In an interview with the Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel commented on the upcoming six-month anniversary of George Floyd’s death, plans for spring semester and the impact of the presidential election.

Gabel also discussed the increasing numbers of COVID-19 cases on and around campus and the University’s future relationship with Zoom.

How do you think the outcome of the recent presidential election and new administration will impact the University as a whole, as well as students and campus climate?

A lot of us are talking about that in different forums and the different ways in which higher administrators from across the country come together, you know, your Athletic Conference, APLU [Association of Public and Land-grant Universities], AAU [Association of American Universities], lots of predictions and analysis. President-elect [Joe] Biden has said and hinted at a few things around stimulus funds, which we think would be great, obviously, in order to keep the higher ed financial model stable. As we know, there will be a new Secretary of Education. And the current Secretary of Education did a lot of things that were different from the administration prior to hers … But one of the main things that is really important for particularly the Twin Cities campus and some of our system campuses as well — but particularly here — is that the federal support for research and the federal investment in science and discovery is critically important to who we are and what we do as the cornerstone of the mission. The new administration is saying that they will invest in that partnership. So, for many of our faculty, staff and students where that is their work, their life’s work, their calling, that is very good news. One more thing I expect is that there’s likely to be an impact on our international relationships too.

Is the administration thinking at all about possibly introducing a mandatory COVID-19 testing element at some point in the future, depending on how the pandemic progresses?

It could be that testing becomes inexpensive enough and accurate enough that it is a useful enough tool. … If the testing can be performed sufficiently and accurately enough, then we may want to introduce it. But it’s very possible that by the time the testing reaches that level, so will the vaccine reach its distribution. It would be a very nice problem to have, to be choosing between the two. We would feel very much like we were on the other side when we get to that point.

Nov. 25 marks the six-month anniversary of the killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. What progress have we made as a University and community to better respond to this event and other systemic violence?

We have been working around equity and inclusion broadly and then specifically on campus safety, which we consider a component of an inclusive and welcoming campus climate. … We have brought in an outside expert, Dr. Cedric Alexander, to help us specifically with the safety component. He’s finished with his interviews, he did hundreds of interviews with faculty, staff, students, community partners, board members, alumni, etc. and is done with that phase and is now in the report writing recommendation phase and will incorporate his recommendations into a safety plan. … It’s a very interesting challenge, because this might be the most bimodal issue that I’ve navigated as an administrator or in my own personal life where, we have absolutely legitimate voices around where police make them feel unsafe and absolutely legitimate voices around people who don’t feel safe unless there is additional police protection. That’s a hard thing to compromise between. We are trying to create a way in which we deal with things like emergency response and crime reduction and how we deal with feeling safe and knowing that your unique life experience and point of view is not only respected but desired, wanted and included. Dr. Alexander is helping us with this as is and are all of our representative community voices, both on campus and amongst our neighbors so to speak. So, it’s all coming together, and it will result in a plan that will start to roll probably early 2021.

Should students, particularly those in University housing, anticipate a similar Maroon and Gold Sunrise plan for the spring semester that involves back home time restrictions and possibly a delay to in-person instruction?

I think we will have a Maroon and Gold Sunrise Plan 2.0, but I think one of the things that we will be able to do better, is we probably won’t be as caught by surprise, like we were at the beginning of the fall semester, by virtue of what happened on other campuses that opened before we did. … So we don’t expect delays, we may do stairsteps into more open activities. A lot of that will depend on what happens between now and the beginning of next calendar year around testing, mitigating treatments, and maybe even some opportunity for vaccination for vulnerable populations and also the numbers in the community around us.

