Interview

Q: What major events in your life have led to your passion for political science? How has this ultimately led to your role as Vice President of International Affairs and a member of the Integrated Response Team on COVID preparations at Suffolk?

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A: “So as you can tell from my accent, I’m not from the US, I was born in Spain, in Madrid, and that was crucial in my focus on political science. I was born and, in the first ten years of my life, I lived in a country that was a brutal dictatorship. We had an authoritarian regime that had been in place for almost 40 years following a brutal, absolutely devastating Civil War, so that experience was transformative in my life. It was probably the number one reason that I felt so passionately about politics in general and about political science. Two of my grandparents, they fought in the Spanish Civil War, so I grew up with those conversations in a country that was extremely, even in the 1960s and 1970s, divided and polarized over a war that had happened three decades before or four decades before. So moving from that, from that authoritarian regime into a democracy, trying to heal the wounds that had divided the country for so long, that was part of my growing up, it was part of who I am and it’s the main reason again that I feel so passionately about politics, because I wanted to be part of that. So for my generation living in that country, going from an authoritarian regime to a democracy is something that will always be part of our DNA. I was very engaged in politics when I was living in Spain and moved to the US when I was 25. But prior to that, when I was in college and when I started working for a US multinational, I was a labor union representative in the company that I was working in. So I always felt very passionate about politics, and then I was lucky that I got a scholarship to come to study in the United States. Originally my plan was just to get an MBA because I was working for a private company, I had studied law in Spain and I felt that I needed a stronger business background so my plan was to come here for a couple years, get an MBA and go back to Spain, I had a job waiting for me there. But when I was here, the opportunity emerged and I have always felt very passionate about teaching and education in general, and ultimately decided to get into a teaching program and that’s what led to my academic career. My plan originally was just to be a faculty member and to teach.  My real passion, my number one passion, is teaching, I love being in the classroom with the students. But then at some point I was asked to help with one project and another and that led to a request to be an administrator part-time, then full-time, and one thing led to another and before I knew it I was working full-time in administration at Suffolk. But it was not something that I had planned, it was something that happened, an opportunity that emerged, and I guess I liked what I was doing, people liked the way that I was doing those things and they kept on giving me more opportunities and then I moved up in the academic administration at Suffolk. For three years I acted as the acting provost at the University, until a year ago and I was exposed to virtually everything related to administration and the institution. So when the crisis hit, because I already had this strong background, that I knew Suffolk so well— I’ve been working at Suffolk for almost 23 years now— I knew pretty much all aspects of the institution and I knew most of the players, President Kelly and Provost Sandell thought that I could be a good person to help with this task and that’s why I got involved in this task force. I also want to emphasize something that the students ask me often, if you had asked me 40 years ago that I would be here in the US doing what I’m doing now at Suffolk I would’ve thought you were crazy. So sometimes life happens, a lot of people know what they want to do with their life and they are very determined to do it but for some of us life just happens, opportunities arise and we just jump in, opportunities emerge and I’m one of those, I didn’t have a clear location. Like I said I studied law in Spain and I hated it, that’s something that I learned studying law is that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. So sometimes those are important lessons in life. You do something and you like it and then you keep learning more and doing more. It’s been a humbling experience for me.

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Q: What current factors, in reference to the pandemic or the economy, contributed to Suffolk’s plan to reopen and maintain a health standard suitable to effective schooling this fall?

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A: That is a very important question and what I really want to emphasize as the number one reason, and the number one factor, is our mission to educate our students. I think ultimately we feel that we have a tremendous responsibility to ensure that the students get the education that they need to be successful in their personal life and their professional life, so how do we best serve and fulfill that educational mission to our students. And in higher ed in general, not just at Suffolk, one of the things that we do really well is not just educate our students, but teach them how to socialize and how to engage and we provide unique transformational experiences on campus. So when this pandemic hit, we asked how do we continue to complete that mission, how do we ensure that the students get not only the education that they need but also these unique transformational experiences. And ultimately we thought that by focusing on this hybrid model where the students will be able to take some classes face-to-face and other classes online, while keeping the campus open and making sure that the students have access to the resources of the campus, will be the best way to fulfill our mission. I also should emphasize that other students wanted to go back to campus. Thinking back to the last few months I can’t think of any interaction that I’ve had with the students or parents, or even prospective students, in which they have said that they don’t want to go back to campus. I’m sure that some might have some reason that they might want to take classes online, but the demand that we have felt from our students, including incoming first year students, has been that they wanted to be on campus and they wanted to have real educational experiences on our campus in downtown Boston. So this was another deeply important factor, how do we respond to that demand, how do we ensure that we do our best to see if we can make that possible. And then last but not least, of course we have financial considerations, and I don’t want to minimize that. We were worried about the impact on enrollment if we decided to go fully online. But that was not the key consideration, I want to emphasize that, because at the end of the day by deciding to go back to campus we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure that the campus is ready, that we will be protecting members of our community faculty, students and staff. So financial considerations, I’m not saying that they’re not a factor, but I would definitely emphasize that they were not the central factor in our decision to return to campus this fall.

