President Bacow, now recovered, shares own experiencehaving COVID-19
Harvard President Larry Bacow announced in an email to theHarvard community on March 24 that he and his wife, Adele FleetBacow, had been exposed to the spreading coronavirus. More than aweek after they began working from home and limiting their outsidecontacts, both started experiencing the symptoms of COVID-19. Nowrecovered, he shared their experience with theGazette.
GAZETTE: How are you and Adele feeling?
BACOW: We are feeling much better. We were very fortunate. Wenever experienced any of the respiratory problems that sent so manypeople to the hospital. For us, this felt a lot like the flu. Notfun, but certainly not life-threatening, at least in ourcase.
GAZETTE: What were your symptoms?
BACOW: We both started off with a cough and then that progressedto having a fever and chills. I also had whole-body muscle aches.Everything hurt. I felt like I was 120 years old almost overnight.And then lethargy — just how you feel when you have theflu.
GAZETTE: What was going through your mind when you learned you hadboth tested positive?
BACOW: Well, we’d been very, very careful, and I was a little bitsurprised, in truth, because Adele and I had not seen anyone excepteach other for close to 10 days before we started experiencingsymptoms. We were completely isolated in the house. One reason wehad taken such precautions is because I live with an autoimmunecondition that makes me very susceptible to any kind of infection.In fact, some people questioned why I actually got tested. It’sbecause I’m immunosuppressed. So I was at risk. And when we testedpositive I thought, “This is going to be interesting.”
I was also worried about being able todischarge my responsibilities. When I was at Tufts, I had gottenquite ill in 2004 when my autoimmune condition was first diagnosed,and I had had to take a month off of work. I realized that I neededto look after my own health. I wasn’t good to anybody if I wasn’thealthy. But beyond that, I realized I also had to give otherspermission to take the time they needed to recover if they gotsick. So when I tested positive, I tried to model the behavior Iwould hope to see in others by being a good patient and doing whatI was supposed to do. And I’m fortunately blessed with a greatteam. They didn’t miss a beat and filled in behind me and just kepteverything moving forward in my absence.
GAZETTE: Were you able to do any work at all, or were you off thegrid entirely?
BACOW: As president, you are never completely off the grid. I waslooking at email, although not terribly responsive to it. I wouldhave one call a day with Patti Bellinger, my chief of staff, andwith Bill Lee, senior fellow of the Corporation. And I wouldreceive daily reports from both Katie Lapp, [executive vicepresident and chief administrative officer] and [Provost] AlanGarber. And if I needed to, I would talk to them by phone aswell.
GAZETTE: What kind of response did you get when you let the Harvardcommunity know in an email that you and Adele weresick?
BACOW: We must have received a thousand responses, from students,faculty, staff, and alumni, in some cases from all over the world.We were both quite touched by the response.
What was a little strange was lying in bedsick watching CNN, if I recall correctly, and having them report onme being sick. That was a bit of an out-of-body experience. Once itmade the national news, we started hearing from old friends andfamily from around the country and around the world.
GAZETTE: What are you doing to keep yourself occupied during thissocial isolation? Have you been binge-watching anything or readinganything in particular?
BACOW: It’s a struggle just to keep up on email. I haven’t reallyhad a chance to read anything for pleasure. In the ironydepartment, our son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughterscalled us up a few weeks ago. They live in New York City. They wereworking remotely and wanted to know how we would feel if they cameup and lived with us during this experience. We said, “Of course,we’d love to see you.” Well, they literally drove up here the daythe two of us came down with our first symptoms. They have been inthe house and we’ve been FaceTiming them and engaging in socialdistancing. The big distraction is having our 2½-year-oldgranddaughter and our now 8-week-old granddaughter with us. We hopeas we emerge from the other side of this in a few days that we’llactually be able to play with them. That will be ourdistraction.
GAZETTE: Now that you are feeling better, what is a typical day likefor you working from home?
BACOW: Since I’m just recently recovered, I’m not sure I have areal routine yet. I have not started exercising again, but that issomething I hope to do in the next week. I’m still trying to takeit easy because I’m getting my strength back. So, for a typicalday, the first thing I do is look at email that came in overnight.And then usually I have a series of phone calls and Zoom meetings,like everybody else. Sometimes those are calls with my directreports. I’m checking in with the deans and the various vicepresidents. I’m also talking to public officials. I’ve had phonecalls with the governor, and officials in Cambridge, Boston, and inWashington, D.C.
I’ve also been talking to my presidentialpeers. The Ivy League presidents have been in close touch largelyvia email, and I have also spoken to a number of them by phone. Imake a point of speaking to MIT President Rafael Reif regularly,and I have spoken to a number of other presidential colleagues inthe area. I’ve also been in touch with [former Harvard presidents]Drew [Faust] and Larry Summers. So, I try to reach out to peoplewho either have previously dealt with situations like what we’redealing with now, or because they’re dealing with them in realtime.
