how that's emblematic of globalization. And it's not just text that explains that, you can see we use graphs quite frequently, and we use infographics to try to make these stories visual, as well as written. And this is a great example of one of those stories, we started working on this maybe a couple of years ago, thinking, oh, this is a fun fact, people probably don't know much about it. And since COVID-19 has come around, and we've all become experts on vaccine production, we're finding out all of this in real time about how things are researched in one country, and then you have a clinical trial in another and then manufacturing is a third country and a third place. So, it's become newly relevant as events have overtaken what we designed back then. So, it's those kinds of connections of explaining our world. So another great example, is we have this timeline on two hundred years of global communication. And so looking at the historical background of some of these—and this is a great example, we always try our best to explain why these kinds of issues really matter to folks. Sometimes, we look at this and think, oh, this is for professors and policymakers. And what does this matter to me? And so we try to take it to things that are part of our everyday lives—social media, smartphones—how might that be different from a world in which your fastest method of communication is a written letter? So that's another example of a lesson that's part of this module.  Every module also closes with a multiple-choice assessment. And these are just meant for students to check their understanding, it tells them right away if they get the question right, and if they're off base, it directs them back to the part of the module where they may have missed something. So there's a chance for students to check their own understanding. We also have a number of instructor resources, collection of essay and discussion questions for each module that are there for you to use or to adapt and use as inspiration. We also, for each World101 module, have some links to related Model Diplomacy cases. And for those who don't know, Model Diplomacy is CFR's other major educational product, which is a simulation of foreign policy decision-making through eighteen case studies now. And so if you really enjoyed the module, but want to go deeper, you want to have an active learning exercise for your students, Model Diplomacy can be a great thing to check out. And Steve will speak in a minute as an experienced Model Diplomacy user as well as a World101 user. We also put together a reading list. This is not meant to be an academic reading list, but this is still roughly at the level of World101, but for students who want to go a bit deeper. So, we're looking at articles written by journalists, we're looking at books, podcasts, documentary videos, as well as a lot of the other resources that are produced here at CFR, but that are not part of the World101 library specifically. So there's the URL for our website again, as I said before, if you go to any page on our website, at the bottom, there's the opportunity to sign up for our email newsletter, you can hear about the launch of "Forms of Government" tomorrow, and the subsequent launches of other modules as they become available. We're also active on social media, there's our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram handles. And we'd love to hear from you, as well, our email address is there, [email protected]. We always love getting feedback from instructors, from people who work in academia, because we really want this to be useful, and we want to hear questions and comments about what we're doing. So I'll stop there, and let Jean and Steve speak a little bit about their experiences, and then be back for questions and discussion. FASKIANOS: Great. Thanks, Charlie. So now let's go to Jean and Steve, to talk about your experience of how you think about teaching World101 either as a full course or using pieces from different modules to supplement your syllabi. So, Jean, why don't we go first to you, and then we'll turn to Steve. ABSHIRE: Thank you for inviting me to join you today. I think I might be a World101 fan girl by now. I am on sabbatical now, and so I've only had one semester really of being able to use the modules, but I have a lot of ideas about how to implement them in future courses as well, but I will concentrate on what I've done thus far. As Irina said early on, I am at Indiana University Southeast, which is a public regional, primarily undergraduate university as part of the Indiana University system. But we are in metropolitan Louisville, Kentucky, although we have a lot of students from small rural towns in southern Indiana who are not very globally minded. So that's my context. I've used World101 modules in two classes thus far, intro to international relations and intro to international studies. In intro to international relations, the portion of the course where I used it was entirely online, and I basically just gave the students the modules and told them to go it. And then to confirm their attention to the modules, the assessments that Charlie just mentioned, I had the students do screenshots of their module screen at the end of each one and then submit those screenshots. Largely as a checkoff, obviously, I suppose they could have shared them, although each picture looked a little bit different. But Charlie also mentioned that they are formative, students can go back and retake the assessment as many times as necessary, but it will drive them back to information in the modules to try to make sure that they actually learn it. And then I also had the—my cat is just shown up, sorry. I also had the students engage in an online discussion where they were asked to integrate ideas and information from actually a couple of the modules relating to international political economy. And as part of that they were required to cite evidence from the learning and the modules. And they did that with kind of, honestly, a surprising amount of success, I was quite pleased with it. And I kind of contrast their performance on the World101 sections with the data I have from the videos that I made for them on other topics, where unfortunately, the viewership of them was not quite what I would have hoped. I think that the sort of diverse elements of presentation from videos to charts and graphs and a lot of nice concrete examples makes the World101 modules really appealing. I also used it, as I said, in my intro to international studies class, where I, that was an in-person teaching experience. And for that, I pulled out segments from the modules, and that's one thing that I really liked about them as well, is you don't have to use an entire module. You can just pull out one piece and use it in class or outside of class independently. And the students responded to it really well, had a very fruitful discussion from the individual segments that I used. Also, in that particular class, we have a heavy concentration on critical thinking and practicing those skills and students are required to do some critical thinking, critical analysis, worksheets, where they look at arguments and evidence and the extra classroom reading list that Charlie mentioned a moment ago, that makes a really great source list for students to do that sort of thing. They're nicely curated lists with accessible but good quality items. So that's how I've used them thus far. FASKIANOS: Great. Steve, over to you. ELLIOTT-GOWER: Okay, well, thank you. I'm pleased to be here. I teach at Georgia College, which is a public liberal arts college in central Georgia, we have about six thousand students. Maybe ninety percent of those students are from metro Atlanta, north Atlanta. I am using World101 this semester in two honors sections of what we call here GC1Y, Georgia College first year, it's essentially a freshman seminar, which focuses on critical thinking. My particular section of Georgia College—GC1Y—is global challenges, and I decided to adopt World101 completely this semester, I built the entire course around the World101 content. And it's a lot of content. So I've included, I began with the "Regions of the World," and we kind of rushed through that one region per class period, which felt like a hundred yard sprint. And now we're into the second section of the course, the "Global Era Issues," and we're slowing down the pace a little bit when teaching this unit of the course. And we're spending maybe two to four class periods on seven of the eleven global era issues. And I actually have been incorporating some of the Model Diplomacy simulations in this part of the course. Pretty truncated version, so we're just spending maybe one and a half class periods on one of the Model Diplomacy courses, we just completed the "Drones in Pakistan" simulation, for example. And I was really pleased how it went, even with this highly truncated version of Model Diplomacy. Because of COVID, I'm teaching both of these classes online. And in thirty years of college teaching, I've never taught online before, so I was really kind of anxious and nervous at the beginning of the semester. But it's going pretty well. The one—maybe the one thing I knew I'd read about somewhere about teaching online is that it's really, really important to have well-produced, well-designed multimedia materials, instructional materials. And certainly, World101 provides that type of content, as Charlie was saying, well, not necessarily as Charlie was saying, but the information is presented in smallish, digestible chunks, which is great for online teaching. And then you have infographics and graphs and the short videos and some interactive features, and I think it works really well for online teaching. I certainly miss the classroom, I miss being able to read a class when I walk in and tell who's with me and who's not. But I think having this really well-designed material helps teaching this online. