- Hi, everybody. I'm Catenya McHenry, and welcome to our September Q&A with Lil.
We're so glad you're here, and great to see you too, Lil.
How are you doing?
- Doing really well, Catenya, thanks for inviting me back.
- Absolutely. We are well into fall and the fall semester,
we have a lot to talk about today in our new Q&A.
We're going to talk about how the opening, the re-opening, of our campus has gone,
we're going to talk about some of our DNI efforts
that McCombs has been putting in place, some of our new faculty.
And so, let's just right to it. Let's first talk about how well
re-opening has gone on the McComb's side.
- Gosh! I think it's been going really well, Catenya.
Across the entire campus, we have about three-thousand faculty members teaching.
Here in McCombs, that would be about two-hundred teaching faculty this fall.
And I'm really proud of the McCombs faculty,
because campus-wide, 60% of our classes are online.
Wheras, in McCombs, about 60% have some in-person component there,
what we refer to as hybrid classes.
And the students could learn remotely if that's their preference,
or they can come to class.
- Which has been great for both the professors and the students, as well.
Talk a little bit about what our buildings look like now on the inside.
The buildings are the same, but a lot has changed in the classrooms
to respect social distancing, as well as keeping everybody safe.
- It sure is. We've been careful to make sure that each classroom
has no more than 40% of
its maximum density in the room.
So, if a room holds 100 people, we only have 40 students in the room.
And so, we've tied down the other chairs so that students can't
sit right next to each other.
And both the professor and all of the students wear face masks.
And I'm very happy that everyone's been completely compliant with that
inside the McComb's classes.
And everywhere you turn, there's hand sanitizer.
There shouldn't be a reason to worry when you're on campus,
people are behaving well and it's a safe environment.
- That's so refreshing. - And in addition, Catenya,
we're finding even when 40 students would be permitted in the classroom,
fewer than that are choosing to attend in person.
So, the actual in-class experience is quite small and individual.
And yet, we have all the advanced technology that the students who are
attending remotely can also get full attention from the faculty members.
- Yeah. And that's been a huge effort to get everything up online,
everything virtual, so you know --
- Kudos goes out to our entire team -- - Yes!
- Our faculty, our staff, our support staff, our technology team.
Everyone who's had a hand in making sure we can continue to operate.
Because it's been a long summer, hasn't it?
- It has! And the Associate Dean for Instructional Innovation,
Prabhudev Konana, and the media services team,
Jörg Becker, all of the people working with them
in the training of the faculty and the installing of the equipment.
It was all a first-rate job, so we appreciate it.
- Yeah. All right, now let's -- That's a good segue to talking about
Just contact-tracing and also coronavirus,
and how we're handling COVID just on campus.
So, can you talk a little bit about contact-tracing --
- Sure, sure. - And how we're handling that.
- So, there's two ways that we are able to test people.
So, what we would call diagnostic testing takes place at
the University Health Services.
And that's something where we even have capabilities of rapid testing
where you can get your results in fifteen minutes or so.
The other line of defense is what we call proactive community testing.
That's saliva testing.
And we have capacity to do about five-hundred people a day that way.
We really need more faculty, more staff, and definitely more students
getting tested, because we haven't reached our capacity yet.
Interestingly, the community proactive testing, the saliva testing,
here in the last month, we have zero staff or faculty positives.
As you might expect, the student positives are increasing,
but not beyond what we expected. We brought a --
A small city into Austin when we started school,
and we expected that several hundreds of students would arrive
with a positive test for COVID.
And, you know, we're in the tens right now not the hundreds. But --
There are some positivities, and University Health System,
and of course the Travis County Public Health, are doing contact-tracing.
And if you test positive, you're supposed to stay home.
So. But classes keep going on. That's why we're wearing masks,
and washing our hands, and not touching each other.
- And the Protect Texas Together app has also been an asset
that has helped with that, as well, with that effort.
- Yes, yes. And I check it every morning. You check your own symptoms.
And once you've done that, you get a pass to attend campus.
And it will let you know if someone has tested positive
in a room that you've been in.
And I got a notice like that last Friday,
and it did not make me nervous because I had had my mask on at all times
and washed my hands and used hand sanitizer and didn't touch people.