I’ve been on calls with the Association ofIndependent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, and theAmerican Council on Education. Last weekend we had the governingboards meeting on Zoom. We had a full meeting of the Board ofOverseers and a meeting of the Corporation.
“With spring break coming up we were concerned that if wedid not act quickly our students would disperse and likely comeinto close proximity with other young people in various parts ofthe world, and that when they returned to campus we could face afull-blown outbreak here.”
GAZETTE: Looking backward, when did the University start monitoringthe coronavirus?
BACOW: In early January, Harvard University Health Servicesstarted paying attention to what was going on in China. We havestudents from China, and we have a fair number of faculty and staffwho travel to China for their own scholarship, so we startedmonitoring what was going on there. We also started issuingadvisories to members of our community who were returning to campusfrom China on the steps they should take to ensure that theyremained healthy. Then we started issuing advisories discouragingtravel, first to China and then broadening that to other hotspotsthroughout the world as they became apparent.
We were very, very attentive to what wasgoing on. We were also in close contact with the members of our ownfaculty and staff, some of whom are among the world’s foremostexperts in infectious disease, virology, epidemiology, publichealth. And they themselves were in contact with their colleaguesin China and in other parts of the world, and started advising uson the risks we were facing going forward. We very quickly startedconvening a crisis-management team to follow these events and tostart doing some preliminary planning. Katie Lapp convened thatteam, which engaged the administrative deans, the vice presidents,and others from environmental health and safety throughout theUniversity to start planning and thinking about what we might do ifwe saw this virus, both in the Boston area and especially if we sawit on our campus. Giang Nguyen, the director of Harvard UniversityHealth Services, also quickly put together a scientific advisorygroup. We have also been blessed to have Alan Garber, a physicianas well as an economist, as our provost. Alan has publishedscholarly papers on the management of pandemics. So we drew upon atremendous amount of expertise in trying to prepare for this virusand to make some intelligent decisions along the way.
GAZETTE: Harvard was one of the first institutions to de-densify itscampus and transition to online learning, and there was somepushback at first. Can you talk about that decision-makingprocess?
BACOW: Our thinking was driven almost entirely by a handful ofconsiderations. One was just looking at the spread of thecoronavirus, both in China and then in Italy and Spain, and tryingto learn from the experiences of those countries. Second, it wasdriven by modeling, which we and others did, which suggested that,if this virus was as infectious as we thought it was and asdangerous as it appeared to be, we could face a very real crisisgoing forward. At that time, we believed that young people wereless at risk than the elderly or those with pre-existingconditions. More recent data suggests, at least in the UnitedStates, that you’ve got a higher incidence of severe illness inyoung people than in some other countries. So we were looking atthat. We were observing what was going on with a few cruise shipsnear Japan which function effectively as petri dishes and imaginingwhat would happen if we got an infection in our dormitories wherestudents live in close proximity to each other.
With spring break coming up, we wereconcerned that if we did not act quickly our students woulddisperse and likely come into close proximity with other youngpeople in various parts of the world, and that when they returnedto campus we could face a full-blown outbreak here. So we thoughtit was important to act before students went on spring break and wemobilized resources very quickly. Our Harvard University ITdepartment under Anne Margulies [vice president and Universitychief information officer] quickly geared up to be able to geteverybody on Zoom, to start educating faculty on Zoom, and to makesure that we had the IT infrastructure to sustain teaching in largenumbers and having meetings on Zoom. Similarly, our vice provostfor advances in learning, Bharat Anand, and his colleagues startedto assemble resources to quickly educate faculty in onlineteaching. Each of the deans worked tirelessly with their facultyand staff to prepare. They are the real heroes of this process. Andthen we issued a notice to students that we were going to ask thosewho could move out to do so and not to return to campus afterbreak, and that we were going to move all teachingonline.
I knew that we would be criticized by somefor possibly acting prematurely. But there was a point in thisprocess where we watched the incidence of cases in Massachusettsover a four-day period go from, I believe, 13 to 28 to 42 to 91,which is clearly an exponential growth rate, albeit from a smallbase. It was a growth rate that had been repeated in almostprecisely the same pattern in every other country that was a weekor two ahead of us. So there were flashing red lights. And Iquickly realized that the cost of being wrong was asymmetrical.What I mean by that is that if we acted prematurely, as somethought we were, then we would inconvenience many, and we wouldprobably squander a lot of resources. But if we waited too long torespond, that cost was likely going to be measured in human life.And so the decision actually wasn’t that difficult. Implementing itwas. But the decision to tell students to leave and to not returnand to transition to online learning seemed pretty clear. We alsorecognized that by acting quickly we might make it easier for otherinstitutions that were faced with similar decisions, but withoutaccess to the same expertise that we were blessed with, to actquickly as well.