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. So we're going to go to your questions now. If you click on the participants icon at the bottom of your screen, you can raise your hand there and I'll call on you, or you can write your question in the Q&A box. And I just want to pick up on what Steve said and just a big shout out to CFR President Richard Haass for this vision, and of course, my colleague, Vice President of Education Caroline Netchvolodoff, for their leadership in putting together these materials. Cary is leading the Education team and Richard is really putting his full weight behind this idea to foster an informed citizenry, give people the knowledge that they need to know what's going on around the world, even if they may not be majoring in international relations. This idea that having the fundamentals, a fundamental understanding of the world is so important and I think we're seeing that play out now, as we're all in the midst of this pandemic. So there is a first question in the Q&A box from Dan Whitman, about the reading list, are the materials copyright free? And I guess we'll go to you, Charlie. HOPKINS: Sure, I can address that. So materials that CFR has produced itself are copyrighted, better are released under Creative Commons, so you can certainly share them widely just with the restriction that it's identified as CFR content. The reading list, and just, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page, and there's details on that or feel free to reach out. The reading list is curated from publications around the country in the world. So it's every publication has their own copyright situation. It's things like the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, some of those I realize are subscription, but hopefully most libraries have access to them. So those are just things that we've identified that others have published, but that we think are high quality and related to the module. FASKIANOS: Great. And we have a question from Katherine Barbieri. And you can just please accept the unmute prompt, and tell us what college you're with. ABSHIRE: Hi, I'm Katherine Barbieri from University of South Carolina, I participated in one of your educators workshops a few years ago and learned about 101. And so I've used the modules at times in course, when I was teaching in person, a few of them on trade, and the one on exchange rates and money were really useful. Now, this semester, I'm online, and I have one asynchronous course. And so I have used the whole module. But I wanted to build the course around the modules, what I found to be—I love it—but I found that the level it was pitched to really vary by module. So there were some that seem that they were more targeted to like high school, the more—I didn't feel comfortable assigning them to college students. And then there were others that are really challenging. So I just wonder if you all notice differences, but I'm just giving you my comments. So I teach at a large—University of South Carolina, it's a large school, thirty-five thousand. And I've been teaching—I just started teaching a course with one hundred and eighty students that is asynchronous, my first time online, my first time teaching that course, intro to global politics, but I teach an intro to IR class, that's a higher level every year, and that has about ninety students. And so turns out there's some overlap so I'm trying to do different things, but I'd really like to design a course around this. So I may have to propose one called "Global Era Issues." I talked too much. I just wanted Steve and Jean, I loved your presentations, I wonder if you would share your syllabi? ELLIOTT-GOWER: Oh, sure. Yeah. ABSHIRE: Mine are sort of standard, like intro to international relations that I've just slotted the World101 modules into as they fit. Steve has a more narrowly, specifically designed course. Right? ELLIOTT-GOWER: Right. And that's what I'm teaching with this freshman seminar. We have the opportunity at Georgia College to propose different topics within the GC1Y critical thinking class. And so I have been teaching this global challenges class, like a global issues class, for, well, gosh, for probably twelve years now. And just switched up the content just this past year. I'm intrigued to see the materials that will come out in unit three, because I think there is at least the potential of using this material to teach either an intro to IR class using the unit three material or maybe an intro to U.S. foreign policy class. FASKIANOS: Great. So I have two questions: a follow up question for you, Charlie, and I'm going to combine a couple of questions that are from the chat. The first is are you, on the site, posting professors' syllabi they give you, to Katherine's point? And the second is we've got two questions that are basically the same. All these topics change very quickly, will they be updated on a regular basis to keep the material relevant? So two people asked that. HOPKINS: Great, thank you. Yeah, both excellent questions. To the first, that's actually a feature we're working on right now is soliciting some syllabuses from instructors and finding a place to put them. So coming soon, watch this space. And in terms of the updating, yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that the COVID content is the most obvious example, that's a phenomenon that's only about six months old, but we've put together some stuff. But also, yes, we have a comprehensive process for keeping track of everything. And that's everything from maybe we have a graph about global levels of heart disease, and every year, then a new year of data comes out and we update the graph, it's little things like that. But it's also very big things. We wrote a really great lesson that we started on also a couple years ago, it was one of the first ones we wrote, about NAFTA. Because it's a big deal. It's really important. As you all know, we've now signed a new treaty that supersedes NAFTA. And so that's something that we're in the process of making some edits to and revising the talk about that as well. The story of that asset hasn't changed too much, but we're definitely keeping up the details about exactly what that is, and everything in between. So yes, we're acutely aware. I mean, that's the great thing about a web platform is that you don't have to wait for the next edition of the book to come out, we can make edits fairly quickly. ELLIOTT-GOWER: And I did notice, Charlie, that you updated some of the Model Diplomacy simulations over the summer. HOPKINS: Yes, yes. Same thing for Model Diplomacy. I think currency is something that we feel is really important that we want instructors to be able to rely on the fact that our stuff is up to date. And again, we hope you'll let us know if you think it's not, or if there's something we may have missed. FASKIANOS: Great. The next question comes from Amy Heath-Carpentier who's an assistant director at Washington University in St. Louis. And she—this is for you, Steve and Jean. Any lessons learned about doing simulations online, I'm jumping into my first simulation online with my gender analysis for international affairs students? ABSHIRE: Good for you. Steve, you specifically mentioned doing simulations, but I do as well. So but you want to go first? ELLIOTT-GOWER: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I actually did my first online simulation just—what's the date today, Thursday? So it was last week and the beginning of this week. So my experience is pretty recent. And I would say that doing simulations online, teaching online, generally, I guess, can be a little bit clunky. It's not as fluid as teaching in the classroom. I guess the major issue that I had teaching this, again, this highly truncated version of the "Drones in Pakistan" simulation was just like getting students into their breakout rooms quickly, and it just sort of lacks the fluidity—that's the best word I can come up with—of teaching simulations in the classroom. Having said that, it's eminently doable. And probably the clunkiness may, of course, be my problem. FASKIANOS: Great. Go ahead, Jean. ABSHIRE: Yeah. So since I am on sabbatical, I've actually not done a simulation online. But in preparation for doing two of them next spring, I have been playing a lot of pedagogical simulations online in the last several months and I do have some thoughts. First of all, because Steve mentioned the clunkiness of the breakout rooms. The newest version of Zoom—or the second newest, I think it's the second newest—actually allows participants to put themselves in breakout rooms. And I think that's a big deal for those doing simulations, because that takes a lot of weight off the faculty member and trying to move people around. So that's one thing I wanted to make sure that folks are aware of. Also, either doing them synchronously on Zoom, or if you're doing them asynchronously, but also actually in-class face-to-face simulations as well, I've had a lot of luck using the platform Slack. It allows for chat, it allows for document sharing. It allows for private group conversations as well as all group discussions. I have not had students have any difficulty learning to use it. It's free for use up to a certain number of messages, and maybe a certain number of participants, but I haven't hit a ceiling on that. So that's another tool that I have found really useful. FASKIANOS: Fantastic, written question from Dennis Holtschneider, it's great that you're on Dennis, who leads the American Association of Catholic Universities. He wants to roll this out to all member universities via preferred marketing materials I should use or should I simply send them to our website, Charlie. HOPKINS: That's wonderful. Thank you. So exciting to hear. You certainly can send folks to the website, but I'd be happy to email you after the session with some more things if you want to put together some flyers or anything, we'd be happy to work with you on that. And the same with anyone else. Either reach out to Irina or just send something to [email protected]. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Okay, so the next question comes from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who is the department chair of political science at Xavier University of Louisiana. Charlie, can you give an example of simulation strategies that you've used in the classroom and or online? Or I think maybe Steve, this might be—you can also chime in on this because you've been doing this ELLIOTT-GOWER: Yeah, sure. The simulations that I've used, I think I've used probably four or five of the twenty or so simulations. I've mentioned the "Drones in Pakistan," which is a simulation that focuses on issues of terrorism and sovereignty, intelligence. I've also used one which deals with a clash between Japan and China in the East China Sea, which deals with some of the same issues with sovereignty and nationalism. So the simulations, because there is often a concept which is to be illustrated through the simulation, can be very useful in intro to IR classes. And I could talk about other simulations that I've used, but if you just go to the Model Diplomacy website, you'll see very clearly what concepts are designed to be taught through the simulation. FASKIANOS: Great. Charlie, go ahead. HOPKINS: I was just going to quickly add, we've got some, especially in the last few months, we've written some additional instructor resources on Model Diplomacy specifically about doing simulations online. So I encourage you, if you've got a login—the logins are all free—once you're logged into Model Diplomacy, there are some instructional resources under the know how to teach online and that sort of thing. FASKIANOS: Great. Let's go to Elsa Dias. Next. She's a professor at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, do you plan to include topics like food security, water conflicts, and REEs? Perhaps, they're already included. And how do you put the modules into the LMS? How do they work for student access? And Katherine also asked about this, can you consider having LMS integration for—sorry, Blackboard, you seem to have it for Canvas? HOPKINS: Great question. To the person who is asking about Blackboard, any day now. We're literally in final stages of testing on that I think it's going to roll out very, very shortly. And, yeah, so we do have LTI integration, it's fully tested and there's instructions about Canvas up there right now, Blackboard and Moodle coming very, very soon. If there are other LMS that you're interested in, let us know, it may just be a matter of testing, and they'll work right away, or it's something we can look into. But we know those are kind of the three biggies. You can also—so let me back up, the LTI you can really integrate a module or lesson directly into your site, and you can put a due date on it. And you can make students have a—write a written response and organize it exactly how you want in your modules in your LMS. You certainly can also just copy and