Willy Walker and Dr. Wayne Frederick, President of Howard University
Willy Walker: Thank you Susan. Good afternoon, everybody. Wonderful to have you all here for another Walker Webcast. If it's Wednesday, it's the Walker Webcast.
It's an honor and a true pleasure to have Dr. Wayne Frederick with me today, President of Howard University, to talk about going back to school, the COVID pandemic, racial justice and how we can all take action during these challenging times to promote diversity and inclusion in our society.
My guest last week was PNC CEO Bill Demchak who provided a wonderful insight into the banking world and leading on issues of diversity. It was pretty clear from Bill’s comments that the pain from the COVID shut down is still to come in the banking sector, but that PNC and other big banks are exceedingly well capitalized and ready to weather the storm.
PNC’s commitment of $1 billion to invest in communities and racial diversity is exemplary. But as Bill and I discussed doing a better job of recruiting, training, promoting, and retaining minorities and women must be addressed with quantifiable goals and day to day efforts.
I'm very excited that former Vornado CEO and commercial real estate legend Mike Fascitelli will be joining me next week on the Walker Webcast. From Mike's early days running real estate investment banking at Goldman Sachs, to building Vornado into one of the world's largest REITS, to his current role as an investor and advisor to some of the smartest capital and commercial real estate, Mike has always been one of the most insightful voices in real estate.
We’ll follow up Mike Fascitelli with Dr. Larry Sabato, Founder and Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Larry has been a consistent guest at the Walker & Dunlop summer conference in Sun Valley, Idaho and his insights into politics at the local and national level are as good as you will find. So please join me for both of those webcasts over the next two weeks.
Finally, before I turn to my discussion with Dr. Frederick, a couple quick notes on the markets. Capital continues to flow to multifamily, industrial and office assets. Many of the multifamily assets that came to Walker & Dunlop for forbearance at the beginning of the COVID crisis are in the process of getting current. We've seen very few new requests for forbearance. As some of you may have seen, Fannie and Freddie’s multifamily forbearance requests increased to $12.2 billion at the end of June largely due to a seniors housing portfolio owned by Blackstone that requested forbearance.
I would note that CoStar just published their quarterly multifamily update and I would strongly recommend watching John Affleck's summary of market conditions. In that summary, John underscores the strength in the suburban markets over urban markets and he also underscores the very significant rent decreases taking place in high rent areas such as San Jose and San Francisco.
As I mentioned on the webcast last week, we're seeing increased sales activity of multifamily properties heading into Q3. We're still seeing very robust refinancing volumes as base rates and spreads remain low, and we actually closed on a $10 million hospitality construction loan, so we actually closed on a hotel construction loan last week, a first since COVID hit. While the markets are anything but back to their normal state, we are seeing some thawing in various sectors.
So, let me turn to Dr. Frederick. First of all, Wayne, it's a real joy to have you with me today and I greatly appreciate someone who has as busy a schedule as you do taking the time out to discuss what you are seeing in the world today.
As an introduction, Dr. Frederick was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and graduated from high school at the age of 14. He enrolled at Howard University at the age of 16 and completed his bachelor's degree and his medical degree by age 22. He performed his oncology fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. Dr. Frederick was named the 17th President of Howard University in 2014 and sits on the board of Humana, Mutual of America, the US Chamber of Commerce, The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and is also Chairman of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. There is so much to discuss with Dr. Frederick and I'm extremely thankful for his time and thoughts today.
Dr. Frederick it's hard to fully comprehend all of the challenges, both professional and personal, that have come your way in 2020. First, a global pandemic required you to shut down the university you run. Second, the pandemic required Howard University Hospital to continue providing care under exceedingly challenging circumstances. And, third, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent social uprising generated a huge amount of emotional pain and suffering in the African American community.