When can students expect to learn more about tuition rates for the next academic year? As tuition was held flat in almost all academic programs this year, should students anticipate a larger increase in tuition costs to account for the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Before the pandemic, we had an internal unwritten goal of staying below the inflationary index that we follow — that is still our goal. If there is any increase, it would still be very low. So it’s not like we’re rebounding, we don’t expect like a reverb from the fact that we kept things flat. But the formal recommendation on tuition is part of a very large total budgetary process that we go through that includes all of our work that we do with the state around the state support to the institution. All of that comes together through the spring and ultimately results in a request to the board over the summer; the board sets tuition. But the administration’s recommendation to the board is usually pretty well known by about a month beforehand. So late spring, early summer, you’ll start to hear what the administration is recommending.

Zoom, the video conferencing platform that is widely used by the University, has recently come under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly lying to its users about security measures and the levels of encryption within the platform. The University’s contract with Zoom extends until 2024, but is there any plan to move away from the platform as a result of these privacy issues?

Not yet. We’ve been working very closely with our own IT department on security and we feel like we have appropriate levels of security managed internally. But if the circumstances change, where if we didn’t feel like the platform was safe and offered the appropriate protections, then we would reconsider. But, right now we’re still okay.

[To change platforms] would depend on what additional concerns came up and when they came up. It’s a very large contract, so a change to it would probably require a public discussion in front of the board. So, it wouldn’t catch anybody by surprise, it would go through the whole shared governance process.

A new University of Minnesota partnership will reportedly help to grow bioindustrial manufacturing — with the bio-based economy already valued at more than $1 trillion annually.

The partnership, involving both the U.S. Department of Defense and nonprofit organization BioMADE, will include the design and operation of a new Manufacturing Innovation Institute located on the St. Paul campus. This new space on campus will aim to grow the bioindustrial manufacturing industry through connecting organizations with research resources.

The U.S. Department of Defense contributed over $87 million in support of the University and BioMADE, which will eventually be headquartered at the Manufacturing Innovation Institute. The federal government has funded the creation of eight other innovation institutions around the country.

In the United States, bioindustrial manufacturing companies are not well connected, said Steve Evans, the technical lead for the BioMADE program.

“It’s hard for a small-size company to get connected with a company or an institute that might help it to the next step and then to the next step into manufacturing,” Evans said. “Those connections in the network are not well-formed, and so we’re going to try to be a catalyst nucleating site so that it’s a national network to enable vital infection.”

Bioindustrial manufacturing is a process that utilizes microbes, like yeast and bacteria, to create chemicals, Evans said. Ultimately, these chemicals are used to create other products such as fabrics, detergents and plastics.

“It’s a different way, a biological way, to get materials that can be used to make things that people, like consumers or other companies, might want to be going into their product. So it’s a way to make things using biology that somebody else might turn into something of interest,” Evans said.

A variety of bioindustrial companies are based in the Midwest due to the strong agriculture business, Evans said. A major goal of BioMADE and the collaboration is to connect with companies based in other parts of the country.

“We kind of described it in one sense as BioMADE in Minnesota is an on-ramp to this bridge that connects the country from coast to coast so that these small companies and medium-sized companies have a way to get access to expertise needed to get to industrial scale,” Evans said.

The University of Minnesota St. Paul campus was also a logical location due to its existing biotechnological infrastructure.

“One of the reasons that BioMADE is going to be located here in St. Paul, on the University of Minnesota campus, is to take advantage of the rich history and manufacturing that this north-central part of the United States has carried,” said Michael Smanski, one of the heads of the BioMADE initiative and the lead researcher in the bioengineering Smanski Lab.

Some smaller- and medium-sized companies lack the resources to begin producing microbes and chemicals and instead perform mostly research tasks.

“The last decade and a half of technology improvement has gotten us to a point that there are many innovative companies and academic labs that are really good at engineering biology to make small amounts of stuff,” Smanski said. “What we need is more innovation that takes those small-scale proofs of concept all the way up to commercial scale. It’s in taking these promising strains and technologies that already work at small scale but figuring out how to cross over and make them commercially relevant.”

A new course at the University of Minnesota is teaching undergraduate medical students cultural competence skills.