paste links to the webpage if you're not quite at the point where you're building all your content inside of your LMS. So it certainly works that way too because there's no logging in or anything, it's just right there with the link. And food security and water, we don't have an entire module devoted to those topics. But they are covered, especially in "Regions of the World." Jean's nodding like she's been in there recently. ABSHIRE: Some of them are also covered in, isn't there material—I'm trying to remember exactly—also in, I want to say, development? Some of that gets touched on. HOPKINS: Yes, I think so. We have eighteen modules and I've read four more that haven't been published yet. I have most of it memorized at this point, but not quite all of it. ABSHIRE: Yeah. I don't have it all memorized either, but I've seen those topics in there. HOPKINS: So yeah, development in unit one and certainly in "Regions of the World." But yeah, I think it's an important topic and one I think we'll continue to look at adding more about. FASKIANOS: Great. The next question comes from Laila Bicharas. She's at State University of New York in Farmingdale, teaches international business among other subjects, and her question is how much of current events news articles, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, are included? HOPKINS: Yeah, I think we kind of walk a line, and I'll be curious to hear Jean and Steve's opinions about how we do this and how well we do it, we're not in the business of updating it every day as stories break. I think we're looking to offer sufficient background so that if you do look at the front page of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you're able to jump right into whatever that day's article is and to know enough about all the terms and all the underlying issues that might be involved. So we are looking for something that's a little bit evergreen, that doesn't—that can apply to any story that might show up on the front page of the newspaper over the next few weeks or months. So we're certainly not competing with news sources, but are trying to provide that background. I don't know if Steve or Jean, if you've got any other thoughts about how you think about that, or how they work together? ELLIOTT-GOWER: Yeah, I like the long form journalism articles that are included on the website. But also I subscribe to—you have a sort of a, or CFR, has a news clipping service, I can't quite remember what it's called, but it's a daily service. And so I look at that every day and I will copy and paste articles from that online clipping service to my class website, especially if it's relevant to something that we're discussing today or over the next week, or articles that are related to topics that students are writing their papers on. So I've been doing a lot of that just recently with articles on climate change and deforestation in Brazil, on corruption in various parts of the world. So that, so using that—that's an old-fashioned word isn't it, clipping service—but using that product in conjunction with the—dates me for sure—but using that product in conjunction with the online materials has proved to be really useful. FASKIANOS: Great. So Pamela asked for the URL. Again, I typed it into chat, but I'm not sure if I sent it to her privately or to everybody. So just to say it out loud, it's world101.cfr.org. And, Steve, you mentioned the news clipping. So that's produced by our digital team, our editorial team, and it's called The World This Week. It's a daily newsletter that you can all sign up for in the newsletter section of our website, you can sign up for different things. We've got newsletters that focus on specific regions like Asia, functional areas, the Middle East, we've got one for CFR Academic, which kind of brings together resources from all across the Council, be at Foreign Affairs, or the Ed department, or the Studies department, and we try to group that by region or topic, so you can sign up for that as well. But Steve, the daily newsletter is really great, The World This Week, because they really do—it sources from around the world and it's not just CFR content. And generally speaking, we are not trying to just feature our own content on our website, we are trying to curate, for all of you and others, really high quality articles, primary materials, you name it. So there's a lot of content to explore on our website. Alright, so the next question is from Jim Harrington, professor of economics at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire, my home state, so thank you for this question. His LMS is Brightspace, and he wants to know if that's on your list, Charlie. HOPKINS: That is not one that we are in development right now. I know it's fairly widely used, maybe we can connect afterwards and it might be great if you can help us test it a little bit and see. But it's something we can definitely look into. And we so appreciate folks reaching out and saying, how about this, how about this, it's really helpful for us to get a sense of where the demand is so we can prioritize. So that's one checkbox for Brightspace on our list. FASKIANOS: So we're currently holding for more questions. But I do have one, because one of the—Jean, you mentioned it about critical thinking. And I think that this product, the educational products, were developed with the eye toward helping students develop their critical thinking skills. So can you talk about, and this is open to all of you, the course skills students can gain from World101? And how do you feel that it builds upon what they need to know effectively to participate in today's society? ABSHIRE: Sure, specifically with regard to critical thinking, and I think it should be acknowledged that critical thinking is contested in its definition. The way we define it, in our general education curriculum is basically looking at arguments and the evidence behind them, trying to sort out bias, things like that, and especially with the classroom assignments reading list that I mentioned earlier, that's with each module, and I think again, has been coming carefully curated, you can get a wide variety of articles and podcasts from diverse sources. And so I think that that helps it be a really good resource for that sort of thing. Because the way I approach it is I want my students to be looking at diverse sorts of sources and doing that. But also, with, like, the debate that I mentioned, relating to international political economy, there was sufficient material in the modules for students to be able to make arguments for and against free trade and protectionism. And I think looking at varying approaches to issues and different alternatives in terms of public policy, and issues are also an essential part of critical thinking, but also just of being an informed, thoughtful citizen, and making choices for elected officials, but also what folks might advocate for. I think the array of issues within the modules, and obviously, there's all the topics, but embedded within that are a lot of smaller pieces that can be pulled in. I think that wide array is also really valuable, because people need to be well rounded. And there was an earlier comment, I guess, more than a question, that there was some variability in the difficulty or sophistication level of the modules. And I agree with that. I have thus far only used these in introductory level classes, I do imagine using them, to some degree, as more context and background in advanced classes, although not as primary teaching tools as I have in the 100 levels. But, honestly, what I find, and I mean, it does vary greatly, a lot of my students lacked that basic knowledge that one would hope that they would come in with from high school. And so if it's a review, or a little bit too rudimentary for some, it might not be for others. And I think that's a reality in every classroom, that there's going to be variability in where the students are coming from. And so, I'm not really disturbed by the fact that there is some—the monetary policy content, for example, is harder than some of the regional studies area content, stuff like that. That's how it is, but that's how our students are, too. ELLIOTT-GOWER: Yeah, and like Jean, one of the principal learning objectives in my class is critical thinking. And just to give you an example of that, I found the Model Diplomacy simulation that we did recently on "Drones in Pakistan" to be really useful because the students are presented with four options in this simulation. One is to launch a drone strike to eliminate a terrorist, the other is to conduct a special forces operation, the third option is to hand over the operation to the Pakistani government, and the fourth option is to do nothing. And so students really have to think through the pros and cons of all of those four options and weigh them against one another. And that really does oblige some to think deeply and carefully, not only about the pros and cons of each individual option, but how they compare to one another. The other kind of big learning outcome in my class using the World101 materials is global civic literacy, and the World101 materials really do provide good content for at least a part of that, that is global literacy, understanding some basic things about regions of the world and important global issues. And then what I'm doing with other materials, is layering in that sort of civic part of the learning objective, think about how students can act as individuals or as part of groups to learn more about these issues to affect certain global outcomes to think about how these issues affect their lives at the local level. One thing I forgot to mention, by the way, was that I'm using the World101 materials in conjunction with Dr. Richard Haass's new book, The World: A Brief Introduction, and the two work really nicely together. