Mark Kreidler: How Harvard and Stanford B-schools have battled COVID-19
Harvard Business School is to the left, on the south side of the Charles River. Across the river, in Cambridge, is the university’s main campus.
At the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, near San Francisco, the stories got weird almost immediately upon students’ return for the fall semester. Some said they were being followed around campus by people wearing green vests telling them where they could and could not be, go, stop, chat or conduct even a socially distanced gathering. Others said they were threatened with the loss of their campus housing if they didn’t follow the rules.
“They were breaking up picnics. They were breaking up yoga groups,” said one graduate student, who asked not to be identified so as to avoid social media blowback. “Sometimes they’d ask you whether you actually lived in the dorm you were about to go into.”
Across the country, in Boston, students at the Harvard Business School gathered for the new semester after being gently advised by the school’s top administrators, via email, that they were part of “a delicate experiment.” The students were given the ground rules for the term, then received updates every few days about how things were going. And that, basically, was that.
In the time of COVID-19, it’s fair to say that no two institutions have come to quite the same conclusions about how to proceed safely. But as Harvard’s and Stanford’s elite MBA-granting programs have proved, those paths can diverge radically, even as they may eventually lead toward the same place.
For months, college and university administrators nationwide have huddled with their own medical experts and with local and county health authorities, trying to determine how best to operate in the midst of the novel coronavirus. Could classes be offered in person? Would students be allowed to live on campus — and, if so, how many? Could they hang out together?
“The complexity of the task and the enormity of the task really can’t be overstated,” said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, head of student health services at the University of Southern California and a past president of the American College Health Association. “Our first concern is making sure our campuses are safe and that we can maintain the health of our students, and each institution goes through that analysis to determine what it can deliver.”
With a campus spread over more than 8,000 acres on the San Francisco Peninsula, Stanford might have seemed like a great candidate to host large numbers of students in the fall. But after sounding hopeful tones earlier in the summer, university officials reversed course as the pandemic worsened, discussing several possibilities before finally deciding to limit on-campus residential status to graduate students and certain undergrads with special circumstances.
The Graduate School of Business sits in the middle of that vast and now mostly deserted campus, so the thought was that Stanford’s MBA hopefuls would have all the physical distance they needed to stay safe. Almost from the students’ arrival in late August, though, Stanford’s approach was wracked by missteps, policy reversals and general confusion over what the COVID rules were and how they were to be applied.
Stanford’s business grad students were asked to sign a campus compact that specified strict safety measures for residents. Students at Harvard Business School signed a similar agreement. In both cases, state and local regulations weighed heavily, especially in limiting the size of gatherings. But Harvard’s compact emerged fully formed and relied largely on the trustworthiness of its students. The process at Stanford was unexpectedly torturous, with serial adjustments and enforcers who sometimes went above and beyond the stated restrictions.
Graduate students there, mobilized by their frustration over not being consulted when the policy was conceived, urged colleagues not to sign the compact even though they wouldn’t be allowed to enroll in classes, receive pay for teaching or live in campus housing until they did. Among their objections: Stanford’s original policy had no clear appeals process, and it did not guarantee amnesty from COVID violation punishments to those who reported a sexual assault “at a party/gathering of multiple individuals” if the gathering broke COVID protocols.
Under heavy pressure, university administrators ultimately altered course, solicited input from the grad student population and produced a revised compact addressing the students’ concerns in early September, including the amnesty they sought for reporting sexual assault. But the Stanford business students were already unsettled by the manners of enforcement, including the specter of vest-wearing staffers roaming campus.
According to the Stanford Daily, nine graduate students were approached in late August by armed campus police officers who said they’d received a call about the group’s outdoor picnic and who — according to the students — threatened eviction from campus housing as an ultimate penalty for flouting safety rules. “For international students, [losing] housing is really threatening,” one of the students told the newspaper.
The people in the vests were Event Services staff working as “Safety Ambassadors,” Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda wrote in an email. The staffers were not on campus to enforce the compact, but rather were “emphasizing educational and restorative interventions,” he said. Still, when the university announced the division of its campus into five zones in September, it told students in a health alert email that the program “will be enforced by civilian Stanford representatives” — the safety ambassadors.
The Harvard Business School’s approach was certainly different in style. In July, an email from top administrators reaffirmed the school’s commitment to students living on campus and taking business classes in person in a hybrid learning model. As for COVID protocols, the officials adopted “a parental tone,” as the graduate business education site Poets & Quants put it. “All eyes are on us,” the administrators wrote in an August email.