I read the following quote from you – “When things are really going haywire and you're in the midst of a crisis in the operating room, some blood vessel has gotten away and is bleeding profusely, I don't get to yell and scream and throw some instruments around the room and stomp my feet, I actually have to become more focused, I have to become even calmer to manage that crisis, I have to find that blood vessel, get control of it and make sure everything is okay.”
So how have you remained focused, maintained control, and made sure that everything is okay during such challenging times?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Willy, thanks for having me. I would say with great difficulty. I don't by any means want to make it seem like it's simple to do. My mentor, Doctor LaSalle Leffall, who was the Chair of Surgery and the first African American President of the American Cancer Society and American College of Surgeons had a saying “equanimity under duress” and that is a surgical principle that all of us who trained at Howard continue to use and I try to do the same thing in the middle of these crises while all the noise is taking place.
I think everybody's reaction is usually to have a knee jerk reaction to do the next thing because we always fear that we have to do something. I actually try to get everybody to slow down and think about what we must do. So bringing my teams together and having some conversations about what we needed to do next and how we should do it and getting everybody to really rally around the conversation about what we should do, and how to do it I think was important, as well as listening. Lots of times in a crisis I think a leader wants to demonstrate leadership and we sometimes falsely believe that means that we have to act, and I think a lot of times what we have to really do is to listen. I think what we tend to hear in those listening moments tend to be instructive and actually give us a good indication of what we should do. So that's what I've been trying to do as well, to make sure that I'm listening to my students, my faculty and staff and then making sure that we're coming up with the right types of reaction to it.
Willy Walker: You mentioned Doctor LaSalle Leffall, someone whom we both knew quite well, and there's a quote I read of Doctor Leffall’s - “maintain that degree of calmness and tranquility because that will allow you to do what is appropriate in any circumstance.” At the same time I've also read that in the operating room where you go still on a consistent basis, which is unbelievable given the demands on your time as President of a major university, but in the operating room you are the ultimate boss, you have complete control of that environment. To be outside of the operating room and to be in the seat that you've been sitting in with everything that's been going on has to have been incredibly challenging - you don't control the tempo, you don't control the dialogue, if you will. How have you been able to manage through the pressures on you to make statements? I mean I heard you say you've been listening but at the same time all eyes are also on you as one of the very prominent African American leaders in the United States today.
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Yeah, it's a very good point and sometimes people ask me why I continue to operate and I tell them that the strange thing is that the operating room is quiet, nobody is there telling me what to do, there's no constituency speaking, I'm not trying to juggle who is this going to tick off, who is this going to please and trying to find middle ground. I'm there to do a job. And the other thing about that is the gratitude that patients have, especially operating on cancer patients. Sometimes I do come into that room with not the greatest of news and I still meet families with courage and gratitude and hope and they get up and hug you and it's just one of the most incredible feelings that you can have about humanity and understanding it.
The job as President is the opposite of that. It's the most thankless job in America probably and nothing that you do pleases anyone. There’s a board member. If you get good financial results the board members tell you don’t over celebrate. You try to communicate those financial results to the rest of the constituency and they're like well you don't need any money you should give us a raise; they don't see the challenges, so it is a juxtaposition. But I do think that operating in both of those worlds does help me to keep an even keel and make me recognize what's important and that's what I've tried to do. Yes, having financial strain is difficult. Being in the middle of a pandemic and trying to juggle, navigating your way through it is difficult. But I’ve operated during the pandemic - patients with esophageal cancer, a patient with a stomach cancer, etc. and seeing those patients navigate that circumstance just gives you a grounding of what's really important than some of the things that we all fuss about in our daily lives and it gives us perspective. I think if you run a major university like Howard like that it helps you with that listening as well because those statements end up becoming a mosaic of a lot of input from others.
