Glad to be back and cautiously optimistic

It’s been just over two weeks since the first day of classes, and the Carolina campus is abuzz with students, faculty and staff — the vast majority of them vaccinated against COVID-19. Masks are commonplace these days — and required for all indoor spaces. The fall semester, yet another like no other but one edging closer to “normal,” is well underway.

How is Chancellor Guskiewicz feeling about things so far? The Well caught up with him recently, an hour before he was scheduled to teach his first class of the semester, a graduate course called “The American Professoriate.” He seemed relaxed and looking forward to getting back into a classroom. “People often ask what’s my favorite place on campus,” he said. “I tell them it’s in front of a class of students.”

Here’s what Guskiewicz had to say about the current state of the pandemic, recent successes, challenges and future goals.

How does it feel to have students back on campus? Is there one specific moment or interaction from the first week of classes that stands out?

It’s been awesome. That one moment for me was Convocation, when thousands of students entered Kenan Stadium, and we were together for the first time in a long time.

We were supposed to have it Sunday night, but they were calling for thunder and lightning, so we pushed it to Monday. On Sunday, they said, “Tomorrow night’s not looking much better.” And I said, “No, we are pushing through. If we have to delay it till the thunderstorms are over, we are doing it in person.” I did not want to do a virtual Convocation, because we had both the first years and probably half of the sophomores there. I gave everybody up on the stage a Carolina ball cap, and I said, “We are going out on that stage.”

For the first 10 or 15 minutes, it was raining, but everybody had fun. There were a lot of smiles, a lot of selfies. The sky was gray with a little bit of sunshine peeking through, and you could see the Bell Tower rising up above the corner of the stadium. It was special.

I’ve had so many emails and calls from parents and students saying, “Thank you. This is what we signed up for. This is what we’ve needed for months and months after all the isolation and remote learning.”

It was a good first week, but we’ve got a long road ahead. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Chancellor Guskiewicz takes a selfie photo with students prior to the start of the New Student Convocation held at Kenan Stadium on Aug. 16, 2021. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

In terms of COVID-19, how would you gauge where the University is now versus a year ago?

We still have a long way to go. We have to be vigilant, and there’s not a day that passes when I’m not talking about the importance of getting vaccinated.

Everyone is wearing masks indoors, and those who aren’t vaccinated are getting tested regularly. We increased testing for students from once to twice a week because we have the capacity to do it, and we feel that extra layer of protection is going to give people even more confidence that we are living, learning and working in a safer environment.

While the testing is really important, we can’t test our way out of this pandemic. It’s all about vaccinations and masks.

Compared to last year, there’s a lot more known about COVID. The delta variant has thrown everyone a curve ball. But our team is prepared for this. We’ve been checking daily the number of students that are going to Campus Health for symptomatic testing. We’ve got the quarantine and isolation space. It’s there and ready. And, fortunately, we are nowhere near capacity. We’ve said from the beginning, we’re going to have cases. We’re going to have clusters. It’s why we have the testing and the isolation and quarantine space in place, ready to manage it. The teams within Student Affairs, Campus Health and our Carolina Together Testing Program have been incredible and deserve a lot of credit for keeping our community safe.

And with those high vaccination rates, the outcomes are going to be different. Our infectious disease experts continue to say that the vaccine is not going to prevent you from contracting the virus, but if you’re vaccinated, the contagion period is significantly shorter, the symptoms are fewer and the severity and duration of those symptoms are reduced.

COVID-19 has dominated much of our narrative, but the University continues to make headway in several other areas. What do you consider some of the biggest recent successes?

I think that we stayed true to our strategic plan [Carolina Next: Innovations for Public Good]. Those eight strategic initiatives are still the priorities for us.

We continue to solve the grand challenges of our time. Our research enterprise continues to do great work. In terms of research expenditures, last year was a record high for Carolina, and this year the total was slightly higher, up to nearly $1.2 billion. I think that’s incredible, given how much of that was happening outside of normal operations.

It’s not just about the number of awards or the dollar amount on those research grants. It’s about the impact that they have. A lot of these are around some of the greatest health challenges that society is facing. Others involve the social sciences and humanities, including work helping society learn how to adapt to the pandemic.

One of the big concerns among The Well’s primary readers — Carolina faculty and staff — involved the University’s budget deficit. Any good news there?

Yes. Around this time last year, we decided to fix the deficit that been growing for about nine years. We had to make some really tough decisions, but all indications are that we will balance the budget by December of this year. And we were able to do it while protecting our mission and people. We haven’t filled a lot of vacant positions, but people have stepped up. I know how hard it has been. Unit leaders have done a great job making tough but strategic cuts of some programs and operations. As a result, we’re getting there. I think we are proving to people at the UNC System office and both our Board of Trustees and Board of Governors that we’re serious about this.

We’re also being much more transparent about what got us to that place and what we’re doing to make sure that the problem is rectified and that we don’t land back there again.

We’re planning a reinvestment fund, which all great universities like ours should have, to invest in the strategic plan and the priorities we’ve identified.

We are advocating for salary increases for our University employees. That’s really important to me because we haven’t had raises in a while. And we have an incredible workforce here, and many people deserve to be better compensated.