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. I think that there was a question too, as Richard has developed a syllabus for his book, which is online, so you can access that. ELLIOTT-GOWER: It came out the day before I started teaching. FASKIANOS: I know, I know it was a mad rush to get that posted. So everybody should take a look at that. Because they are complimentary, for sure. So building on what you just said, Steve, about citizenship, Elsa Dias asks how do the modules encourage students to develop skills as participants in global citizenship? Do they provide students with places to engage in volunteer opportunities? And obviously, that's hard now during the pandemic, but offer virtual engagement that connect with the modules. ELLIOTT-GOWER: I don't think that they do. But what they do is they provide that foundational knowledge, that foundational global literacy, to make informed decisions about global issues. FASKIANOS: Right. And Elsa, just for you, we have a paid internship program at the Council. And one of the benefits of being in this pandemic is that we are working remotely and all the internships are remote, but we are continuing with them. So it is allowing students—you don't have to be in the New York area or the DC area to have an internship at CFR. You can be anywhere. So I would really encourage your students. We are asking that students have at least four, I believe it's four semesters of college work because we want a certain level. It's not exactly volunteering at a service organization, but it is great exposure to international relations. And again, it's a really good lifeline, I think, during this pandemic, so you should check it out on our website. And we also have fellowships for tenured professors, I'm just going to take this opportunity now to plug that. I think the deadline is up—is coming up or has passed, but it is an opportunity to spend a year in residence or be placed actually at like the State Department for a year, take a sabbatical from your university and go work at the State Department, or we'll place you in some kind of practitioner setting. So if any of you are coming up on sabbatical, you should take advantage, look at those opportunities, as well. They're in the same career opportunity tab on our website. Okay, so I'm going now to— ABSHIRE: May I jump in on this? I guess, ideally, I want my students volunteering in refugee organizations or CFR internship or things like that, too. But I would encourage people, I guess, to think more broadly about how we understand and how we practice citizenship. Citizenship within a state involves having civil conversations with other people, it involves writing letters to the editor, it involves writing to your representatives, or calling them and I also have the global citizenship goals within my department and my classes, and if my students are out engaged in dialogue with their peers, or with their family members—holidays are coming—or they're blogging or writing emails to their congressional representatives, or whatever. That's global citizenship, and I'm delighted by that. I'm all about internships and volunteer work, too, but if they can infuse it in their daily lives, I think that might actually be best. FASKIANOS: That's great, Jean. It's important, and also registering to serve as a poll worker for the elections since we are now in this. Traditionally, it's been senior citizens that have been working at the polls and with the risk of this virus, I think we're seeing young adults going and volunteering, which is so amazing, that they're really rising up and want to contribute to their communities in that way. So the next question comes from Laura Tedesco at St. Louis University, Madrid campus, about the demand, I'm sure that there's a lot of demand for this material outside the United States. I would also like to know if all the material for students comes from U.S. sources, it'd be great if there were material from different countries and regions. So, Charlie? HOPKINS: Yeah, I think a big part of our audience certainly is in the United States. But we do think about that. I think the reading lists for the modules—everything is in English language, so that does limit us a little bit. We're not going to assume students speak a foreign language, but especially in "Regions of the World" we try to point folks to high quality local journalism, point folks to some cultural works, some important news stories that are written in the places that they're about, and then also when we're writing these modules, we're working closely with CFR fellows who travel or are from various parts of the world. We have a really diverse staff, who works on this as well, which is really great. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly something we think about, and I think in particular "Regions of the World" reading lists are places where we put a particular emphasis on trying to pull in some sources that are published outside the U.S. FASKIANOS: Great. I am looking—Laila made a nice comment in the chat about World101 offers great resources that accelerate the development of hybrid and online courses, helped set the foundation and fill some of the knowledge gaps some students might lack. So yes, that's great. We hope that's the case. The tenure fellowship deadline is October 31. My team just gave me the date, so thank you for that. And then we have no more questions, but for the final thing. I just wanted to ask you, Steve and Jean, if there are any other CFR resources that you use to complement World101 for supplementary materials. Are you using Foreign Affairs? And then we will give Charlie the final word. ELLIOTT-GOWER: As I said, the sort of principle text that I'm using is Richard Haass's The World: A Brief Introduction in three hundred pages, which is kind of a remarkably disciplined piece of work to explain the world in three hundred pages. I'm also using a lot of material from The Economist, as well as articles from Foreign Affairs. All of the material I'm using is a little bit, to address that previous question, is a little bit U.S. or Euro centric, and you just have to be mindful of that and recognize that there are other perspectives on these issues. So one thing that I do—just very, very briefly—is as an exercise, I assign students to be a global villager, somebody from somewhere else in the world, to look at an issue from their kind of local perspective and look at some local news items that deal with the same issue that we're dealing with, from this Western perspective, maybe The Times of India or something like that, or English language, Chinese newsletter, newspaper. FASKIANOS: Jean? ABSHIRE: Yeah. So I was going to defer to Steve, because I probably don't do as much of the CFR resources as I should, I made a few notes. I didn't know about the clipping service, for example. FASKIANOS: That's the benefit of these gatherings. You learn about other things. ABSHIRE: Also when you can come and present, but also learn something, that's gold standard. But I also am sensitive to the diverse perspectives issue, and I have assignments built in, where students are forced to go look at news sources from other countries and such as that. Factiva, for example, allows, I think it is, which is a database that some of your libraries might have, allows searching in diverse new sources and stuff like that. So I train my students on that and have them go hunting. FASKIANOS: Charlie? HOPKINS: Well, it's been a few years since I've been in a classroom. So I don't know if I can answer what I use in the classroom. But I will say, I think we really mean it, I appreciate all the questions and I've got a couple that I know I need to follow up on. And so I really do mean it and say, I hope that you'll reach out if you've got additional feedback or questions or another LMS that you'd love to have us take a look at as well. Or anything of any of those kinds, or feedback on monetary policy is really hard or whatever—those are great, too. Monetary policy is really hard, I was not good at economics in college. But I really encourage you to please let us know how we can help and sign up for our newsletter, follow us on social media, because we've got some really great things coming out this month and beyond. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. So thank you all for being with us today and talking, presenting World101 and sharing your best practices. We really appreciate it. And to all of you for being part of this, your questions, we hope you become power users of World101 as well as all the other great content on CFR. As Charlie said, you can follow @World101_CFR and @CFR_Academic on Twitter, use World101 and Model Diplomacy as teaching materials, you can go to CFR.org. And we also have a special website that's looking at health issues, ThinkGlobalHealth.org, which is obviously so important during this time, as well as ForeignAffairs.com, we have a special rate for students. I know that everybody is tight on money, but it is relatively cheap, and it's a good resource. So you should look there, too. But CFR.org, World101, and Model Diplomacy are free. So that is really important. Thank you again, I hope you're all staying well, healthy. And thank you for participating today. We look forward to having you join us again in this virtual forum. (END)

Martin D. Burke, chair of the SHIELD COVID-19 strategy for the University of Illinois system, and May and Ving Lee professor for chemical innovation and professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses targeting, mass testing, and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 on campus. FASKIANOS: Thank you so much, Erica, and good afternoon to all of you. Welcome to today's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at the Council on Foreign Relations. Today's meeting is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website Cfr.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We're delighted to have Martin Burke with us today to talk about targeting, mass testing,  and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 on college campuses. Dr. Burke has chaired the SHIELD COVID-19 strategy for the University of Illinois system, and is the May and Ving Lee professor for chemical innovation, and a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he serves as associate dean for research at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and teaches at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. So Dr. Burke, thank you very much for being with us. The university, your university, has been in the news with the systems that you're putting into place. So we'd love to hear about the test that you've developed for the University of Illinois to target and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and share some of the challenges and lessons that you're learning from the implementation as we are starting out this semester. BURKE: Great Irina, thank you so much. And thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations for the opportunity to share our story. I'll go ahead and share my screen if that's okay. Okay, great. So thank you so much again. And yes, as we all I think went through this same challenge last spring, when the pandemic kind of came upon us. I was asked by our Provost to figure out how to stand up and strategically deploy scalable testing as part of the university strategy to try to reopen and stay open safely in the fall. The first thing that really struck me was that this is all about safety to empower the community. We called this our SHIELD platform to represent that focus on safety as the highest priority. We also recognize that while testing was going to be really important, testing is not a silver bullet. And so we really went after a comprehensive program to deploy fast, scalable testing as kind of part of a comprehensive effort. We call this our target, test, and tell initiative, and I'll explain exactly what each of those pieces is meant to represent. Really kind of a comprehensive data science-driven, strategic deployment of testing with fast communication so we can maximize its impact. The other piece is that there was a lot of challenges that required a lot of innovation, and in Illinois we love to innovate. And we use this as an opportunity to try to do that. I'll explain those things, as well. The target, test, and tell platform is meant to represent on the target side, using frontier data science and modeling to help us figure out who to test and how often to test them in a way that would maximally mitigate the spread on our campus. And I'll show a little bit about exactly how we've done that. The second test piece is we recognized quickly that the kind of traditional nasal swab-based approach was not going to be sufficient for the testing frequency that we were aiming for and the speed. And so we innovated and developed a new saliva-based test that's very fast and scalable, which I'll describe. And then the last piece was to figure out how to communicate the information from that test and put it into action as fast and as effectively as possible. And so