Willy Walker: Your comment as it relates to putting everything into perspective and thinking about those patients that you operated on during the pandemic and putting their pain and suffering in the context of what all of us were doing is super helpful. You were diagnosed with sickle cell anemia at birth. I'm assuming many of our listeners don't know exactly what sickle cell anemia is and what it is like to have it. Can you describe for a moment what the disease is and how you manage having sickle cell anemia?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Sure. Sickle cell anemia is a genetic disorder that affects your hemoglobin which is the protein in our red blood cells that carries oxygen. It's one of the most studied and known about genetic disorders because it demonstrates that when you just have one amino acid, which is the smallest product of a protein in the wrong place in a genetic sequencing code, you can have such a dramatic change. What happens when I get into a deoxygenated state such as overexertion, overly stressed, high altitude, that hemoglobin molecule becomes very, very stiff and it deforms the cells and those cells become “sickle” and they can get stuck in your blood vessels, etc. In young kids, for instance, that can result in strokes and I've met teenagers with sickle cell who had strokes when they were five and six. The life expectancy is also very significantly shortened as well. The primary manifestation of it is the pain that you get in those deoxygenated states because the blood vessels, especially at your joints, get clogged with those red blood cells and that pain is pretty severe. I’ve broken an arm and a leg both playing soccer and I have not experienced the kind of pain that I get from a sickle cell crisis so it can be a very debilitating disorder.
Willy Walker: So with that as the backdrop let me try and understand a little bit how you are where you are today because when you were at MD Anderson doing your oncology fellowship it's pretty clear that you're going to be one of the very best cancer surgeons in the United States, if not in the world, and you have the opportunity to basically control your world, be an incredible physician and raise a family and proceed forward, if you will. And I'm not trying to say that's “just being a surgeon” because we need more surgeons and you still are a fantastic one. But what was the turning point in your career that got you focused on Academia, Administration and now finding yourself in a job that has a schedule that is incredibly busy, is incredibly stressful and quite honestly probably causes the sickle cell to come back on a more frequent basis than if you had just stayed the course of being a surgeon?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Yeah, you know, coming to Howard was key. Howard University has a sickle cell center which they've had since the year of my birth in 1971 and meeting peers with sickle cell, getting counseling in that group, also just learning about my disease process was really important, learning what my triggers were I think was critical to how I manage my disease and how I was able to put things in perspective.
Doctor Leffall was a big influence being an academic surgeon. One of the first hurdles I had to kind of get over was whether or not I could even do general surgery. At that time, we would take 16 residents and only six would finish. We used to call it a pyramid program. Fortunately, that's illegal now but back then it wasn't. That attrition was very high, and it was stressful, but I had learned some techniques to cope and, yes, I did get sick while doing my residency and had to put that in perspective, but his influence was important.
I also had an opportunity to meet with Ben Carson when I was a resident. I reached out to him, and my mom was a big fan of his book and his career, and he was gracious enough to meet with me for about 35 to 40 minutes up at Hopkins, I traveled up to Baltimore, and I told him I wanted to become a surgeon and I wasn't sure if this was something I could do. He said to me he had never met somebody with sickle cell who was a surgeon and I still haven’t met someone myself. But he really encouraged me in that little bit of time, and I think sometimes we don't appreciate how if we just stop ourselves long enough to smile at someone, or to give a kind word of advice, how big an influence it can be. And I thought to myself here is one of the greatest neurosurgeons of all time who took the time to meet a medical student, not from his medical school but from Howard, and encouraged me to do it and to go after it.
So, I always felt I wanted to be in an academic setting because of the ability to teach and I enjoy that aspect of my training, and I thought that if I could stay in that realm, I'll do it. I will admit that I'm probably a reluctant president because I never had any ideas of becoming a university president. Some of this happened I would say kind of because of circumstances, in the right place at the right time. As I always tell young people I always prepared myself well. I got my MBA while being a full-time faculty member at Howard as a surgeon, but I try to be aspirational about the things I want to do and not necessarily ambitious. And, yes, it's a stressful job, it is time consuming without a doubt, but I think a lot of the techniques that I learned early on in my life to cope have really proven to be helpful.
