Rutgers Pres. Holloway on the Chauvin Verdict — and Vaccine Mandates

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Brian Lehrer: It's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're joined now by Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University. You might know that we had already invited him to join us to talk about their mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for most students for the fall semester, and we will discuss that, but he was here in February, some of you will remember to talk about his book, The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans.

Before we get to vaccines, we want to take advantage of his deep knowledge of our history to place yesterday's Derek Chauvin murder convictions in some historical context. President Holloway, thank you for joining us this morning. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Holloway: Thanks for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: I see you and the Rutgers Chancellors issued a statement about the verdict. Want to share the gist of it with us as it comes from the State University of New Jersey?

Jonathan Holloway: Sure. The gist is, we all bore witness to George Floyd's murder. The world bore witness to that. The question is now what are we, and this is in my role as president of the university, what are we at Rutgers going to do about it? It seemed to me as a real opportunity as leader of this institution is to talk about the strength in our diversity understood in many different ways, the importance of coming together as a community, one in which we are not necessarily all agreeing with one another, but that we have the respect for each other, enough respect that we can tolerate, and engage the other on our differences and come out to a better place.

That's something that's really critical to have in a community that any community I want to be in. It also spoke to the need to rely on our expertise with our Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, where we can bring scholars and their knowledge and research to bear on the common space, and hopefully, give ideas for a better world.

Brian Lehrer: How hard is it for you as a university president, to accomplish that goal of having respectful dialogue among the students and faculty across political divisions? New Jersey's a diverse state in many, many ways, and that includes politically, how difficult is it now, when so many people feel so strongly about their point of view that sometimes they see others as not just different, but illegitimate?

Jonathan Holloway: Oh, you cut right to the heart of it. It's very difficult, but I've always said that at a research university especially if we aren't prepared to do difficult things, we should just close. We aren't meeting our purpose. The important thing to recognize as the institutional leader is, look, I'm a human, I have my particular political views, and they're very important to me, but my job out of the university is to push my own personal politics to the side to say that we all have to listen to one another.

In that regard, oh goodness, I have supported people who have spoken up at any of my different campuses I've been involved with, who sprouted ideas I've really just deeply disagreed with, but it was important that the idea be brought out into the marketplace because it's the only way that it could be dismantled frankly if it's a really bad idea. You've got to get it out, so others with better ideas can prove them wrong.

Brian Lehrer: In your book, you referenced the Rodney King case, where the police officers, of course, were caught on video beating him and then were acquitted. That was in the early 1990s. Does this verdict yesterday mean anything has changed with your long view of history?

Jonathan Holloway: Oh, gosh. My response is yes and no. I will confess that when the news broke that the verdict was about to be shared in the next hour or so, my stomach dropped because quite honestly, I was not confident that he'd be convicted, certainly in all three counts. Partly that's because of the history of Rodney King, and the way the officers were acquitted, and a much longer history of what I'll simply call a willingness for people to look the other way when it comes to these kinds of instances. Goodness knows what would have happened if we didn't have the video in this case. We'd be in a very different world right now. That quite literally in a very different world.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking on the show this morning about the mix of hope and cynicism, or a certain emptiness even that can come with this verdict. On the one hand, his whole past year of activism since George Floyd was murdered, has the country talking in a different way and certain reforms being instituted, versus the feeling that this case stands out so much because it's the exception in terms of the verdict because police killings of Black people have to be this bad for juries to see them as crimes.

I'm curious for you, again, in your role as university president, whose job in a way is to instill hope in the next generation, but also as a historian not to shrink from brutal realities in our national story, how you see synthesizing all of this as the work of the university, and how it can be best done to leave your students best prepared to go forward? I know it's a big question.

Jonathan Holloway: Wonderful question. Yes, it's a big question. We're attempting to address a fair number of that in an introductory way, in a message to the community, in the sense that we recognize the complexity of Rutgers as a community with incredible diversity that you mentioned before, but we also need to call upon what we are good at. We are a research university. We have incredibly talented scholars, and teachers, and students whose job it is to come together and pressure test ideas. That's what we are supposed to do. That is our function.

I can't pretend at all to have all the answers, nor should Rutgers be looked at as having all the answers. However, as a university administrator, I can be absolutely committed, that our duty and obligation as professors, as administrators, and as students, is to wrestle with these really hard ideas, and suggest better ways forward. There are always better ways, but if you don't have institutions that are committed to doing that investigation, you're not going to get there.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, he's the president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway. From one difficult topic to another, vaccines. Rutgers was maybe the first university, it was the first one that crossed my awareness to announce that students wanting to return to campus in the fall will be required to get vaccinated against COVID-19 except for those with medical or religious exemptions. Other colleges and universities have followed suit, including, listeners if you haven't heard it yet, Columbia and Fordham here in our area, just in the last week. President Holloway, talk about why you came to that decision.