So, I feel safe on campus. - Excellent.
All right, now let's talk about some of the efforts that McCombs is making
in diversity and inclusion.
When we talk about how long the summer has been,
the summer has been long in just preparing to return to campus,
and also doing some active listening and enacting some new efforts
on campus to -- Well, in McCombs -- to address our diversity and inclusion.
So, can you talk a little bit about what McCombs has done,
and why you felt like that was important.
- Sure. So, I'm glad to be the interim dean in a position
to listen to people. I'm grateful
that we have an Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in
Raji Srinivasan, and she and the program leaders
in undergraduate and graduate studies have been very eager to listen
to students of color,
and this is a work in process,
so we want to be listening to all voices,
including faculty and staff and alumni and students.
And, yeah, I can still talk about some progress in some of the pain points
that we've made this summer.
One of the things that the undergraduate students expressed
is that the building itself is not as inclusive-feeling as it could be,
and I admit, Catenya, I had to ask what that meant,
and one of the things we heard was that the depictions of people
in the building tend to be mostly white and that there aren't
many spaces that celebrate a broader, more diverse set
of student histories and faculty and student alumni accomplishments.
And so, with the advice and support of leadership throughout
the undergraduate programs and in multiple corners of the dean's office,
we have designated a previous special events space as a space where
students could redepict it with art or education to tell stories
of some more diverse people that have come through McCombs
and been successful.
Of course, such a space is inclusive to everyone;
it would in no way be designated for particular students.
It's more that the walls themselves provide an opportunity
to celebrate a wider set of stories, and we hope it gets wide use
by everyone in McCombs.
- Well, I know more than just me is happy to hear that,
so it's nice to see that some active progress is being made
to address the concerns that the students have
as well as faculty and staff.
- Catenya, one of the things the students would also like
is more support among program staff for inclusion activities,
and students are busy, people pursuing their own education,
they are very much leaders and yet don't want
the entire burden of leadership on them,
so to the extent, even in the time of potentially constrained resources,
that we can help support staff to support students,
we would want to do that,
and I've got a really great development team
that, even in these COVID times, we are busy raising money,
and one of those aspirations for this coming academic year
is another 12 million dollars of scholarship endowments,
not necessarily targeted, but we do try very hard
to raise scholarships that particularly benefit
students with financial need, and so to the extent
underrepresented minority students with a higher proportionality
have more financial need,
my efforts with that team to raise more scholarship money
should have those spillover benefits.
And I'll keep listening all year, and to voices of all types.
- Excellent.
All right, now let's talk about some new faculty.
We have about a dozen new faculty across the McCombs School,
so can you talk about some of our --
Well, they're all rock stars, but --
- They're all rock stars!
- And we're so glad to have the new faculty.
They've come from schools from all over the country
including Stanford and MIT, so talk to us a little bit about
who is new to McCombs and some of their research areas too.
- Catenya, you and I talked before this interview about,
dare I mention anyone by name, because I --
But you said we couldn't take 25 minutes to do it,
so I'm only going to mention a couple,
and I hope a future interview I can mention more and more.
I'm excited that Avi Collis has joined us here from MIT,
because he's working particularly in the COVID-19 environment specifically
about highlighting strategies for business reopening
and his research was featured on MSN.
Maria De-Arteaga from Carnegie Mellon is an artificial intelligence researcher
recently featured on CNN.
Bukky Akinsanmi is a management professor who joined us straight from her PhD
at University of Wisconsin, and she studies human resources
and human capital.
One of the interesting things about Bukky is her undergraduate field is architecture
and she's particularly interested in how space influences
the productivity of workers and in worker transitions
from one job to another.
And finally, it's just a treat to welcome Lisa De Simone,
a tax professor that we hired from Stanford,
and she does cutting edge work on international tax policy,
and in particular just published a paper
about foreign accounts and the requirement for foreign banks
to notify the U.S. government when U.S. taxpayers
have money abroad.
- Well, welcome to all of our new faculty. Well, that does it for our September Q&A
with Lil. Thank you so much for joining us today,
and thank you so much, Lil, for your time
and also all of the insight that you gave today in the Q&A.
We will see you next time and next month for our October Q&A.
We'll see you next time. - Sounds great! Thanks, Catenya!
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