Willy Walker: It's really interesting your comments about Dr. Carson remind me of when you were doing your medical studies at Howard and having worked with Kurt Newman over at Children's Hospital where I’m on the board and Kurt is a friend of both of ours, but Kurt is I believe, one of only five percent of hospital administrators in the United States today are actually physicians by training. It must be a huge advantage for you to not only have the training of being a medical doctor but then in your management of both the hospital and the University of Howard to be a physician. Is there anything where other than just the core training that comes into play? We started this conversation off talking about sort of stay calm, when you're dealing with life and death issues you must take a deep breath. Anything else that it allows you to do as an administrator given your training as a physician?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Definitely. I tell people I was a patient long before I was a physician and that probably is what influences and instructs me more than anything else because getting sick frequently and being hospitalized frequently as a child growing up you see hospitals from a bed and you see them in terms of how they work. I tell people I kind of grew up in hospitals, I understand exactly how they work, I understand the roles that people have in them and I think that that has been a major advantage, I've spent all of my life in a hospital practically.
And the other thing that I think is helpful is most physicians when it comes to the business of medicine are not very involved in it and don't become very immersed in it for several reasons. Part of it is our medical curriculum that probably needs to be changed. And once you do develop some type of an interest, the very people who it seems shut us out from that aspect of it actually welcome it, they want you there at the table, they want you to be curious about the procurement process, they want you to be curious about the revenue cycle and to understand it and when you demonstrate that I think people are willing to bring you in.
And I think being a physician it helps because I can have a discussion about how the operating room works with an administrator but it's a very different conversation when I tell that person last week I showed up for my 7:00 o'clock case and everything was ready at 6:30 and I'm grateful. That’s a very different conversation because they immediately understand. When we talk about operating room times, I check my own operating room times frequently and make sure, so it does give you a different insight. And I think in this circumstance, the situation that we’re in with the pandemic, it also I think, helps our decision making as a team better because the science of it is something that I understand and appreciate and respect as well and I think that that's a big part of what our decision making is calling for in this particular moment as well.
Willy Walker: It's fascinating to think about that in the business context where we all try and focus on our customer and all want to know our customer better. You've come to your professional career having been the ultimate customer, if you will, and it obviously gives you great insight into how to meet the customer’s needs.
Let me shift for a moment, Doctor Frederick, to going back to school. In a letter that you wrote to the Howard Community you wrote, “We are planning for a hybrid academic model where some students and faculty will be in the classroom and others will be online. The decision on which students and faculty meet face to face will be made based on health risks, the faculty, staff, and students regarding underlying medical conditions or concerns over transmission, academic discipline and course content, as well as degree attainment and accreditation requirements.” So how do you determine the health risk to faculty, staff, and students given the second wave of COVID virus we are currently experiencing?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: It's definitely very concerning when I think of the health risk. Back in mid-April when we thought we hit our peak and were coming down the other side of the proverbial curve I felt fairly confident that we could do this safely. As I sit here today, I am extremely concerned if we can. We actually have more cases right now than we did in that mid-April time. The death rate has not risen but we just had a July 4th holiday weekend in which several people all around the country were not social distancing, not wearing masks, and I am concerned that that would cause further transmission and we will see the impact of that over the course of the next 10 to 15 days.
We bring students from 46 states and about 71 countries. That's a milieu for putting stuff in a Petri dish that could be explosive and so we have to be thoughtful about that. We're continuing to move forward with our hybrid model with robust testing, but we are going to be very willing to pull that down and go fully online if we just don't think the societal circumstance is going to accommodate what we do.