I'll tell you about a new app that we developed called Safer in Illinois, which is available free on the App Store, which is an app that allows results directly to the user's phone as soon as we have them. Within hours, we get the results out to individuals, as well as digital exposure notifications that are proximity based. And, actually, the last piece, an access screen that if you're up to date on your testing, and you're not positive, you get access to buildings. But if you're not, you can't and so this has been a key aspect of the program that's been very helpful. The last is this entire process has been in lockstep partnership with Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, which is our local public health, which we think has been a critical piece of our success. And so we always like to say we're running a program that utilizes fast frequent testing, rather than running a testing program, because it really is a comprehensive, multidimensional effort that's critical, I think, for making this work. And I'll try to describe why we say that. Just very briefly, some of the modeling that we did as the take off point was if we did nothing and we have fifty thousand people in our community as faculty, students, and staff, so if we did nothing to mitigate spread, pretty much everybody would come infected very quickly. This is obviously not the goal we wanted to achieve. And so we alternatively looked at really a layered approach. If we implied a range of mitigation tactics in combination, we found that we could actually predict a really good outcome. So, two times per week testing of everyone, so that’s fifty thousand people twice per week was the target. We also wanted to have a high degree of compliance with masks, classes greater than fifty online, and both manual and digital contact tracing. And if we put all of these together, we predicted that we would get a very safe outcome. So we would have a bump when the students came back. This was because they're coming from all over the country with positivity rates commensurate with several hundred of them who would actually have COVID when they came, and that we would be able to find them quickly, help them get isolated, and then hit a nice, safe, steady state and have a safe environment for teaching and research and also not cause infections in our community. So this was obviously the goal. And this led us to really understand that we had to have multiple layers in order to make this work. So we're looking at the R0 or the chances of any individual spreading it to others if they get infected. As we can see, testing twice per week does a lot, it really helps in a major way. But, it's not enough on its own. Just wearing masks that makes a really big difference. But, it's not enough to get us below one. If we start combining just masks and testing twice per week. Now we actually predict that we would be below one and head towards a really good situation. If you start adding in classes greater than fifty online as well as other ways to kind of mitigate spread, including contact tracing, now we get to R0s that are very desirable. And this is the situation obviously we're aiming for.  When we started looking at this, we realized we're going to have to test everyone, probably twice per week, at least to start. And again, that's fifty thousand people twice per week, that was a very large testing load. And this nasal swab was not going to work. And the problem is, many of you've heard, people first of all don't like to do it. There's also a lot of supply chain issues associated with it. We wanted to find something that was good at kind of easy and rapid self-collection that would not require as much in terms of health care workers and much easier. And there were a lot of reasons why saliva started to look really attractive. Okay. The first is people will be much more likely to do it twice per week, because it's noninvasive. And there were reports showing that even if the detection level was lower, if you were doing it frequently, you can still get very good mitigation of spread. Now the really exciting news is there was a paper that came out last April showing that in fact, you can detect SARS-CoV-2 in saliva even more sensitively than the nasal pharyngeal swab. Okay, so this was very encouraging to us. And it's also the medium that matters. When you look at saliva, of course, that's how we spread SARS-CoV-2, we know now by droplets, as well as aerosols, and so you're directly testing the medium that matters and really testing for infectiousness. We also get a quantitative readout by PCR, so you're actually getting number of copies per mil in saliva, and really start to understand in a data driven way, how to mitigate this. The standard method was the NP swab, which then involves viral transport media, as well as RNA purification, all of which are supply chain costs and time bottlenecks. There was a very encouraging report that had come out in April, a new saliva-based method that had come out of Rutgers. But the challenge was, it still required a very specialized collection device, and it still required RNA purification. So it kind of slows things down, supply chain bottlenecks, and was still very expensive. My colleague, Paul Hergenrother, had, I think, a really bold idea to take directly from saliva to PCR. Could we cut out all the supply chain, make a very simple process, thereby making this scalable, cheap, and very fast? And so we launched kind of a Manhattan Project-style effort over about six weeks, we looked at thousands of different possible ways to do this. And the bottom line is, we found that if you simply heat saliva at 95 degrees for thirty minutes, it inactivates the virus but also we think breaks it open, exposes the RNA, and you can go directly then in a buffer to a PCR reaction. Excellent level of detection down to five hundred. So even more sensitive than the nasal pharyngeal swab, consistent with some previous reports, without the RNA steps being skipped, so we were really able to keep that really nice component. And all the details are in this manuscript that we put on the bio archive. We also then had to create a lab that could actually do these tests. And long story short, we converted our veterinary lab into a human COVID-19 testing facility. We had actually tested that tiger at the Bronx Zoo back in February, you may have heard about, so we had a leader in this area of animal coronaviruses. And we transfer that into a lab that can do up to twenty thousand tests per day right on our campus. That was led by Tim Fan and Paul Hergenrother. So, just to give you a sense, real quick, of how we did that, the logistics, so we popped up twenty different tents all over campus, we set them up so you literally can't walk to class without walking by a tent. It takes about seven minutes to come in and submit your saliva sample. We've actually now performed almost 400 thousand tests since July. The results are back within hours, which is critical. And inside the lab we're using these Thermo Fisher QuantStudio 7s and some robotics to make this process fast.  The last piece is the app that I mentioned. This allows you to get your results directly to your phone in a HIPAA compliant and very privacy-first manner. It's only decoded when it hits your phone. You can also opt-in for a digital exposure notification, which is proximity-based so it'll tell you if you've been close to somebody who is exposed. And you can also self-report symptoms, etc. The other key feature is that if you are up to date on your testing and you are not positive, you get a checkmark. And this is actually now required at any building in our campus, you have to show your app on the way in to show that you're up to date, and that you're not bringing in COVID. If you aren't up to date, you get an X. And this means you have to go get your test or you've tested positive and you should be isolated. And so actually entry into any of our buildings is now predicated upon being a safe member of the community to be able to enter that building. The really exciting thing is this has now been picked up by our community. So actually, to get into any bars or restaurants or coffee shops around here, you have to also show your app. And this is a really nice way for us to integrate with the community to maximize safety. The last, I think most important slides I'll show you is some of our recent data. This is our dashboard, I think, from yesterday. And you can see we've performed a very large number of tests. So far, our seven-day positivity rate, I'm happy to tell you is now 0.31 percent. We were able to open and never have to shut down our classes since we started and still maintain that rate at this point. That's been a big exciting success in that regard. And just to show you a little bit of the story, the daily new cases is on the y-axis on the left, that's the blue lines. And here on the right, we actually have the positivity rate. Okay, so number of new cases divided by the number of tests for that day, that's the line in orange. And then the bars in green on the bottom is number of tests per day. And you can see this access goes up to twenty thousand. So, on some of these days, we're performing about two and a half percent of all the tests in the entire United States just in our one lab, so it really shows the max, the scalability of this test is actually quite high.  So really quickly, I'll just say over the summer, we did a pilot, we were testing our faculty, staff, and our graduate students. And you can see that we actually started about one and a half percent, we were able to bring that down almost to eradication. We saw some really encouraging signs over the summer, then our undergraduates came back, okay, and we knew we were going to get a couple hundred cases. That's almost exactly what we got so the modeling was very close to what we expected. But the models had predicted then that this would come right back down. And we had actually worked into our model that some of the students would go to parties. In fact, we had seven to eight thousand going to parties three times a week and not wearing masks. So we knew there would be noncompliance. That still should have been okay with what the modeling has shown. What we didn't predict is that some of our students would make really bad choices when they knew they were positive. The vast majority of our students have done a fantastic job. We've got great students in Illinois, and they've been great partners. But, unfortunately, a small number of our students who knew they were positive from our test, chose to go to parties, host parties, or otherwise break isolation and interact. And that caused a real problem. So we saw a spike. Actually, we saw increase in our positivity rate. Interestingly, before we saw the increase in the cases substantially, and this very much both spatially and temporally correlated with unsafe activities that were reported. So again, I think the key here is, we hit this challenge, but we had a very fast frequent testing program, so we could see it early. Okay, so we got a very early warning signal that something was wrong. And we saw it before the cases even rose. So with that, we instituted, very quickly, changes. The first was, we looked at all the data and greater than 95 percent of all the cases were with the undergraduates. We actually started essential activities only just for the undergraduates, we didn't disrupt research and faculty could maintain their normal