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Q: In your extensive studies in variations of ideological fiscal policy, what kind of things have you discovered that inform your decisions on education policy at Suffolk and specifically the response to the current pandemic crisis?

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A: So like I said, I studied law in Spain. When I was growing up (it has changed now), but we didn’t even have private universities in Spain, they were all public. And education was pretty much free from kindergarten to college. When I went to law school I was literally paying the equivalent of $400 in tuition a year. And that’s not unusual in Europe, education tends to be part of the social compact, and it’s virtually free to ensure access. When I came to the United States, that obviously was a huge difference, because here obviously, even in public universities, education is much more expensive and there’s a lot more focus on quality than there is in Europe. So there is tension between access versus quality. And in Europe, by and large, the priority is access; to make sure that everyone will have access to education, no matter what your background is. Even if you don’t have the resources, if you want to go to college you have the opportunity to do that. But here in the US, access is more of a problem because of cost, even in public institutions, is so much higher. So for me that has been a formative experience, coming from this Spanish background and then working so long here in the US, how do you find that right balance between access and quality? And I think that it’s not an either/or proposition. But obviously the reason why, in the US, universities are as extraordinary as they are is because they’re expensive, they have more resources than universities have in Europe because people pay more. So that money obviously makes a difference and gives them the opportunity to do things that in Europe they can only dream of, so I think that’s an important factor. The second point I want to emphasize is that the pandemic has laid bare the inequities in our society. And this is true here in the US and it is also true in Europe. These are not new things when you think about issues of racism, issues of inequality that have become so prevalent, and rightly so, over the last few weeks and months. They were there before, it is not like this is something that has happened as a result of the pandemic, but the pandemic has definitely brought down the veil that we had over some of those issues. And what we see is that the people who are suffering the most are the ones who are at the bottom of the economic ladder. And also the minorities, who are suffering the most from the pandemic. And when we think of what has happened over the last few weeks or months, we see that we have light on those people, the ones who are working at food plants, that work at food stores and pharmacies and restaurants. They are the ones who made it possible for us to work safely at home, they have been the ones who are risking their life for us, but they are making minimum wage. So I think that is a tremendous problem related to the question that you asked and I feel that we have a moral obligation to address these frankly. That this is not sustainable, that the future of our society is going to hinge very much on what we do to address these problems of inequity and racism that have been so prevalent in our society. And in that sense, I think education is key, it is one of the key instruments that we have in our hands to address this issue. But the problem again, going back to my point, is how do we ensure access, how do we make sure that people have access to a proper education that will allow them to build professional lives and the lives that they want. And then on a more micro level, when you think about Suffolk University for example, about 36% of our students are first generation college students. So for many of our students, having access to campus is crucial.  We have had students, even when we closed back in March, we had a student that was homeless, and we had to keep the residence hall open because they just didn’t have anywhere else to go. There were students who had problems in their homes and they just couldn’t go back home for one reason or another, whether it was health or domestic violence. This is true on so many campuses across the country. So the students need access to the campus, they need access to our support services. Another thing that this crisis has also shown are the problems with mental health issues, how do we ensure also that students have access to our counseling services and our mental services? So we have a huge responsibility to address all that. And again, this is only in our own microcosm of Suffolk University, so how to ensure that the campus is open and that would provide this support, these services to our own students. And the last thing I want to say to your point is when we think about ways to address this problem of the pandemic, and how institutions themselves are responding, I think it’s crucial that we respond in a way that addresses these inequities. And when you think of higher education, thousands of people have been losing their jobs, thousands of people have been furloughed in our university, and this has been extraordinarily painful. And in many cases, who are the people who are furloughed, who are the people who are losing their jobs?  Well, the ones at the bottom. Again, the structural problems that we have in our society are also true in our own institutions. So I think it’s really important, going back to your question about what I have learned in my own research, is how to address these inequities not only at the national level but also within our own institutions. I think it’s important to lead by example. I am proud to say that at Suffolk, although we have made some very painful decisions, some people have been furloughed, and a few people have lost their jobs, we in the top administration have also taken voluntary pay cuts, and I think it was the right thing to do. Frankly I wasn’t happy about it, let me tell you, but I think it is the absolute right thing to do. We need to lead by example, and the pain has to be distributed in an equitable way, that it cannot be only the people at the bottom that suffer the consequences.