The other thing I would say about this is that Howard is in a unique circumstance. The coronavirus infection has disproportionately affected African Americans. I employ more African American faculty than any other higher education in this country and so I have a moral obligation to make sure that I don't put them at risk and for those of them who have underlying pre-existing conditions they would be at risk of death if they were to contract this so we do have in my opinion a higher bar to do that. We have to balance that as well against the fact that we also educate a significant number of low income students and one of the things that they do get from Howard is being in an environment where they can socialize and also develop soft skills and grow their confidence that's outside of an environment that structurally disadvantages them and Howard tends to remove some of that and help them gain that confidence and experience so we are trying to balance that as well. And doing that online is not the same without a doubt and we want to make sure that those young people don't lose ground as well.
Willy Walker: You mentioned, Dr. Frederick, the disproportionate impact that COVID has had on the African American community. In Washington DC, 80 percent of the deaths in Washington have been African Americans. Do you think this disproportionate impact is due to access to health care, the density of the communities where African Americans live, the underlying health conditions in the African American population or something else, or a combination of all?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Yes, it's a combination of that as well as something that I refer to as “weathering” which I think is a concept that most people don't appreciate and that is that over time if you live in adverse conditions that have piled up against you, that consistent continuous weathering also decreases your ability to participate in a society fully. And I’ll give you an example right here in DC. Ward 3 is 95 percent white by population. The life expectancy there on average is about 87-88 years. If you go to Wards 7 and 8 where it's 95 percent African American, the life expectancy of an African American male is not quite at 70 years, it’s 67 or 68 years. That difference in a city of this size, you’re talking about just a few miles apart, human beings with the same types of organs and could potentially have very similar genetic makeup, same risk factors, have a completely different health outcome experience. They have less access to care. You don't have an acute care facility in Wards 7 and 8 where you can deliver a baby so if you're a pregnant mother getting prenatal care and actually doing a delivery you have to come across the river to one of the other Wards. You don't have but two full-service groceries in Wards 7 and 8 that serve about 170,000 residents. So again, if you're looking for nutritious food, if you’re looking for fresh vegetables, that's not as simple a task as one may think.
I can go on and on in terms of not having that access and so when that happens and then you have a virus like this that is going to really adversely affect people with co-morbidities such as hypertension, diabetes, etc., the incidence there is incredible. And this is the nation's capital. If you look at the maternal mortality rate, the incidence of end stage renal disease in this city, you would not be sure that you were even in America and that's, unfortunately, a hidden truth that exists right here in our city and something that we have to undo. So yes, there are significant disadvantages regardless of all the prosperity that has been occurring in the city over the past couple of decades, but the resources have not been applied evenly across these eight wards and if we don't have an intervention it's going to worsen.
The other thing I’ll say as well, the other thing about weathering, is that incidents like this pandemic actually double down on that weathering so what you're going to see now with the disproportionate African American unemployment which is traditionally significantly higher than the average for the country, is you again are going to give another dent to generational wealth because of the number of people who have been lost as breadwinners and because of people who are going to have chronic lung issues and other things like that and can't necessarily live productive lives and you just can't build wealth to the same degree if you live 20 years younger than someone else. I mean compound interest just doesn't work in death and so we have to recognize that when we talk about generational wealth, we have to get people to live long enough to even get there and that's a challenge for African Americans.
Willy Walker: There's a lot in there that I want to unpack. The first one would be to your point as it relates to wealth. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, where you sit on the board, I read a research report yesterday talking about financially distressed communities and how COVID has run more rampant in those communities predominantly due to the fact that many of the people who live in those communities work in the hospitality and the leisure sectors. So they're being, if you will, forced back to the front lines as hospitality and leisure comes back online, getting them interacting with people and therefore increasing the infection rate which will both devastate those communities from a health standpoint and then to your point also hit them from an economic standpoint. It was interesting to see that the Federal Reserve Bank was focusing on that financial qualifier to a health issue.