Jonathan Holloway: I will confess, we weren't trying to be the nation's leader in this conversation. We were very inward-focused, and really trying to do what we could to reassure, to instill confidence in our community that we were going to come back as close to 100% as possible in the fall. For us, the way to do that was to wrestle with the idea of vaccination and the extent to which we could deploy what science has gifted us in this regard to ensure a safe return. Our leadership on this issue was is accidental, I confess, but I take a measure of pride that Rutgers is part of a leading Vanguard in this conversation.

We were thinking about how do we repopulate our campuses? We know that students are the biggest risk factor to a community because the way it's congregate living, students I'm thinking primarily undergraduates are hyper-social as age-appropriate, and they are going to be gathering together. For me, it was a multi-step process. How do we guarantee the safety of our students as much as we can guarantee this for those who are living on campus? Again, the congregate living and in dining, vaccination. To me, that wasn't a hard question to resolve. We already require vaccination for several other communicable diseases.

Then the question was put to me, how comfortable am I requiring for those who live off-campus? That gets tricky on lots of fronts, but off-campus, students will be coming into campus, and universities are incredibly porous as institutions. Again, this made sense very quickly, they need to get vaccinated as well. It was a multi-step process. It was guided by, frankly, can we even mandate this from a legal standpoint, and we feel very comfortable that we can because of certain statutory provisions in New Jersey State law.

Brian Lehrer: Will students claiming a religious or medical exemption be allowed to live and attend classes on campus? How will you handle them?

Jonathan Holloway: We will handle them in the same way we handle those who currently have those exemptions. The fact is at any given moment, in let's say a large lecture class, prior to COVID, there are people there who exercise the right for exemptions and weren't fully immunized, but because we've generally have herd immunity for these other kinds of diseases the community, by and large, is safe. Well is safe. We shouldn't say by and large is safe. We're going to be using the same philosophy when it comes to vaccination protocols for COVID exemptions, how we populate classrooms, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: What's the standard for either a religious or a medical exemption? When we had a military draft in this country, people could opt-out on the basis of personal convictions that didn't have to be rooted in formal religion. What would be the standard for the religious exemption here?

Jonathan Holloway: I confess Brian, you caught me on a detail. I don't know the terms, but I know that we have them articulated within Rutgers. I usually don't get down into that level of the weeds, but we will be following our standing policies when it comes to religious and medical exemptions.

Brian Lehrer: Got you. Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Rutgers president, Jonathan Holloway on their students, faculty, staff, parents, or those planning to return to Rutgers campus or any campus next fall. Are you relieved by the vaccine mandate or do you need convincing, or do you want to ask president Holloway a question? Call us at 646-435-7280. If you are a part of the Rutgers community or extended community in any way, 646-435-7280 or a tweet, a question @BrianLehrer. How about faculty and staff? Why not require them to get the vaccines? I see they're not going to be required.

Jonathan Holloway: Not at this time. There are interpretations at the law we're looking at like, do we have the ability to mandate and that's an ongoing-- we're wrestling with that at this moment. There's a fair number of faculty and staff who are, who would welcome the mandate and those who have the reasons for not welcoming that. We decided to really get this communicated as early as possible, let's go with what we know we can do. That's what the student population and really again, to emphasize that they are, I use these words gingerly, they pose the greatest risk to their community, but it's because not because they're bad people because they live in congregate housing, dining, and then they're hyper-social in a way that our faculty and staff they're at a different point in their lives. They aren't going to be convening those kinds of ways.

We also know from this past semester that the positivity rate as compared to our faculty and staff was 70% higher amongst our students. We had a very small population of students on campus. We're going to sort of the hot place, as it were, to address that and then we move forward from there.

Brian Lehrer: How was enrollment this year? Some people anticipated last spring, that's how long we've been in the pandemic. Even last spring, people were anticipating that some colleges and universities would see a drop in enrollment because people just didn't want to pay the tuition to have a virtual experience. How did enrollment hold up at Rutgers this year and how do you see it for next fall?

Jonathan Holloway: Enrollment was okay and in some places, we saw increases. Partly, is because as the state university of New Jersey, we have a large population of students in New Jersey who could take our classes here at a very different cost profile then and if they were out of state someplace else or at a private university. We did fine in that regard.

Across the nation, as far as the coming academic year, everybody broadly speaking saw huge increases in their application pool. For so many schools went away from standardized testing is one of the reasons we saw a real increase as well across the board except for its international students. That has nothing to do with Rutgers, but geopolitics right now, and the difficulty of getting visas, et cetera, most universities saw a drop in international students, which is very worrying on all fronts.

We are still in that moment. April is when universities across the country are really cultivating their admitted pool. In fact, I'll be doing a town hall for admitted students this evening as a way to answer their questions and get them excited about joining the Rutgers community. The numbers are doing okay. They were concerned about a couple of weeks ago, but we've been messaging a lot about how we're going to come back safely and come back as much as close to a hundred percent as possible. I think that's been reassuring to students. We're seeing the numbers come in where we want them to be.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie in Readington Township. You're on WNYC with Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway. Hi Debbie.

Debbie: Oh, hello. Thanks for taking my call today president Holloway, I just want to express my concern as a parent of a Rutgers student and of other college students that these vaccines are only approved under an emergency use authorization. They have not gone through the long-term testing that is necessary for full FDA approval to occur.