activities. But the undergraduates were only allowed to go to class, go to lab, go to work, exercise outside or go to religious activities, otherwise, they were grounded. And this was at the risk of getting suspended if they broke that. We also started prioritized testing, so we knew the undergrads were the challenge. And so we started testing some of them three times a week, the rest twice a week, and everybody else only once a week. So rather than fishing in the whole ocean, we just fished in the smaller pond, faster testing, faster results. And that also helped. The last was we saw a gap. Even though we were trying really hard to work with our Champaign-Urbana Public Health, to isolate as quickly as possible, there was still a delay in communicating to Public Health, and then them finding our students. So we launched our own team, we called it Shield Team 30. The goal is to find and help safely isolate all new positives within thirty minutes. That's actually been a big success and really helped move things along faster. We started texting the students, instead of calling them. Apparently they like text better. And the text said, you know, you're positive, we want to support you, here's all the things we can do to help you. And if you don't respond, you're suspended. So we coupled the carrots and the stick. And I think that got us a really good level of compliance. You can see the result as we were able to bring the numbers quickly right back down. And a couple of things I want to emphasize, we looked very closely, and we didn't see any crossover between our students and our faculty and staff. Okay, zero. We actually tried very hard to find even a single case and we couldn't. We also have seen no evidence of crossover from our students into our surrounding community. And so I think because we're able to turn it around very quickly, we're able to stop that obviously very undesired outcome. We're not letting our guard down. We figure this could also, of course, get back into trouble very quickly if people make bad choices. And so the other thing we're doing is really amping up our efforts to partner with our students to really help them have the tools they need to make really good choices, have lots of safe socialization options, and have severe consequences if they choose otherwise.  Okay, so just to summarize, we've learned that fast, frequent testing can help mitigate the spread in a large university community. The testing is not a silver bullet. It has to be integrated with all these other aspects to make sure it works. Our I-COVID test, as we're calling it, is a direct saliva to PCR test that enables fast, frequent testing on scale. Prioritized testing can make a big difference. Mechanisms to help people isolate quickly and safely is really important. And if anyone's interested, we're working very hard to try to make our platform accessible to as many people as possible. We're a land-grant institution, it's our mission, just to try to make impact and serve the public good. And if you're interested, Bill Jackson would be happy to talk to you about how we're trying to do that. And there's his email address. Thank you so much. Very happy to take any questions. FASKIANOS: This was fantastic. Thank you so much for that overview. So, first question, how much has this cost the university? BURKE: It took us about $10 million to stand it up. And it's going take about $10 million to run it through the semester. FASKIANOS: And have you made your test, the saliva test, offered it to other communities? I know you're partnering with your community, but it seems like in other parts of the country, it would be a useful tool. BURKE: Yes. We are on a mission to try to help anyone who wants access to what we've done, to help them replicate it in their own community. And so we've launched a collection of programs to try to do that. One is called Illinois SHIELD, the goal of which is to try to get our testing capability out to our entire state. The other one is called Shield T3, which is trying to help get it beyond Illinois, to the rest of the country and to the world. And both of those organizations are actively in the process of trying to build those partnerships and expand access. Shield T3 is working with I think now thirty or thirty-five other institutions, at different levels down the road of engagement, and about five or six other universities are already using our approach. And there's about seven different countries that have now teamed up with Shield T3 and are working on that to try to help get it out beyond the U.S. So, we're all in on trying to help expand access as best we can and really looking forward to partnering on doing that. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. All right, let's go to all of you.  (Gives queuing instructions.)  FASKIANOS: First question. What is the degree of efficacy as compared with the no swab test? And what is the cost per test? I know you gave us the cost for the overall. BURKE: Sure. FASKIANOS: This question comes from Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome, professor of political science, Brooklyn College, CUNY. BURKE: Great, thanks for the question. And we've included the data I’ll describe in a manuscript that we published on the bio archive that I included in the presentation. Happy to send it if people want to find the link as a follow up. We did some comparisons to the nasal swab, the overall concordance looked really good in general, things matched really well. There's some times where things don't match because we think that the nasal swab will stay positive, far beyond when people are infectious. That's actually been an issue with the nasal swab. But overall, the concordance is really high. And now as I mentioned, we've run 350 thousand tests or more, and we track the CT values, which is the number of times you have to go through this thermocycler to see the virus. And we routinely see detection limits down to like five hundred copies per mil, which if you look at all the literature for the nasal swab, that's actually substantially lower than typically what you see with the nasal swab, or at least on point with the best cases. We've also done direct comparisons with other saliva tests that had been authorized via EUA authorization from the FDA. And we found ours to be more sensitive than the other tests, particularly one, for example from Yale. We think we've got an excellent level of sensitivity. And again, we've now applied it on population scale and seen it working. So we think it's got lots of data behind the fact that this test can work really, really well. FASKIANOS: Great. The next written question comes from Bob McCoy. Perhaps this is not relevant to the intent of this presentation, but a significant barrier to successfully fighting COVID-19 is the politicization of what ought to be a purely medical matter by the current administration. How can this be countered?  FASKIANOS: I'm not sure you want to take that on. But if you do, go ahead. BURKE: I'd say we're a land-grant institution. Our mission is to serve the public good, and we feel like we have found something that can be helpful and our goal is to help make it as accessible as possible. FASKIANOS: Great, thank you. Other questions. I see another one in the chat box. People are doing that instead of... FASKIANOS: Bob McCoy is a fellow with the University of Montana. So thank you for giving us your affiliation, appreciate that. FASKIANOS: You said you have very severe consequences for the students that are going to parties when they know they're positive. Are you suspending people? What are the consequences that you've implemented? BURKE: They get suspended. FASKIANOS: They get suspended. BURKE: The people who are the most upset when that happens is the 97+ percent of all the other students who are doing a really great job and trying really hard to make this work. And I think what we've seen is, again, the overwhelming majority of students have been fantastic partners in this. And they're really proud that their university is being viewed as a model for maybe how we can stay open safely. And they also don't want to go home and have to take the rest of their courses online, in their parents’ basement. So they've been on social media, and in every other way the loudest advocates for let's all team up and make this happen. It's been a relatively small number of students who have made really bad choices. The brutality of this situation is the math is not on our side. Small numbers of people can make really tough situations very quickly, and I think this is 2020, we're in the middle of a pandemic, we all have to do our part. And that includes the students, they have to understand. You cannot throw parties, and you certainly cannot throw parties when you know you're positive. It just doesn't work. And I think the etiquette has to change. As a society, we have to say you just cannot act that way. And there has to be severe consequences when people make that choice. FASKIANOS: Just as a note, we've passed the threshold in the United States of 200 thousand dead to this virus, and I think the projections now for January 2021 is, I think I heard today, 400 thousand. So, or somewhere there. So clearly, our behavior needs to change as a society.  There's another written question from Sunny Jha, an anesthesiologist at USC in Los Angeles, and a frontline COVID doctor. What are your thoughts on the idea of an immunity vaccination passport? BURKE: Great. So first, Dr. Jha, thank you so much for your courage, and you're protecting all of us as a frontline health care worker. It's obviously heroic, and we really appreciate everything you and your colleagues are doing to keep us all safe. And I would say that we have tried to look very closely at the science behind the potential for reinfection. And the likelihood that someone may or may not be infectious post their kind of standard isolation period. And bottom line is, we're still trying to convince ourselves that there is a period of time during which someone would not be able to transmit the virus. We're being cautious and very data driven around this. So for us, we're not doing like an immunity passport. If someone does test positive, and they go through the standard isolation, and then are released by our Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, we actually put them back into our testing pool. And so you still have to test twice per week, we can follow their CT values, and we're doing this and if their CT value is very high, which is typical, that would translate to them having a very low level of virus in their saliva. And the science that's available would tell us they're not going to be infectious. If your CT value is very high, we actually allow them to continue. If their CT value is low, we put them back in isolation, and we track it. And if it ever drops back down, we put them back in isolation. And the idea is if they get reinfected, we would see it and as you probably know, there's been about five cases that have been confirmed around the world of people being reinfected with COVID-19. So we're playing it very cautious right now. But we'll continue to follow the science and the data. And if we can get to the point where we convince ourselves that for a period of time, the risk of reinfection is very low, then we will change to give a window of time where the person probably doesn't have to test but we're not there yet. That doesn't mean we're saying we think that you are