The course focuses on teaching differences in cultural practices that medical professionals will likely engage with throughout their careers. Students also learn how to communicate with patients who may have a history of experiencing medical mistreatment. Leaders in the program say they hope teaching these skills will lead to broader reform in the medical field.

Cultural competencies discussed in the class include the ways in which different cultures view things like gender and religion and how that may impact their wishes for medical treatments. Take, for example, abortion, which is viewed differently among religious groups and means conversations with patients may look different depending on their beliefs.

The course, Cultural Competence in Personalized Medicine, was offered to undergraduate students through the College of Biological Sciences for the first time this semester. The course instructor, Ian MacFarlane, an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, is working on making the class a regular offering.

Currently, much of the undergraduate curriculum is focused on the technical aspects of medicine and genetics, MacFarlane said.

“I want students to start thinking about what tricky conversations they are going to have, what places they’re going to feel uncomfortable or unprepared when they walk into a patient interaction,” MacFarlane said. “This not only helps them think about if this is a field that they really want to get into and think about some of the challenges, but I think it also points them toward opportunities to approach their medical curriculum … with a keener eye to thinking about some of these cultural aspects.”

Third-year student Mindy Kolodziejski, who is currently enrolled in the class, describes cultural competence as having awareness and respect for individuals’ cultural identities.

“I think it’s an awareness of and respect for each individual’s cultural aspects, whether that be race, religion, ethnicity, gender, et cetera, and just being able to recognize those identities and respect them in the context of specifically personalized medicine,” Kolodziejski said.

Kolodziejski said she hopes to translate these skills to a future career in genetic counseling.

“Cultural competence is something that I know is really important in genetic counseling and is something that I’m personally really interested in, as far as social justice issues and things like that,” she said.

Another aspect of the curriculum focuses on how the medical field can utilize cultural competency systemically, like using translators in hospitals and acknowledging differences in access to health insurance, according to MacFarlane.

“We’re going to talk about bigger picture things in terms of just the medical research that’s out there but also looking at systemic barriers in healthcare … trying to think about at both levels, the individual level and the system, because if you have a system that’s flawed, even if the individual actors are acting with the best of intentions, they can still reproduce harmful outcomes,” MacFarlane said.

Heather Zierhut, the director of the genetic counseling program, said she hopes that focusing more on cultural competence in medicine will eventually lead to changed practices in the medical field overall.

“For instance, more culturally aware and skilled providers could lead to increased access to genetics service providers, more anti-racist policies in precision medicine practices, greater trust and satisfaction with clinical care, and ultimately improvement in health outcomes,” Zierhut said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

In an effort to streamline the donation process, the University of Minnesota Foundation will now be responsible for all monetary gifts for the M Health Fairview system.

This new agreement, approved by the Board of Regents in October, acts to create one brand for donors to give to, making the donation process more efficient. Previously, fundraising efforts were completed by two different groups, the University of Minnesota Foundation and the Fairview Foundation.

Combining all donations under one brand, the University of Minnesota Foundation, or UMF, is likely to increase the number and amount of gifts from donors, said Patricia Porter, vice president of development, medicine and health for UMF.

UMF’s Driven campaign launched in 2011 and has raised approximately $3.97 billion. The campaign will end in 2021. These funds are designated for a variety of places, including M Health Fairview.

The M Health Fairview system consists of the University’s Medical School, University of Minnesota Physicians and Fairview Health. This partnership will also extend to M Health Fairview locations around the state of Minnesota.

This change will take effect on Nov. 1. The Fairview Foundation will continue to distribute funds raised by donors prior to this date, said John Swanholm, president of the Fairview Foundation and vice president of community advancement in a statement emailed to the Minnesota Daily.

This new arrangement will especially benefit the University’s Medical School, which often depends on donor contributions to fund new research projects. Leaders also said they hope this funding will help to increase the Medical School’s rankings over time.