I really don't think it's appropriate to be mandating this type of vaccine for our healthy, young students. I think it should remain a choice and that it would be good to encourage the vaccine for those who choose to get it but that there are other ways that we could help ensure safety of the students at Rutgers without mandating the vaccine. I wonder what your thoughts are on that?

Jonathan Holloway: Thank you for the question. It's a very reasonable one and I've certainly have heard from other people like you with the very same thoughts and I respect them all. The choice though, is well, a couple of different things. We're actually very confident that the vaccines, which are now under emergency use authorization, EUA will be FDA approved before the start of the school year. I can't promise anybody that, but we're operating from that, with that set of confidence in place.

That's part of our legal, well, I don't want to get into the legal lees of it because that's really not the question you're asking. I didn't hear it that way at least, but we do have the ability to do this mandate even under emergency use authorization, according to state law, but to your point about health and safety and the concerns, all the science is telling us, I even, I'm saying this even in light of the as a J&J pause that these are safe vaccines, granted there have not been the long-term studies. We all know that, but the numbers are looking really encouraging. My daughter's already vaccinated, as a matter of fact. She's not at Rutgers but as a college student.

The risks to the broader community of not being vaccinated, which is really what we're looking at. If we don't get enough vaccinated students to get to herd immunity in the fall, the risks to the community are really quite stark, I think, and the likelihood that we would have to shut down again are quite high, I think. Vaccination is really the only path we have forward to return to the Rutgers experience that I hope your daughter had enjoyed if she's far enough in her years prior to the pandemic setting in.

I understand your concern and I respect it. I also know to return to Rutgers in the way that well, I've yet to experience since I started during the pandemic, but for what I understand the only way forward is to get this vaccine at a level that will ensure confidence that we can proceed safely and I find that is through mandating.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie, thank you very much for your call, and just on the caller's language, I think she said the vaccines are experimental. I don't think we can characterize them as experimental anymore but the distinction that you made President Holloway between ones that currently just have emergency use authorization, meaning they could get widely distributed more quickly than when there was no emergency that's real.

Emergency use authorization is the legal status of these vaccines right now. It's interesting to hear you say, even under that status, legally, you think in New Jersey, you can mandate it and also that that status will go away. Interesting to hear that you think it'll go away by the fall where they will convert at the federal level from emergency use authorization to the vaccines, to just authorize. Will all classes be offered remotely for students who don't, for whatever reason, get vaccinated? If the mandate is, "Get vaccinated, if you want to come back to campus in person" will Rutgers students have an option if they don't?

Jonathan Holloway: Thanks for asking the question about the about classrooms, across the nation, you're going to see-- This fall, you're just not going to see packed large lecture halls. I don't think there'll be the level of psychological comfort for that yet. We will be in person, but we'll be certainly offering classes online as well. We'll be like every other large university across the nation in that regard. There's that point. Specifically to your question of, if someone-- were you saying if someone didn't want to get the vaccine for an agreed exemption, will we offer them--

Brian Lehrer: Either way, for an agreed exemption or because they just refuse is can they not enroll at Rutgers then, or do you have accommodations where they could go remotely?

Jonathan Holloway: For the exemption students, it's business as usual because we've been working with exempted students for a very long time, but for people who simply choose not to, I'm afraid I don't have a supportive answer in that regard because we can't open that door. From a logistic standpoint, and manage the integrity of getting vaccinated of making sure that people who come to extracurricular events are operating in a way that we have confidence that they aren't going to be spreaders themselves. The really hard thing to say is if they don't want to get vaccinated, then the opportunities to study at Rutgers are going to be put in a really challenging situation, to be honest.

Brian Lehrer: Take one more call. Marsha, in Wayne, you're on WNYC with the president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway. Hi, Marsha.

Marsha: Hi, how are you? President Holloway, I want to thank you. I'm alumni of Rutgers and I work for Rutgers. The faculty and staff, you have kept us in mind, our safety. As a member of the staff, I just want to thank you for all of the caution that Rutgers has taken, the consideration. I feel that my safety and the safety of my colleagues has been one of the things that's forefront in your mind. Thank you for that, and I've been vaccinated.

Jonathan Holloway: Thank you so much, as have I.

Marsha: I look forward to [unintelligible 00:21:57] after the fall.

Brian Lehrer: It's nice to get a thank you every once in a while, isn't it?

Jonathan Holloway: It is.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure you deal with so many complaints and so many issues. She just called to thank you.

Jonathan Holloway: It is a rare thing. I don't want to make light of it at all because I really do appreciate that kind of generosity, but other academic leaders like me in other places have had to make a series of really hard decisions this entire academic year. It's a really rotten situation to be in. When someone recognizes that, if you're dealing with a lose-lose situation like which loss or is more palatable, that's a moment of grace. I appreciate. I appreciate her being generous in that way.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University, and the author of The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans. President Holloway, we appreciate you coming back on with us today. Good luck, the rest this semester.

Jonathan Holloway: It's a real pleasure. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more to come.

 

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