But the guts of the school’s instructions were similar to those at Stanford. Both Harvard and Stanford severely restricted who could be on campus at any given time, limiting access to students, staff members and preapproved visitors. Both required that anyone living on campus report their health daily through an online portal, checking for any symptoms that could be caused by COVID-19. Both required face coverings when outside on campus — even, a Harvard missive said, in situations “when physical distancing from others can be maintained.”
So far, both Harvard and Stanford have posted low positive test rates overall, and the business schools are part of those reporting totals, with no significant outbreaks reported. Despite their distinct delivery methods, the schools ultimately relied on science to guide their COVID-related decisions.
“I feel like we’ve been treated as adults who know how to stay safe,” said a Harvard second-year MBA candidate who requested anonymity. “It’s worked — at least here.”
But as the experiences at the two campuses show, policies are being written and enforced on the fly, in the midst of a pandemic that has brought challenge after challenge. While the gentler approach at Harvard Business School largely worked, it did so within a larger framework of the health regulations put forth by local and county officials. As skyrocketing COVID-19 rates across the nation suggest, merely writing recommendations does little to slow the spread of disease.
Universities have struggled to strike a balance between the desire to deliver a meaningful college experience and the discipline needed to keep the campus caseload low in hopes of further reopening in 2021. In Stanford’s case, that struggle led to overreach and grad-student blowback that Harvard was able to avoid.
The fall term has seen colleges across the country cycling through a series of fits and stops. Some schools welcomed students for in-person classes but quickly reverted to distance learning only. And large campuses, with little ability to maintain the kind of control of a grad school, have been hit tremendously hard. Major outbreaks have been recorded at Clemson, Arizona State, Wisconsin, Penn State, Texas Tech — locations all over the map that opened their doors with more students and less stringent guidelines.
In May, as campuses mostly shut down to consider their future plans, USC’s Van Orman expressed hope that universities’ past experiences with international students and global outbreaks, such as SARS, would put them in a position to better plan for COVID-19. “In many ways, we’re one of the best-prepared sectors for this test,” she said.
Six months later, colleges are still being tested.
Mark Kreidler is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Harvard pay-parity policy helps bring outside workers into middle class
The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, which is across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus.
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Harvard University was featured in a New York Times article that profiled one of the university’s food-service employees, Martha Bonilla. At her job preparing breakfast and lunch for executives at Harvard Business School, Ms. Bonilla and other Harvard service employees receive the same pay and benefits as those who are directly employed by the university.
Harvard’s policy requiring parity among service workers and university employees was formally adopted after numerous student-led protests in 2001 demanding better pay for campus workers. Recent research claiming that wage disparity in the US is a product of institutions outsourcing to low-wage contractors further motivates Harvard’s effort to avoid outsourcing and pull workers from the bottom of the labor market into the middle class.
The New England Council commends Harvard University’s efforts toward wage parity and thanks them for their commitment to support hard working serving employees on their campus.’’
To read The Times’s story, please hit this link.
Anders Corr: Professor trying to protect us in Chinese-food fight
Boston.com and Slate Magazine recently poked fun at a young Harvard Business School professor whom I have counted as a close friend for more than 10 years. Ben Edelman ordered Chinese take-out from an online menu that was out-of-date, with prices $4 lower than the restaurant charged him.
He got into a funny e-mail exchange with the owner of the restaurant, a likeable bartender in Boston named Ran. Ben (being Ben) asked for treble-damages -- $12. As he pointed out in the e-mails, treble damages is his right under Massachusetts law, and provides a good incentive not to defraud.
Of course, this story got the interest (and laughs) of writers at boston.com and Slate, and the articles resulted in thousands of likes, op-eds, posts and retweets. Everyone was laughing at “Professor Cranky Pants.” Even me. I immediately hit send on a finger-wagging e-mail telling Ben that he should pick his battles more wisely.
Another restaurant then forwarded 2011 e-mails from Ben about a Groupon coupon that the restaurant sold, but on which the restaurant did not honor its commitments in the fine print. The restaurant did not cover the fixed-price option. Again this looks on first blush to be a man who is not picking his battles wisely. Ben apologized on his Web site.
But after sleeping on it and speaking with other friends of Ben, I realized that if everyone acted as did Ben, the world would be a better place. Most of us just ignore the likes of a $4 overcharge because we have "better things to do," don't want to rock the boat or otherwise fear conflict. But that means that the next guy who orders Chinese takeout also gets overcharged a few bucks. Over years, that can mean tens of thousands of dollars for one restaurant. Multiplied by thousands of small restaurants, taxis, dry cleaners, lawyers, physicians, contractors and other small businesses, small-time fraud can mean billions of dollars filched every year.