“The stronger the medical school is, the better off the health system does because it attracts more patients, it attracts national notoriety and it attracts more grant funding from federal agencies,” Porter said. “So we see this philanthropy very often helps leverage.”

Continued support of the Medical School will also help to aid further research into the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If you look at all the media attention that the University and our health system have had, it’s been about that whole spectrum,” Porter said. “It’s been about vaccine development and antibody tests; it’s been about creating ventilators in garages that can be built cheaply. It’s been about creating masks and shields within our own biomedical engineering departments. And then it’s been about the actual care, the frontline care workers, that are delivering care and taking care of patients right now.”

She added that the switch is also beneficial to those who donate to the M Health Fairview system as they will now be able to make gifts to one organization rather than the two separate ones used previously.

“When you have a benefactor population that feels so strongly about what we do as a University and how we can help patients, it just becomes natural that we can help them have one conversation as to how that translates into patient care,” said Anette Lillegard, assistant vice president for communications at the Medical School.

These changes will not require UMF to change its operations, although staffing will expand to account for the added workload. The foundation expects to see an increase in efficiency as a result of this new agreement.

“We’ll be expanding: we will be importing information from their database into ours and setting up some new funds,” Porter said. “There’s a lot of communication activities that need to go on to inform everybody on the front end … so those are the things that we’re focused on right now.”

The University of Minnesota launched the Gopher Equity Project in late September, a series of online training modules designed to educate students on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Since its start, over 1,000 students and over 60 staff and faculty have either begun or completed the training modules. The major goal of the project, run by the office of Multicultural Student Engagement, is to address and improve campus climate, or feelings of respect and belonging.

The project was also motivated by the killing of George Floyd by a then-Minneapolis police officer in May.

“… Since then, I think there has been a lot of people in this country that are rethinking, reimagining our institutions and what they’re there for, and what role they played in furthering racial inequality,” said Abdulaziz Mohamed, a second-year student and project assistant for the Gopher Equity Project.

The modules are split into three separate sections, the second of which includes facilitated discussions with other students who are completing the training. These discussions allow students to ask and answer the sometimes difficult questions surrounding diversity and racism on campus.

The first section includes training on the topics of equity, power, privilege, oppression and identity. The third and final section connects students with resources to continue learning about the subject.

The training is only required for first-years, and the project coordinators say there is not a plan to make it mandatory for the rest of the student body.

“My hope is that people feel compelled to do it on their own without requiring, because once you require something, it has a little different kind of feel to it,” said LeeAnn Melin, associate vice provost for student success.

Work on the project began in 2019, following a series of recommendations and resolutions to improve diversity on campus from the now-dissolved Multicultural Student Success Committee. The Board of Regents passed the proposed resolutions, eventually leading to the creation of the Gopher Equity Project.

These resolutions also addressed the graduation gaps between students of color, along with other underrepresented groups, and white students.

“We think about individual students, and how they individually feel as well as the perceptions that we have about how we treat each other, so there’s two kind of levels to [campus climate],” Melin said. “That’s the undercurrent of this whole thing. We all play a role in creating an inclusive environment and a welcoming campus climate.”

However, Mohamed sees the Gopher Equity Project as just the first step of many needed to fully address issues with equity and inclusivity on the Twin Cities campus, and hopes the project will be expanded in the future.

“I always feel a range of emotion as a Black man, when an unarmed Black person gets murdered by the police,” Mohamed said. “As a student, I always am looking at ways in which I could be useful on campus or just be useful in my community as a whole. I am really glad to have the opportunity to participate and help lead this project because I honestly believe that it can help change the campus for the better.”

The University of Minnesota is concluding the process of distributing over $35 million to students and units impacted by COVID-19 as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.

Of the University’s CARES funds, over $17 million is designated specifically for students that have been financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of these funds have now been distributed, and the University is looking ahead to an audit of the distribution process.