GAZETTE: How do you feel the University went about supportingstudents and others in the transition?
BACOW: Obviously, we were asking a lot of students and others inour community to move so quickly, and people across the entireUniversity pitched in to help. It was a mark of the strength of ourcommunity that individuals volunteered to assist students as theymoved out. We also tried to provide financial support to helpstudents with travel, storage, and other expenses. Staff in theCollege worked day and night, literally, to implement this decisionand to address issues as they arose. They had thousands ofquestions to answer and problems to solve. Around 6,000 of ourundergraduates moved out in five days or so.
We have had to quickly make a transition toonline teaching and learning, and it’s also a transition foreverybody working remotely from home, with very few exceptions.We’re so grateful for those members of our community who arelooking after the students still in residence. We are reallygrateful to our employees who are continuing to make sure that ourbuildings are safe and secure. Everybody has been touched by thiscrisis. I’ve been really encouraged by the willingness of both ourfaculty as well as our students and all the people who aresupporting them to, almost on a dime, master the technologynecessary to teach online. There’s been so much goodwill on thepart of people willing to learn new ways of teaching andlearning.
GAZETTE: In your experience as Tufts president, is there anythingyou can compare this to?
BACOW: I lived through the 2008 financial crisis, and there arecertainly some similarities between this crisis and that one, butalso some important differences. The big similarity is that eachone affected the economic environment in which we operate. And, ineach case, we saw a decline in our endowments. In each case we areseeing a likely decline in philanthropy in the short-term and adecline in corporate and foundation support.
We will also see an increase in the demandfor financial aid for our students. We’ve seen great anxiety amongour employees, faculty, and staff, as well. And in each case we’vealso seen the community really respond positively, with peopleworking hard to help out others less fortunate. That’s been veryheartening.
This crisis is much harder than 2008because it affects our ability to deliver on our core mission. Weare a residential research University, and right now we basicallycannot have students in residence. And the capacity of our facultyto deliver on our research mission is at the moment compromisedbecause we’ve had to shut down our libraries and archives, and mostof our laboratories and facilities that actually support ourscholarly work, so there are challenges here that we never faced in2008.
“Irecognize that I’m not going to get everything right. But ratherthan try to do everything perfectly and be paralyzed byuncertainty, I think it’s important to be able to act, and actdecisively.”
GAZETTE: Even amid those challenges, there are efforts happeningacross the University to address the pandemic. Can you speak tosome of the collaborations and work happening with Harvard scholarsand experts from around the world to try to tackle thecoronavirus?
BACOW: One of the very first things we did, well before it wasclear that the coronavirus was going to be this extraordinarycrisis for our nation, was to develop a collaboration with ourcolleagues at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health. Thisis a major scholarly collaboration based at Harvard Medical Schooland run by Dean George Daley that engages all of our teachinghospitals, along with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of PublicHealth, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty in other parts ofthe University, and our colleagues at MIT, BU, the Broad, and theRagon Institute. It also engages people in the life sciencesindustry here in Massachusetts. Harvard is at the center of thisactivity, focusing on developing rapid diagnostic tests, which arecritical for how we manage this crisis going forward, and newvaccines and therapies. I’m incredibly proud of the way that ourfaculty, our graduate students, our research staff, our colleaguesin industry and in the hospitals have all come together so quicklyto focus all of the resources that Harvard and its neighbors canmuster to try to address the challenges created byCOVID-19.
GAZETTE: What has Harvard’s engagement with Cambridge, Boston, andthe state been like through this process?
BACOW: We’ve been working with the city of Cambridge, the city ofBoston, and the state to try to be helpful in a variety of ways. Anumber of our individual Schools, for example, tried to makeresources available to assist in homeschooling. I can’t say enoughgood things about what our Graduate School of Education has done inthis area. We also made the Harvard Square Hotel available to firstresponders and health care workers who may not be able to traveleasily back and forth to their homes, in part because they fearinfecting their own families. And we have made additionalfacilities available in Boston and Cambridge for the same purpose.We’ve collected personal protective equipment from our laboratoriesand made it available to area hospitals for health care workers whoare still trying to take care of sick people in an environment inwhich personal protective equipment has proven scarce.
There was a recentarticle in the Harvard Gazette that details the variety of other ways that we have beentrying to work with the state and our local communities.
Our alumni around the world have also beenterrific in offering their assistance. We’ve had a number of themhelp to arrange shipments of personal protective equipment fromdifferent countries that’s now being distributed and made availablethrough the governor’s good efforts to ensure that the supplies goto where they’re needed most.
GAZETTE: With the economy in such disarray, how are you thinkingabout the endowment and future payouts?