Dr. Wayne Frederick: I think it's been critical. I've been a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank, this is going into my fourth year, and it has been really eye-opening to see the transition, to see the focus on underserved communities etcetera, at the bank. Tom Barkin who is the president of the Richmond Bank, the fifth district where I'm on the Board, has done a lot of outreach in terms of getting into the communities to talk about these things and also exposing himself as well to that. I think even my addition to the Board was really looking at that issue. I see a lot of low-income students, we have a hospital that serves an underserved community, and so I bring a slightly different perspective. Whenever people talk about the unemployment rate, I'm often asking about what it is for African Americans and demonstrating how wide that gap is and, yes, that issue that you just mentioned it has several different aspects to it. Just think about someone who currently is working in a hospital as an orderly and they are traveling maybe on two buses to get to one of our hospitals on this side of the city from southeast and they contract the virus, they go home, they are told to self-isolate and or quarantine in a one bedroom apartment with two or three kids who live there as well. There's just no way for them to avoid that, there's no way for them to get away from that. They may have a face covering but they may not have access to masks and so all of those things I think compound the issue and I do think it's admirable for the Federal Reserve to really look at it.
And the last thing I'll say is I think if you look at the data both in terms of healthcare, and in terms of the overall economy, if we spend time lifting up the least of us the entire country is way better for it and much wealthier. I know in health we spend more money in the last year of life than we do on prevention, as an example, and so if you think of the sickest of us, if we could prevent them from getting sick, especially when they are younger, what that would do to our healthcare expenditure on GDP if we put a lot of that money up front in terms of preventing things like hypertension, etc. And prevention in not just medications and screenings but it is about providing nutritious meals and safe places that people can live and access to quality healthcare as well.
Willy Walker: As you talk about the disparities and going back to your comment of somebody who lives in Ward 3 versus Ward 7 in Washington, on the COVID pandemic you've been very prescriptive as it relates to “all solutions don't fit all communities” to the extent where drive-through testing sounds like a great thing except for in many communities, particularly in some African American communities, not everyone has a car to hop in and go through a drive-through testing facility. Is there anything that we really ought to be focused on right now, Dr. Frederick, as it relates to addressing the needs of the African American community related to COVID?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Absolutely, I think there's several things. You mentioned one that I've mentioned before on interviews, where we put testing, and how it has tried to play a role there. We put up a testing site in Ward 7 and we've also taken away the barrier of having to have symptoms because we recognize so many people are asymptomatic and encouraging people to come and get tested.
A second one as we look down the road that we need to start thinking about is a vaccine and vaccine trials. This virus accesses the body through an ACE receptor. We have developed antihypertensive’s as a medical community that are ACE inhibitors and some of those drugs did not work as well in African Americans so I do have a concern that there is potential that the reaction to a vaccine may not be the same. And as we start building out clinical trials if we don't enroll enough African Americans, and they are disproportionately affected and, in my opinion, would need to get the vaccine more so than anyone else, we could have an issue. So, Howard is trying to get involved with the vaccine trials both on the side of the science and in terms of recruiting patients, I think that's another aspect what we have to do.
And then the third thing is, especially as the government is thinking of another relief package, I think one of the things that we need to look at is infrastructure opportunities. As you just pointed out, those people are returning back to the hospitality industry and so on. I think a concerted specific effort that looks at those workers and trying to get them assistance, not just around dollars, but around things like PPE, transportation and so on, because if we protect them from getting the virus and spreading it we actually as a country I think will do better in terms of the use of our medical resources such as our ICU’s, our ventilators, etcetera as we move forward.
Willy Walker: What's your outlook as it relates to therapeutics and a vaccine and when we can realistically think that we're going to be able to fight the disease? I was just looking at the numbers this morning, Dr. Frederick, as it relates to the morbidity rate in the United States versus Russia and India and my assumption would have been that given the medical infrastructure that we have in the United States that our morbidity rate would be well below Russia and India and it's actually much higher than Russia and India and the virus has been here longer, it has spread more widely, but just on a percentage basis we're losing more people to this virus than two countries that are far less developed from a medical standpoint than we are.