More than $25 million was designated specifically for the Twin Cities campus, with more than $12 million going to students. As of Aug. 19, 92.2% of this amount was already distributed to students.

In the coming weeks, the University will perform an internal review of this process to verify that the funds have been distributed effectively. An external audit, completed through the company Deloitte, will be completed in October.

“These funds are likely to be audited at several levels,” said Gail Klatt, chief auditor in the University’s Office of Internal Audit, in an email to the Minnesota Daily. “We also plan to audit the funds internally to make sure that we have complied with all of the federal requirements and our internal decisions for how these funds were to be allocated and used.”

An oversight committee was also created to make decisions and ensure consistency while distributing the funds.

“The creation of the oversight committee allowed for collective understanding of the CARES funds, identification of key decisions and a path for escalation and management of decisions and issues,” said Suzanne Paulson, who works with University finance as the University’s controller.

Federal agencies were tasked with allocating funds from the CARES Act to institutions and stakeholders around the country.

The U.S Department of Education was responsible for distributing most of these funds to the University. Other federal agencies that provided funds included Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Department of Education required that 50% of the funds be distributed directly to students. Other portions could be used to replace lost revenue throughout the pandemic.

“Foregone revenue results from refunds made to students for housing, food or other services that could no longer be provided as a result of coronavirus closures,” Paulson said.

Through the Department of Education, the CARES Act also provided specific funds to targeted groups. The Morris campus received $166,642 from the Strengthening Native American-serving Nontribal Institutions program.

This award, which was delivered prior to June 30, serves the Morris campus as an institution rather than individual students.

“The targeted allocations are based on specific criteria and student population,” Paulson said.

Another award of $106,690 was allocated to the Twin Cities campus through the Strengthening Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving Institutions program.

These funds have not been drawn but will go toward students on the Twin Cities campus in the future. The Office for Equity and Diversity will issue these funds as awards.

In a virtual interview with the Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel discussed COVID-19 testing on campus, the safety review of the university’s police department and employment opportunities at the University.

Many universities and colleges around the country have implemented mandatory testing programs or other testing initiatives. What will make the MTest program effective in defending our community and campus against the spread of COVID-19?

One of the lessons we learned from our peers was that really robust testing programs are no substitute for six feet of social distance, masks and avoiding large gatherings [and] washing your hands, the mantra that we’ve all been hearing these last few months. The campuses that had frequent testing have also had surges … But the better use of our resources was to really engage in the practices that prevent or mitigate spread, and that’s the behavioral practices.

What would the University’s response be if a University student, staff or faculty member dies from COVID-19? Who takes responsibility and/or liability for that?

That would be a tragedy. Obviously, we would be devastated, but COVID is everywhere right now and we are in a global pandemic. We’ve maximized choice and flexibility so that if you don’t want to be on campus, then you can [choose not to be]; as a student set your schedule, as an employee set your work relationship, we haven’t been able to do that 100%, but we’ve been able to do that a lot. Maximizing safety, considering that the virus is everywhere, and maximizing choice, we think puts us in the best possible position to look our community in the eye and say, ‘This is the intersection where you can make choices about your own situation and plan accordingly.’

Several weeks ago, a COVID-19 acknowledgement appeared in the MyU portal of all students at the University of Minnesota asking them to acknowledge the risk of COVID-19 on campus. What did the decision making process look like within the University’s administration when pushing out this acknowledgment?

The decision making process was that this was the way we could put information out without, we thought, making it appear as if we were forcing some sort of legal waiver of liability. It came to our attention that it appeared to be a waiver of liability. That was a mistake that we didn’t anticipate that reaction and that’s why the follow-up communication came through.

We thought this was a crisp way to get some of that information out. We should have been clear that it was an information push only, and hopefully the follow up communication resolved that.