infectious. We're just saying we want to be super cautious and careful about when we make that decision. FASKIANOS: And in terms of the isolation, when a student tests positive or somebody on campus, is isolation in their dorm room or do you have a special isolation unit? Or where are you quarantining people? BURKE: We set aside 5 percent of our total housing at the outset for isolation and support. And typically, for example, if it's a building, we have thirty thousand students in Illinois, so there's a lot of different housing situations. And so, in a large building, one of the floors would be set aside for isolation, for example. Students then are moved from their room into one of these isolation rooms, and we provide them a lot of support. I think that's obviously really important. We need to make sure that they have access to food and social support as well as any healthcare needs that they have. We partnered with a local health care provider through what's called a pandemic health worker program. They can get a kit that helps them track their symptoms. And they have telehealth, we have our Champaign-Urbana checking with them every day. We check in with them every day. There's a voluntary support Zoom meeting every day for everybody who's in isolation if they want to kind of talk to others and try to talk through challenges together. We really try to take a very supportive approach to this. That said, there's also, as mentioned, severe consequences if people don't stick to the isolation plan, they can be suspended. And I think that's actually important that we have both. FASKIANOS: There's a question in the chat. I don't know who asked this question. Maybe they'll identify themself. Would this model work for nonresidential universities, like a commuter campus, community colleges, and city colleges? What recommendations would you make for these institutions? BURKE: Yeah, it's a very different challenge, and we recognize that. So we are in some ways, fortunate to be in a very, somewhat contained situation. We call it a semi-contained community, because of course, there is travel in and out. But in general, it's much less than, let's say, for living in a major city or urban setting where there's lots and lots of mixing, or students are going home every night and having lots of interactions, and then coming back. So it's a different problem, we think that it's probably going to require customized kind of variant of what we've done. And that's actually going to be true in a lot of other situations as well. We're now trying to work with folks, think about army bases, and prisons, and vacation destinations, and K through 12. And they're all these different archetypes that are going to require customization or optimization of the program in the process. We don't have all the answers for those. And I can't give you data, because we haven't done it yet. But we think there's lots of opportunities to customize what we've done for different situations and try to figure out how best to mitigate the unique challenges associated with those different situations. And so that's what Bill Jackson and his team are working on, is trying to come up with these archetypical programs that could be in a sense, utilized in different situations and the learnings from each could then cross-fertilize each other. We're trying to set it up that way, so we can learn as much as we can quickly. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. That question was from Elsa Dias in Colorado. So thanks for identifying yourself.  FASKIANOS: The next question in the chat comes from Bob Klein at Ohio University. He likes the art behind you, by the way. He is also an ACE fellow. COVID-19 pandemic is happening alongside mass protests against black lives matter. For, as one example, how are you balancing rights together and exercise free speech with the need to manage the COVID-19 pandemic? ASU had some issues with this and he's wondering how you're dealing with it. BURKE: Obviously a really important question and something that we all need to think about. How to help enable and empower those really important protests in that conversation to happen. We've been working very closely with our student affairs, academic affairs groups who really think very carefully about these types of challenges. And we've been cognizant of the fact that we have to be able to be open and flexible to allow those things to happen. We've had protests also on our campus, and those are allowed to happen. And I think the idea is to try, of course, to promote social distancing and safety as much as possible. And there's been, of course, many examples where people have been protesting very safely and socially responsibly, and of course, are really important things to protest about. I think that's really where we understand it's really important and we're really trying to make sure that that's able to happen. FASKIANOS: Great. The next question comes from Dick Foster. Coronavirus blood tests were among the first solutions attempted. Blood was traditionally fluid tested. Saliva was dismissed as not having the potential for accurate diagnosis. If you agree that the sequence is correct, what was the breakthrough that led to saliva testing? We almost never hear about blood testing these days. BURKE: I think that way back in March and April was when there was some initial hints that perhaps saliva could be used. I think a paper that really was helpful to us because we were already really trying to figure out if saliva could work. There was a paper from Anne Wyllie at Yale that they put on the archive, where they had shown as I showed in the presentation that you could detect SARS-CoV-2 and saliva more sensitively than the nasal pharyngeal swab. So that was a very helpful, I think, discovery. It still used RNA isolation, and I think we've all heard about through the team here were able to discover is that you can actually skip that RNA isolation and then go directly from the saliva to PCR, which really helped make a big difference in terms of its usability and scalability. I think the evidence accumulated quickly, and then the team here was able to breakthrough on the skipping RNA isolation. And now it looks like a really good way to do it. I think there's an inertia associated with the nasal pharyngeal swab because it's been around and it's been widely used. But there's lots of reasons why I think saliva-based testing can make a big difference, especially start thinking about fast reading testing of entire populations, started by K through 12. And there's just so many advantages to the saliva-based test. We're really trying to get the word out there that this can really be helpful and hopefully our story can really move the needle and people switching to saliva. FASKIANOS: Bob has a follow up about the protests. Did you build that kind of activity into your models? BURKE: We didn't specifically build protests into the models, but we did build seven to eight thousand students going to parties and probably not wearing their masks into the model. So some level of noncompliance to make sure that we were being very eyes wide open about the fact that these are young people, they're going to want to socialize. Again, what we didn't build into the model was willful noncompliance with known positivity. That's something we've now had to reckon with and deal with. We're working on trying to become increasingly cognizant of the challenge in the real world, as opposed to what we hope for, and we're learning every step of the way. That said, we don't view the noncompliance as something that can't be changed either. So, in addition, to continuing to now make our models better, we're also trying to push back against that noncompliance and really bring that down, because it's critical. I think it's humbling to recognize, we could build, we could test everybody every day. And still, if you go to parties, when you're positive, it's not going to work, right. So it really does have to be a really robust program. It's multidimensional, multilayered, and you've got to get community buy-in and a really good level of compliance. Everybody's got to do their part. That's just the reality of the situation. FASKIANOS: I know, you said, you were working with colleges and universities and trying to get the word out. Is there any central repository of information that universities and colleges can consult for best practices and models of success? BURKE: Yes. We have a repository of information about our system and how to deploy it. And that's where Bill Jackson is leading this effort called Shield T3 to try to help do that. So if anyone's interested, if you would contact Bill Jackson he would be very happy to work with you. And as I mentioned, I think thirty plus universities are already engaged with him. And we're aware of about five that have already been able to stand up our testing capability on their own campuses. And our goal, again, is just to maximize the impact as best we can and to try to help everybody benefit from our experience here. I think there'll be the best point of contact if people are interested. FASKIANOS: Great. I'll get the contact information and share out that information to the group on this call, and maybe even to people not on this call, because I think this information is very much needed. Have you been working with the CDC? BURKE: We've met with them. And we've been sharing all of our information with them. Because obviously, if it's at all helpful, we're really happy to do it. We have actually been sharing pretty regularly our information with them in the hopes that it can be of some benefit. They're very engaging, and they ask great questions, and lots of back and forth. It's been a good dialogue with them. FASKIANOS: Great. And in terms of your partnership with state and local officials, how has that been working? Again, it's so important to have those synergies between the health officials and the local leadership at the sub-national level. So I think that would be informative to people on this discussion. BURKE: Sure. Yeah, we've been very fortunate. We have fantastic leadership at the University of Illinois. The university level here, at our systems level, and we have a fantastic partnership in relationship with our Governor Pritzker. And it's been a huge asset. I can't begin to say how strong and important that's been. And we've also got a great relationship with our local Champaign-Urbana Public Health District. Decades of history around that and getting through some other tough situations. Of course, nothing like this. But measles outbreaks and things like this that have really tightened those bonds and learn how to work together. And we have a great relationship with our Illinois Department of Public Health as well. And we've been in close contact with all of them. So Chancellor Jones, our chancellor here at the University of Illinois, just a passionate advocate for our land-grant mission and doing everything we can to try to maximize our impact and serve the public good. Tim Killeen, who's our university president, very early on, he called this an Illinois moment in the making, and asked us to make sure we made it as big as possible. So that kind of visionary leadership has just been tremendous. And we have worked closely with Governor Pritzker, his office, and the entire state. It's just been tremendous partnership throughout the whole process, which we're very grateful for, and looking forward to continue to leverage to