But you're on the front lines, you're on the board of Humana and you see what Humana is doing as well as what many of the drug makers are doing. What's your outlook as it relates to are we going to get some therapeutics this fall? Are we going to get a vaccine early in 2001 or is that all just the markets trying to say, hey hope is coming but not realistic that we’ll get it by then?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Well I'll tell you this has been an unprecedented effort in the medical community which is usually more competitive around vaccine development or medication or therapeutic development because of the economics. But I think that this has represented unprecedented collaboration and I think as a result of that it will yield results. It's hard to say when but I think it would be unprecedented in terms of how quickly we get to a vaccine and how quickly we get the therapeutics.
Now I think most lay people don't realize that these things usually take traditionally years to develop and we are consistently talking about something happening within 24 months of the first case and the first case reports being spoken about, and within 24 months means by December of 2021 and that's unprecedented. I think that as a medical community we're going to get there both in terms of a therapeutic as well as in terms of vaccine and I think that that says a lot for the nature of this entire pandemic itself.
Willy Walker: If we go back to bringing students back to school in the fall, Howard is located right in the heart of Washington, D.C. and it’s as urban a university community as you can almost find in the country. I was sitting around thinking about it and maybe NYU is a more urban located university but Howard is right in the middle of it so if there is an outbreak of COVID at Howard in the fall is it realistic to think that you can quarantine students or control the outbreak and what if you do have to shut the university down again if you do bring students back?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: I think it's realistic to believe that we can now quarantine especially with a hospital, having the campus de-densified, having the number of students in dorms decreased, all of those things are things that will assist us in being able to, I think, control an outbreak.
Having said that, the more contagious version of this as a result of the recent mutations does concern me and so it does also require, we will require a lot of cooperation by everyone in terms of contact tracing, being able to tell where people have been, what classroom they were in, who else was in the classroom, being able to test those people. Testing is going to be critical in terms of a quick turnaround. We've secured a free testing solution in which we will have a CLIA certified lab set up at Howard and be doing testing that has a turn-around time of three hours or less. And it's key, you don't want people out for several days or a week, you want to be able to turn that around quickly and I think that's going to help us as well. And we've identified spaces in the dorm where we would put people and group them in terms of being able to have them isolated. I do think that there is an opportunity for us to do that safely. Is it risky and if it does get out of control do we have to make a decision to shut down? Absolutely, but the other thing we have to define is what is out of control, what really is that kind of trigger that gets you there and that's up for debate. That's something that we were talking about actively especially with the young people who may be asymptomatic or for that matter have mild forms of the disease, you could get some blunting of interest in terms of people even getting tested or coming forward.
So I'm spending a lot of time - we had a town hall yesterday in which some senior administrators communicated to a group of people that we wanted them to be cautious about what we're doing and we needed to rely on them being accountable and I'm going to continue that messaging. We're not going to have anybody sign waivers, we're not going to have anybody sign a pledge. I feel that we have to be thinking about the communal good and ultimately if everyone is responsible, and acts responsibly, it's going to get us there.
Willy Walker: Your response Dr. Frederick on that specific question is probably similar to most university presidents across the United States. Now I'm going to add the complex layer that you have, not uniquely, but you and a few other college presidents have which is that it's my assumption that Howard students have been participants and in many instances leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country over the past month. And Howard obviously has a long list of prominent African American leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Governor Doug Wilder, Mayor Adrian Fenty and potential Biden running mate Senator Kamala Harris. How are you going to manage the significant health concerns of congregating and protesting with the long-standing expectation that Howard students will be leaders on racial justice issues given the backdrop of what you just talked about of managing the campus and managing the COVID outbreak?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: The march for social justice is a long one and one that Howard has gotten involved in from its inception back in 1867 and right now we're in a moment where lots of other people are joining that journey and we're thankful for that.