BACOW: We are looking at literally every expenditure within theUniversity. The deans and the vice presidents are all working withus at the moment to limit spending and to ensure that that we arecoming into alignment with what we know are going to be diminishedsources of revenue. We’ve already spent a lot of money that wewould not have otherwise in helping students go home. We arerebating room and board for students throughout the University. Wehave seen a decline in continuing and executive education revenues— a precipitous drop. So the immediate effects are significantalready. And then we’ll see what the market delivers to us inendowment returns going forward.
The good news is that we anticipated thatat some point we would face a recession. We were cognizant of thefact that we were already in the longest peacetime economicexpansion in history. Several years ago, we began planning for thenext recession. We didn’t know when it would come, but we knew thatit would arrive at some point, and so we created a recessionplaybook, produced by our financial planning staff under (chieffinancial officer and Vice President of Finance) Tom Hollister’sguidance, with the participation of all of Harvard’s deans and vicepresidents. We also tried to make sure that we understood thelessons of 2008 so that we could be better prepared the next timearound. We took measures to ensure that we had more liquidity thanwe had going into 2008. We built reserves. All these things willhelp cushion the impact, but the impact will still be felt. Thecity of Cambridge and the city of Boston have already putrestrictions on construction projects right now, so construction onthe campus is on hold at the moment. Lots of things are going to bedelayed, and there will be belt-tightening across theboard.
GAZETTE: Challenging times demand tough decisions. What is it like,as the leader of Harvard, to have to make such difficult calls? Arethere examples from history that you draw on?
BACOW: This is a time when I actually think it’s helpful to havebeen through some things like this before. At one point during my10 years at Tufts, I made up a list of about a dozen crises ofdifferent sorts that I had to deal with, ranging from 9/11, whichoccurred 10 days into my presidency, to a major power failure inMedford that forced us to operate the university for eight dayswithout any electricity, to the financial crisis of 2008, togetting sick myself in 2004 and being hospitalized multiple timesin a six-month period.
I think having been through all that givesme some perspective. I sometimes say that one of the challengingthings about being a university president is that all the easydecisions get decided before they get to you. That means thatalmost every decision I get to make is a 51/49 decision — if I’mlucky. Sometimes it’s 50.0001 versus 49.9999. The no-brainers haveall been decided previously. So I’m used to having to make toughcalls.
It helps to have been through challengingcircumstances in the past. I’m also blessed with fabulouscolleagues who help me understand the consequences of differentchoices. And then, like any other person, I just try to do the bestthat I can do. I recognize that I’m not going to get everythingright. But rather than try to do everything perfectly and beparalyzed by uncertainty, I think it’s important to be able to act,and act decisively. And when you need to engage in errorcorrection, to do that quickly as well.
GAZETTE: What are the implications for higher education as a resultof the pandemic? Are there any silver linings?
BACOW: Even the darkest clouds have their silver linings. We’veseen a lot of wonderful work on behalf of so many people fromacross the University trying to help others less fortunate. Theseefforts don’t surprise me, but it’s still wonderful to see. We’vealso seen both faculty and students experiment with new ways ofteaching and learning, which I suspect will have long-termconsequences for us. I suspect many of us have realized that wedon’t need to travel nearly as much as we once did to attendmeetings. Many of those meetings can now be held using technology —that will help us reduce costs and also reduce our carbonfootprint. I also think we have realized people are immenselyflexible. And while we all miss the social environment of beingtogether and working together, people are still finding ways to bevery, very productive from home. As we look forward, I hope we canbuild more flexibility into how people work at Harvard. That’sgoing to have long-term benefits as we think about how we organizework, not just within the University, but throughoutsociety.
I also think some of the relationships thathave been forged between institutions that are collaborating now toaddress the challenges posed by the coronavirus will prove durableas well. I just look at how we’re working with some of ourcolleagues in China right now, not just at Guangzhou Institute ofRespiratory Health, but at other Chinese universities. I suspectwe’ll build off those relationships going forward. So I think thatthere are going to be many positive benefits. That said, I wouldn’twish this on my worst enemy.
GAZETTE: Is there a message you’d like to convey to the Harvardcommunity, recognizing that the full impact of the crisis is yet tobe felt?
BACOW: First of all, I would thank people for their patience andfor their flexibility in adapting to circumstances that none of ushave ever lived through. I would also ask people to give everyonethe benefit of the doubt. So many people are working so hard rightnow across the University, working nonstop trying to address adizzying array of questions, of uncertainties, and we know it’sinevitable that we’re not going to get everything right. We haven’tgotten everything right today. But people have worked really,really hard to adapt and to adapt quickly in the face of newinformation. I would hope that people would trust their colleaguesand trust that the institution is going to do the best it canpossibly do. And I would hope they know that when we make mistakes,we’re going to try to correct them as quickly as possible. And thenwe’re going to try to take on yet another new set of challenges,because the challenges are not going to go away. They’re going tobe with us for some time to come.
