Hartford Business Journal

6 Hartford Business Journal • May 18, 2020 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com W hen Thomas Katsouleas scheduled a town hall meeting for UConn students and faculty in early March about the COVID-19 pandemic, closing down the campus was one of several pos- sibilities the school was considering. When he actually held the virtual town hall two days later on March 12, the situation had deteriorated so quickly that UConn had decided to close the campus and move all coursework online for the rest of the spring semester. "This was just one of the scenar- ios, one of many, that we were get- ting ready for, but it wasn't some- thing we were expecting to pull the trigger on," Katsouleas said. "At that point we fully expected [students] would be coming back; only later did it become apparent that this [virus] is going to be ramping up for a sig- nificant period of time." In his decades-long career in high- er education, Katsouleas has handled weather disasters and student and faculty issues of all stripes. He also led Duke University's engineering school during the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out a quarter of the university's endowment. But for Katsouleas, who is not even a full year year into his first univer- sity president job, the COVID-19 pandemic is a unique crisis that threatens residential student life, the way faculty can teach classes and possibly more than $100 million in revenue per semester for the state's flagship university from housing, dining services and other fees. In a nearly 40-minute interview, Katsouleas reflected on how UConn has responded to the pandemic, the university's role as an economic and research driver and how the crisis changes the trajectory of his young university presidency, which started Aug. 1. "In February I was feeling like the new presi- dent; I was still out on the road, meeting our donors in differ- ent parts of the country for the first time, doing all the kinds of new things you do," Katsouleas said with a grin. "But by the end of March, I felt like I'd been president of UConn for six years." Elsewhere on campus, officials from unions representing profes- sors and graduate student employ- ees give the administration high marks on keeping the lines of com- munication open so far. But they still have some pressing questions. And heavy financial losses are a har- binger for possibly painful cuts ahead. For now, the best answer Katsouleas can provide regarding future budget decisions is that everything is on the table, as the university still hopes to reopen its campuses on Sept. 1. Uncertain fall semester UConn has already lost about $30 million this spring, as a result of students being sent home early and coursework being moved online. It made back some of that money — $21.5 million — from the federal gov- ernment's CARES Act passed in April. The school expects to lose up to an additional $120 million in the fall semester if it closes its campuses to residential students. Earlier this month, Katsouleas, along with the heads of Trinity College and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, joined Gov. Ned Lamont during a virtual press conference detailing a timeline for reopening college campuses, which will be predicated on the availability of testing supplies and overall prevalence of the virus in Connecticut. The state plan puts the onus of enacting social distanc- ing requirements and other safety measures on the schools themselves. As Katsouleas and other UConn ad- ministrators mull over the prospect of reopening campus in September — a decision will be made by June 30 — the first priority is to prevent the school's flagship Storrs and four regional campuses from becoming COVID-19 hotspots by reducing lec- ture hall class sizes from about 350 students to less than 100 and setting up a contact tracing regime. In fact, UConn is exploring the idea of offering a summer course on contact tracing, which could create a cadre of student volunteers to as- sist with efforts to follow the virus' community spread, Katsouleas said. But even as the transition of UConn's more than 5,000 available courses to an online learning format has been largely successful, Katsouleas said the university loses more than student fees by offering strictly remote learning. "I think the value proposition to the student is having access to those faculty at a time when the world is changing tremendously fast and there are unsolved questions," Katsou- leas said. "They also see value in the co-curricular and out-of-classroom learning they experience in a unique campus environment, and that can't be replaced with an all-online experience." UConn's administration in- structed faculty to prepare for both in-person, online and hybrid meth- ods of teaching courses for the fall semester, said Michael Bailey, execu- tive director of UConn's chapter of the American Association of Univer- sity Professors union. Communication between admin- Tough Test Freshman college president Katsouleas leads UConn through unprecedented challenges UConn administrators will decide by June 30 whether or not the Storrs campus will open this fall. UConn President Thomas Katsouleas says budget cuts will likely be inevitable as the college deals with the financial fallout from COVID-19. PHOTO | HBJ FILE PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED

• Cover