Under the Maroon and Gold Sunrise Plan announced in early September, you explained that students in University housing would follow required “back home times” for the first several weeks of the semester. The Maroon and Gold Sunrise Plan also states that students who do not abide by these requirements will be subject to disciplinary action. What kinds of disciplinary action can students expect to see?

In the event that somebody decides to behave otherwise, the decision point is whether the behavior was inside the dorm or outside the dorm. Within the dorm, it’s governed under Housing and Residential Life standards and that is a violation of those standards and would be overseen by the staff of Housing and Residential Life. Outside the dorm, is the Office for Community Standards and would be overseen by that staff. Our intention here is not to create something that feels like a weaponization or criminalization.

Has the administration decided on a list of actions that would be taken, if within the dorm, someone was not following the requirements?

We thought about and decided not to create a separate set of violations or standards for violations of the Maroon and Gold Sunrise Plan. Instead, it would follow the same criteria that any violation of the rules of Housing would follow with the same potential outcomes. So this is part of how we expect people to behave and an absence of meeting that expectation would follow the exact same standards that any disciplinary action has.

What updates can you provide on the review of the University of Minnesota Police Department and the overall safety of our campus, which was undertaken by Dr. Alexander in late August?

Now he’s starting his listening and we’re in the process of scheduling his meetings with different faculty, staff, students and community constituencies. And so that will be the long part of the process for him to listen and learn, and then extrapolate from those different perspectives, the beginnings of some recommendations, and he’s at the front end of the listening portion of his engagement with us.

With the majority of classes relying on online instruction in some capacity this fall, what training is the University currently making mandatory for faculty to ensure they are meeting and exceeding best practices for online learning? How are faculty being monitored and given feedback in this regard?

We don’t have mandatory training, we have voluntary training… We’ve had literally thousands of faculty go through thousands of different training workshops… I think that they know that if we don’t meet your expectations, that’s a failure. But how they obtain that training is pretty individualized depending on how or what they teach. And we’re watching each student’s evaluations very closely and your feedback very closely to make sure that we’re keeping things at the level that you have every right to expect.

What plans does the University have in place to ensure no decline in paid and unpaid internships offered to students as a result of COVID-19? How is the University cultivating and maintaining relationships with employers in the area and across the country?

We did see a real dip last summer, because of the timing of the pandemic and a lot of students losing their internships, or at least their first choice internship … But the trend line that we’re seeing right now that we’re cautiously optimistic about is that by next summer … things will be back on track because the job market here for the educated workforce that we graduate each year is strong.

After the pandemic is over, what three things should students, faculty and staff, parents and community members takeaway as “what the U did right” through it all?

As a research university we stepped in, in the early phase during the ventilator shortage, testing vaccines, testing mitigating treatments and providing really deep clinical care to the community.

Universities are notoriously rigid and we had to be nimble and flexible in ways that were really unusual for us. And I think we sat around our Zoom table and said, ‘We’ve got to continue to educate and figure out how to do it quickly.’ I think the idea of meeting the challenge, so that education continues, I think we got that right.

This pandemic has made all of us have to say, ‘Okay, that might have been right yesterday, but it’s no longer right today.’ And we have to just be vulnerable to that reality and make the best informed decisions that the information we have available allows us to make, and own when we’ve been wrong or when we’ve needed to evolve.

What was one wrong decision you or the University’s administration supported during the pandemic and what did you learn from it?

Well, I would think the obvious one is the housing and dining refunds. There were a few, but that one was the one that I think was the most palpable for the student body. Whether you were living in housing or taking advantage of a meal plan or not, is that we made the original decision around the refund based on what other schools at the time were doing… But what we didn’t realize at the time and have learned … is that this pandemic hits people differently. It creates a different frame of what it feels like for people to do what should be done, what should be done is changing in light of the pandemic and so, that was advocated for effectively by the student population and parents and some of our faculty and staff too, so we changed and issued the rest [of the refund].

This interview has been slightly edited for length, grammar and clarity.