try to make the impact as broad as we can. FASKIANOS: Another question in the chat box. Given how this virus disproportionately affects black and brown communities, what are you doing to promote this test as a public health benefit to those communities? BURKE: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a critically important point. And we're working very hard to try to figure out how we can do that. That obviously means those are the communities we have the chance to having the most positive impact. And so, we want to figure out a way to do that as active conversation, the discussions going on right now. Exactly along those lines. And up till now, we've been focused on just trying to get it up and running and successful here at our university. Again, we're not celebrating anything. And we know we've got a long way to go because there's a very dynamic situation. That said, we feel like we've finally been able to show that it can work in our setting. And so now, a very large amount of effort is being pivoted towards how do we try to get this out to as many communities that need it as possible? And as the question correctly points out, there are groups who are very disproportionately affected by COVID-19. And so of course, a very important goal is to try to get this to those groups in a way that can really help turn that around. So it's a very high priority. FASKIANOS: So in terms of your mode of instruction, you said over fifty students in a class is remote. So obviously, under fifty, you're meeting in classrooms. How have you reconfigured your classrooms in order to be socially distance? What are your professors doing, etc.? Do your professors have the option to be remote? Or is everybody in person? BURKE: Okay, great. So yes, we have offered online option for both the students and the professors. If it's done live, it's by choice, everyone chose to do that. And so in terms of maximizing social distancing, there was a whole other team that spent the whole summer trying to figure out how to do that as best that we can. The decision was made, any classes that are greater than fifty are moved online. Okay, so as you point out, the classes have to be fifty or less. And what we did was just tried to use our largest lecture halls as much as possible is one of the key strategies. So many of the classes that were, let's say, thirty, people usually would be in a small classroom, you do the exact same thirty people, but in a large lecture hall, and then you can, of course, space everybody out. There's a lot of people who've chosen to try to go outside and have their classes, especially while the weather's nice and small groups, types of classes, which can also really help. There was a huge effort towards maximizing cleaning protocols and trying to figure out how to clean between classes and avoid any cross-contamination that way. And also a lot of thought around, of course, aerosolization and ventilation and trying to really think through issues associated with how to minimize the chances of spread through aerosols. It was really a comprehensive effort led by another team that was deployed just to think about those issues. And we've been working closely in concert with them to try to synergize with what we're doing with what they're doing. And so far, as I mentioned, I think the most important statistic I can tell you is, we have not seen any evidence of transmission in the classroom. And so I think that's really encouraging. And the problem is actually outside the classroom, in the residence halls, and mostly actually off campus. That's where we've had our biggest challenges, actually, is residence halls off campus. And so again, we're pivoting and flexing and trying to focus all of our energy on as much as possible mitigating that. But I think it does argue you can have in-person classes safely if you've got a very strong mitigation strategy. And of course we all want to get back to teaching our students and performing research and helping educate the leaders of tomorrow. And that's what we're committed to doing. And so I think it's very encouraging in that regard, that we've been able to do that. FASKIANOS: And have you had a drop in your international students? BURKE: I don't know the numbers, but we've actually had remarkably little loss of students coming in. We had a very high percentage of our students came and are actively participating in in-person classes. I don't have the exact breakdown between national and international. But overall, we've actually had most of undergraduates come back. FASKIANOS: Noe Ramirez just raised his hand. Noe, go ahead, and accept the unmute prompt please. Q: There we go. Thank you very much. Appreciate this opportunity to ask this important question. When you mentioned the high prevalence rate with the Latino and Black communities. I recently read some research that diet could be highly correlated with risk to COVID, especially the diet involving, for example, the gluten that is oftentimes found in, that is common in Latino diets like with flour tortillas, or the pastas, for instance, that other groups may consume regularly. Are you familiar with any research that might point to the diet also being a risk factor for COVID, particularly among the nonelderly population? BURKE: Thanks for the question. I'm not an expert in that space. And I don't have any additional information or I'm not read up on that issue. I actually don't think I'll be able to comment specifically. Otherwise, to reiterate, as already has been discussed, the numbers are clear that there's certain communities that are being disproportionately affected by COVID-19. And so I think, of course, obviously, we need to help understand why that is and what we can do to try to address it. I don't have any specifics to add on the question you're asking. But just to acknowledge that it's a really important issue, we really need to better understand it and try to help. FASKIANOS: Bob Klein has a follow-up question from Ohio University. How's the concern over clinical placements, internships, and student teaching being managed when students are going off campus? BURKE: We have here at the University of Illinois, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, which I'm very grateful to serve as the associate dean for research, and we have our students in the clinics. And the answer I guess I can give you is that they all have to go through the exact same kind of rigorous, twice weekly testing program, at the beginning, that everybody else did. They've also been switched to once per week, since we've changed the progress testing towards undergraduates, because we didn't see challenges in that space, but they're all being tested frequently, like everyone else. And I think that by having it be comprehensive, and having all of that data, it's allowed us to make sure that we look out for any issues in those spaces, and we haven't seen them yet. And so without evidence that there's any challenges there, the plan is to keep them on the same testing frequency we have now. FASKIANOS: You mentioned that in order to enter bars and public spaces in town, you have to have this check. So how are the locals taking that? And do they have access to the test as well? And how often are locals who aren't part of the university system being tested? BURKE: So first, the bars have voluntarily chosen some of them to use this, if you're an Illinois student. They did actually make a provision, if you're not an Illinois student, you can just show that you've been tested recently by printing out your test. And I think they use that to let them in. I've not actually seen the process working myself. But that's why I've heard that it's being done. If you're not able to get the app with the test from the university, there are alternative ways to show that you're not positive. And, and again, it's not all of them. But what's been really good, it's been the bars and restaurants that are most frequented by our students. They've been able to use this as a vehicle to help kind of partner towards creating that safe socialization environment. We have not, yet, been able to expand our testing to our local community. But it's a very important goal, and we're working very hard to try to get there. So as I mentioned, up till now, we've just been trying to make sure we got it up and running in our own university’s faculty, students, and staff and make sure we can make it work. And as we continue to try to refine that process now that we've seen evidence that it can, we're really working hard to try to expand access to our community. FASKIANOS: Bob Klein had a clarifying point he meant also student teachers in the schools. BURKE: Okay. Everything I've been describing is for the University of Illinois, not for the K through 12. Just to make sure we're being clear. K through 12 is a critically important goal. We're trying really hard to figure out how to help in that space. But everything I've been describing is for faculty, students, and staff at the university. And actually everyone in any of those groups is participating in the testing program. That would include any of our teachers or members of the community who are teaching the students. FASKIANOS: Thank you. The next question comes from Nel Martinez. Once the vaccine is available, have you thought about making the vaccine a requirement of all students, faculty, and staff? Clearly this is going to be a year, we hope, and it may be even longer before this may be an option, but will you make it mandatory or optional? BURKE: So we haven't made any decisions as to whether a vaccine would be mandatory or optional. FASKIANOS: If there are any last questions, I'm happy to take them. Otherwise, we can bring this to a close. You've given us so much information. And it's clear that this model should be taken to other parts of the country and other communities. Because, as you said, if you're not testing, then it's hard to control this, or contain it. So any other last questions? I think the queue is done. Martin Burke, thank you very much for doing this. We really appreciate it. I will circle back to you if you would be willing to share the presentation, or at least your bio archives and contact information, so people can follow up with the members of your team who could help push some of these things forward. We will also include with that a video and transcript of this session so that you can share it. Because I think the information that you've given us is so important, and we need to get it out there. So thank you very much. BURKE: Thank you so much for having me, and giving us a chance to tell our story. Thank you. FASKIANOS: For all of you, in between the first and second presidential debates, we are hosting a Virtual Election 2020 U.S. Foreign Policy Forum on Thursday, October 1, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The discussion will address foreign policy challenges awaiting the winner of the election, and what Americans need to consider as they cast their vote in the coming days. So I hope you'll join us for that event, and you'll share the invitation or the announcement widely with your networks. So again, please follow us on @CFR_org and @CFR_Academic on Twitter, and go to Cfr.org, Thinkglobalhealth.org, and Foreignaffairs.com for additional information and analysis on COVID-19 and a whole array of topics and issues, and I hope you all stay safe and well. So thank you. Thank you again, Martin Burke. BURKE: Thank you very much. (END)