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Q: What is your professional opinion on the federal government's response to COVID, specifically on the topic of reopening schools?

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A: Let me begin first by saying that this is my personal opinion, it has nothing to do with Suffolk University, but on a personal level, if you ask me what I think of the government response, I would define it in four words: lack of leadership, lack of planning, disorganization and denial. I think that pretty much sums up what we are experiencing these days. I think that a few things that really stand out and have been very discouraging and very worrisome, one of them of course is the fact that we have not been following scientific evidence and scientific advice. You can remember the whole debate about whether we should be using masks or not, and you had Trump claiming even yesterday, I was astounded to hear, that the virus will disappear. Which is something he said very early on in the pandemic, but even yesterday when he was giving a press conference in the White House, he said it again. So there’s just a lot of wishful thinking here, other than taking action and doing the things that the scientists are asking us to do, again, wishing that it will go away. Or the claim for example that kids are not affected by the virus. There was something in the news yesterday that even Facebook had decided to remove a video from the Trump campaign that was making that claim. So honestly I cannot think of any other country, probably the only exception I can think of is maybe Brazil, in which political leaders have departed so often from scientific advice. This has been, I think, a very unique characteristic of the response to the crisis in this country and I think that we are suffering the consequences of that. Another factor that I emphasize that is very different is the politicization of the response, and at all levels, at the federal level, the state and local level. If you think about the issue of masks, at some point it became that wearing a mask or not wearing a mask is a political statement. So again rather than following the scientists, it’s just another example of politicization and of course the spreading of misinformation that has been so widespread in social media, and in media in general. I think that’s another, I would say, distinctive feature of the response to the crisis in this country. And then it’s been a very fragmented and scattered approach, so we have not had a unified national response to COVID-19, state governments seem to be on their own and doing what they think is best based on their own often political considerations. In some states, like ours (Massachusetts), I think we’ve been fortunate that a lot of the decisions seem to be driven by scientific advice, but in other states that’s not the case. So I think that fragmented approach, that scattered approach, has also been distinct about the response to the crisis. And when I think about Europe, and I think about the difference between the US and Europe, one of the key differences is the role of individualism versus collective action. In Europe, individualism is not as strong as it is here, so there is a lot more relevance for collective action, for focusing on the "us" versus the "I". I think the ethos of individualism, that is one of the extraordinary things about this country, it becomes a hindrance in a situation like this when you need a collective response. It is "me, myself and I" rather than "us". And the "me, myself and I" might be extraordinary when you have the geniuses like Bill Gates who created Microsoft, but when you’re trying to respond to a pandemic, it doesn’t quite work as well. And then connected to that, I think the difference in Europe, people expect that the government will be serving them and helping them to solve their problems. In the US the government is often perceived as the enemy, the government is the problem. There is a famous quote from Ronald Reagan that “the most terrifying words in English are ‘I am from the government and I’m here to help’. This is something that he said in his political campaign, and a lot of people still believe that. Other than seeing the government as an instrument of good, and an instrument to help us, we ask how do we limit the government powers, how do we make sure that the government is not involved. And I think that has been catastrophic for a situation like the one that we’re facing now. I think the scientists know what we should be doing, I think this is not rocket science in many ways, and we need to follow their advice. That is a very significant reason this is not happening in this country, that is one of the reasons we are in such terrible shape. Sorry that I could not be more positive, but it worries me what I see every day on the news.

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Q: In your opinion, what would be the federal government's best path forward in regard to public and private education functioning efficiently during the pandemic? Should this be a decision for individual states and localities or should there be uniform national guidelines?