The incoming class is the largest and most diverse in Carolina’s history. Why should those who love Carolina celebrate that achievement?

It’s important because we have an incredible curriculum here. We have world-class faculty. And 17% of the class are first-generation college students. When you’re in a classroom — and I have taught for many years here — that curriculum comes alive when it’s being taught in a classroom environment with such diversity. No matter what the topic, to have meaningful conversations where people’s different lived experiences are brought to the surface around those issues — that’s what makes Carolina so great.

Build our Community Together is the first initiative in the strategic plan, but we’ve continued to face diversity, equity and inclusion challenges on campus. How will we make headway in the coming months?

Let’s just be honest: We are not where we want to be. While we’ve made progress we have also had setbacks. But we are committed to building our community together, committed to being able to recruit and retain the very best faculty and staff and also to be very deliberate in our approach of diversifying and making sure that we create a welcoming campus environment, where our underrepresented faculty and staff know that their voices are being heard and that they belong here at Carolina.

As long as I’ve been in South Building — as senior associate dean and dean and now chancellor — we’ve been working really hard on this. I formed the first deans’ faculty diversity advisory committee in the College about six years ago. That was an important step. We began instituting required diversity workshops for search committees and strategizing for potential cluster hires and mentoring to ensure we could diversify the faculty.

Two things we’re doing right now are going to be really important. We are going to double down on our minority postdoc program and double the size of that class over the next few years. And while we put the VITAE program on hold for a while due to the pandemic and budgetary constraints, it’s back up and running. We’re committing an additional $1.2 million per year to that program.

I’m also really excited to have Leah Cox, a respected national leader, here as the vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer. We have elevated the chief diversity officer position to a vice provost and Leah is visionary leader and brings a wealth of experience and talent to this important role.

We offered her the job right as the tenure situation was unfolding. She accepted, and then things escalated. So I picked up the phone and called her. I said, “Leah, I just really want you to know we are committed to this.” She stopped me mid-sentence and said, “Chancellor, I’m there for you. This is what I do. I want to be at a place like Carolina. There is no perfect place. You have challenges, and so do other places. But I’m going to be there to be a part of the solution.”

That’s the kind of person she is. That’s the kind of person you want leading these diversity initiatives.

Leah is an incredible listener. And she’ll challenge you. That’s what I want from her. I need her to feel like she can walk in that door any day and say, “Kevin, you’re missing something here. I need to create a line of sight toward something you may need to pay more attention to.”

The University recently launched Carolina Across 100. How will it benefit North Carolina communities, and why is that important?

I’ll start by telling you about the 2019 bus tour. When I became chancellor, I decided that we had to strengthen our partnership with the state of North Carolina — taxpayers, the General Assembly — to both showcase the great work that we do and learn by getting out on the road and visiting the cities and towns that our students call home.

We had three buses and traveled about 1,600 miles to 28 of those cities and towns. We took around 100 faculty members, and people came back with all these ideas about how they might tweak their research and really make an impact.

Anita Brown-Graham from the School of Government faculty was part of that tour. I remember sitting on a bus with her — we were driving from Cherokee back to Chapel Hill — and she said, “I think there’s more we can do with this.”

She came to me with a proposal. The idea was to show how we touch all the counties across North Carolina and, in the process, learn where we’re falling short. The pandemic had just started, so it got put on hold. Six months into the pandemic, our service to the state became even more critical. I said, “We’ve got to do this.”

The project got off the ground this summer, and Anita has a team taking an inventory across campus of where Carolina’s research and programs touch each county and what we can do to amplify that. She already has over 70 Carolina undergrads enlisted to help serve this initiative.

A lot of our service is around health care issues — COVID, but also the opioid epidemic and health disparities among underrepresented groups. Much of it involves our economics and business faculty helping small businesses survive the pandemic. The School of Government trains public servants. We do so much to benefit this state, but we can and will do more. It’s why I like to call this the University for North Carolina.

What are your top goals for the coming year?

I just printed out my installation speech from last fall, because I’m going to read a couple of lines from it in my class today. The theme of it was how we must stay true to what we put on paper. And what we put on paper is Carolina Next: Innovations for Public Good. If we stay true to that strategic plan, there’s no question we will maintain our status as a leading global public research University — that we will continue to be the University for North Carolina, with an emphasis on the eight initiatives, especially the first one, Build Our Community Together.

Right up there alongside staying true to our strategic plan is the health and safety of our campus community. So how do we do both of those? I think we’re showing that in these early weeks. We do it by remaining committed to delivering high-quality teaching for these students who desperately want to be in the classroom, where they thrive, but doing it under different conditions. We’re all in masks. We’re physically distancing as best we can while still being together. We’re reminding each other of the importance of being vaccinated. Soon we’ll turn to booster shots and get people lined up for those.

And so, my priorities are staying true to the strategic plan and maintaining a healthy, safe campus environment — monitoring the data every day, every week, and adapting as needed.

I’ll admit, there are skeptics. That’s understandable after what happened last fall. But this semester is different in so many ways. Last year we had an untested playbook. This year, it’s a much more tested playbook. There’s still plenty of uncertainty. As I said, I’m cautiously optimistic. I just hope people will give us a chance.