We have all experienced petty fraud. Physicians have tried to get me to undergo procedures I later found were totally unnecessary. Taxi drivers have taken me on long, allegedly “fast’’ routes dozens of times in cities around the world. One even seemed to be spinning his wheels (and his meter) on purpose, consequently fishtailing all over the road, during a snowstorm. Grocery stores have charged me for items I never bought.
Did I take the time to challenge these businesses for a buck or two? Never. It didn't seem worth it. Who knows if that crazy cabbie will pull a crowbar on me? Does this mean that these businesses have little incentive to fix their overcharging? Yes. In fact, they have an incentive to overcharge: Petty fraud is a big source of often cost-free revenue. Not taking action leaves the problem to harm others.
It's a classic public-goods problem -- going after petty fraud helps everyone, but almost nobody is properly incentivized to enforce the law against small-time fraud. Even public prosecutors prefer the big cases that get them media attention and votes. If more of us took Ben's approach, fewer petty fraudsters and fewer bartenders with no incentive to fix their out-of-date menus would nickel and dime us to death. With more Ben-like attitude, we would live in a far better world.
Consider the good that Ben has done in his crusades against fraud. Ben told me a long time ago that in his public high-school in Washington, D.C., he found that heavy chains and a padlock were used to permanently lock an emergency door that by law should not be locked during school hours. If a fire had happened, this could have caused death or injury to a lot of kids.
Ben took a picture of the chained door, with a time-stamp, during school hours, and at some risk to his academic career given the power of his principal, pressured the school to henceforth keep it unlocked during school hours.
Ben is not only risk-acceptant, as pointed out by another defense of his counter-petty fraud activity, he is the kind of guy who loves to read the fine print. He found American Airlines and others lying about nonexistent “taxes” that were actually fees. He got the U.S. Department of Transportation to fine American Airlines, and ever since they aren't defrauding millions of customers in this way. That means that Ben has saved me a few bucks, since I fly American. Thanks Ben!
A couple years ago, Ben realized that Facebook was telling advertisers who its users were (including our names!) whenever we clicked Facebook ads. Facebook had repeatedly promised that it would never do this. Ben told The Wall Street Journal and it was front-page news. Facebook still gives away our names, but at least now explains itself and we know what Facebook is up to. I'm less likely to click those ads, and maybe I get less spam as a result. Thanks Ben!
Even Google's tricks against its customers have been discovered, and revealed, by Ben (who happens to know how to program Web-bots). He used those bots once to discover the Web pages, for example on human-rights stuff, that dictators in China and elsewhere censor from their people. I bet that those folks are happy that someone is looking out for their interests.
See:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
https://comparite.ch/chinavpnstudy
The Groupon e-mails are part of Ben’s bigger concern for the common man. He was quoted in 2011 in Forbes, where he raised the issue of potential consumer-protection violations by Groupon. When a consumer buys a Groupon from a restaurant or other business, that consumer has the right to expect that the terms of the fine print of that Groupon will be honored. When a restaurant fails to honor a promise it sells, the consumer who purchased that agreement takes a hit. This is petty fraud, and when summed across all Groupon restaurants, could result in millions of dollars of losses to consumers every year.
As with the Groupon dispute, most of Ben's attention is on big brand-name or big-time fraud and other malfeasance resulting in potentially millions or even billions of dollars of costs spread out thinly over all of us. He rightly gets a lot of positive attention for his work.
The Chinese take-out incident, however, reveals something even more extraordinary about Ben than all his achievements. He sent the e-mails not expecting that they would become public and give him fame. They were not meant to advance his career or make him money. $12 doesn't matter to Ben. His efforts resulted from a sense of injustice, and led him to inform a small proprietor of his duties, with an appeal to moral principles and the rights of him and others under the law.
Did it look a little silly when put in the newspaper? Definitely. But Ben took time from his other "more important" pursuits to stand up for a principle. He made an effort to hold the small businessman accountable, expecting nothing in return, as he does when he holds Google or the airlines accountable for billions of dollars of fraud.
Ben is a man of principle, and attempts to be a protector of all of us. Let's learn from Ben and stand up for ourselves when overcharged $4; by doing so, we stand up for each other. Ben's earnest concern for the little guy's nickels and dimes may seem silly at first. But Ben stands on principle, and those nickels and dimes can really add up.
Anders Corr, Ph.D., is principal of Corr Analytics Inc. (www.canalyt.com), which provides strategic analysis of international politics. He is also the editor of the Journal of Political Risk (www.jpolrisk.com). His areas of expertise include global macro analysis, quantitative analysis and public opinion. Dr. Corr maintains a global network of regional and subject-specific political risk experts.