 

A: That's an interesting question. One thing that I’ve learned in all my years living in the US is that this country is so huge, and it’s so different, that in all these disparities across the country, I don’t think that a uniform policy or a uniform decision will work across the country. When you think about resources, about capacity, about funding, there’s just such a huge difference all over that I don’t think a uniform answer will be the right answer. But I do think that guidelines are key. It’s one thing to say that everybody has to do the same, and I don’t think that would work, but to say that you have to operate within certain crucial guidelines, dictated by the scientists, not the politicians, I think that’s absolutely essential for a safe opening. For that to happen, number one, the schools need resources, they need money. How do they make sure that they have what they need to reopen the campuses at all levels, whether it’s from the sanitization products, and equipment, and PPE to protect the students and to protect the faculty? The schools need money for that, all those things are expensive. They also need money for testing, testing is absolutely crucial. I think that if you’re going to do it, you need to make sure that you provide them with the resources to do it in a safe way. And I think that's something that now Congress is still debating on, another package, but as of now that’s just not happening and in the absence of those resources I think that reopening will be a disaster. Two, and I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, it is crucial to follow the scientific leads. These cannot be political decisions, we have to do what the scientists tell us to do, what is safe. I think it’s also crucial that there is flexibility because things change so rapidly, so something that we are doing today, within hours, within a day, within a week it might be different, so we need to be able to adapt to a changing environment. And then last but not least, whatever decision we make in order to reopen schools, we need to prioritize the health and safety of everyone. Anything that compromises that, I think, will be a terrible mistake.

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Q: Do you believe that there is one perfect solution to this problem, or a specific path that schools should take?

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A: I wish! If there is something that I have learned over the last few weeks and months it’s that there’s both no perfect solution and no easy solution. Everything is so complicated. That has been really stunning. What I have learned is that there’s a lot of compromises and balances in all the decisions that we make. But if I think about the lessons that I have learned in the last few weeks and months that I’ve been working on this process, number one is that you need to be humble. There's just so much that we don’t know about this virus, about what’s going to happen in an hour, in a day, and a lot of assumptions that we’ve been making over time, for example back in March and April there was this notion that the virus would disappear in the summer because of the heat, well they have not played out the way that we expected. So I think being humble is absolutely crucial, don't feel that you know all the answers, that you can anticipate everything that is going to happen, I think that it is just absolutely essential. The second thing that I’ve learned is just the need to be flexible and adaptable. The situation is just changing so rapidly and so constantly, within days, within hours, so you need to adapt to that, you need to make adjustments. I remember as a political scientist, teaching international relations, one of the quotes that I often mention in my courses is from an expert in war, Clausewitz was his name, and he said something to the effect that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. You can spend literally years planning a war with another country and the moment you get into battle it all goes through the window because they do something that you don’t expect, because the weather is different than you anticipated, so the bottom line is to be realistic. And I think that also applies to this virus, I think no plan will work with this enemy because we just don’t know enough about it and it’s changing so rapidly, so being flexible and adaptable is another important lesson. The third one, again a broken record, but we have to follow the scientists, they are the ones who know, they are the ones who have the data, they are the ones who have the resources to do the research and to know what works and what doesn’t work. I think that has also been a very important lesson. The fourth one, I mentioned earlier in the discussion, The issue of equity is so important; no matter what we do,  at any level, whether it’s in Suffolk, whether it’s in the local community, within the state, within the country, focus on equity. Let’s try to address those inequities that happen and are such a huge problem in our country and in our communities. Another lesson, I feel, is to not be judgemental. Throughout the crisis I have seen so many different reactions. People that I thought that I knew very well, people that I really admired, sadly they were paralyzed with fear. And it’s just so easy now to be critical of people who say I don’t want to go to work, or I’m scared of doing this or doing that, and I just think being judgemental is unfair to those people because fear is so individual, and all of us handle it in a different way. So let's stay away from being judgemental and let’s help them and make sure that we do everything we can to address people's concerns and people's fear. But I have just seen so much of that, of trying to be judgemental. The other thing that I have learned, and I hope this is clear by now, health and safety should be the absolute priority. I know so many times there has been this debate between the economy, and health and safety, and I think that’s just absolutely impossible. You cannot have an economy if you don’t have health and safety. We have to focus on health and safety first, and then take care of the economy, not the other way around. So we shouldn’t be making any decisions at all that will compromise the health and safety of members of our community, I think that’s a price that we shouldn’t be willing to pay. And with all this, I have to say that overall, I feel quite proud of the way that Suffolk is trying to address this crisis. Because partly I think President Kelly, she shares those values that I just described, I think they’re informing everything that we’re trying to do. We make mistakes, don’t get me wrong, and there may be a lot of things, like I said before, that we’re not anticipating, but I think ultimately when you’re opening under the right values and the right principles, hopefully we will find the right answer.