The reality is based on history some of those people are going to leave the journey as well at some point and Howard is not going to, we're going to continue. In this moment what we have to do is focus on the outcomes and what I've been talking to my community about is that we have to keep our head down and keep doing the things that we were doing. While everybody is concerned and jumping in right now we have to welcome them, be welcoming, but we still have to keep focus on doing the things that we need to do to right the wrongs and the ills of our society and that's what we're going to continue doing.
We have to educate our students and our community about the risk of how that's done and so we're going to be starting a series called Protester Policy where we're going to be doing some webinars and symposia directed at our students and the rest of our community to get them kind of focused on what are the solutions around here. The discussion about reparations, where did that come from? What is the basis for it? What does it look like and how can we bring solutions around some of the injustices?
We're going to launch an Innovation Center. Most of these are focused on technology and associated with STEM. We're going to launch one where the core is social entrepreneurship, but we've been developing this for the past 12 to 18 months long before this struck. And what we're going to try to do is to have students - we're going to wrap it with social sciences and humanities - and have students be able to engage with big data and technology as well as venture capitalists to recognize that they could turn the activity that seeks to look at problems like income and inequality, criminal justice reform, they can not only turn those things into careers but it can turn them into social entrepreneurship opportunities as well and I think that we can mobilize. The point here is that protesting is an aspect of what we do but it's just one aspect of what they're going to do, and they can do that in a responsible, safe, and healthy manner. But ultimately what I think we need to get them focused on and doing is really looking at what the solutions are. We're going to try to provide them with many an opportunity to learn about it as well as to get there as well.
Willy Walker: I've given talks at Howard. I've recruited at Howard. I've given talks at Morehouse and I’ve recruited at Morehouse and it is not easy to gain traction as it relates to recruiting talented African Americans to corporate America. What would you give as suggestions to the many, many corporate leaders who are watching this webinar today as it relates to how to get engaged and how to be successful at recruiting people of color into their companies?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: That's a great question. I think my students are looking for a long-term relationship. They're looking for people who are committed. Jamie Dimon started coming to Howard University to recruit back in 1989. In 2015 I had him back as my Charter Day speaker and JP Morgan has set up a relationship with Howard University where they have students who participate in internships and so on. We have a luncheon after and obviously the luncheon is to honor the orator for Charter Day. He told me he was going to go meet with some students, 20 students in that JPMorgan program and he'd be right back. I went up to the luncheon and I explained to everybody where he was, we said the invocation, we ate, we were done, I walked back downstairs, went to the building and the room that he was meeting these students in and he was still there. Students see him and that company as they have a relationship with the CEO. The CEO is going to show up and miss a luncheon because he's answering every single question of every one of them. I recognize that not every CEO can do that at every historically black college in America, I’m certainly not suggesting that. But I think when people come to recruit they have to recognize that students are looking for - they already suspect that the environment may not look like them and may be unfamiliar and so they want some familiarity.
The second thing I try to tell people is that it’s a longitudinal process, so it's not when is career day, you show up on campus, pitch your tent and you leave. The companies that are successful with my students reach out to them during their exams, they make a schedule and they remember to reach out to them, they call them on their birthdays, they call them randomly to find out how they’re doing, they call them when there's activity in the country that they think may adversely affect them.
And then the last thing is what we've been doing under my leadership which is looking at workforce development. Our project with Google that started as Howard West was an example of that. I've tried to convince companies to invest in the education of my students so that they will be better employees and that recruitment starts with their education. What I pitched to Google was that my students come out there and actually live and breathe your air, your Google engineers should teach them in the curriculum. Not a traditional internship. A lot of my students can’t afford to do an unpaid internship or for that matter even just flying out to California is a concern that they have. Those students now go out there and spend an entire academic year being taught by Google engineers and Howard faculty and I think that Google just like Howard has been very impressed with what that has done for workforce development. So lots of companies that I talk to now I say to them why not look at our curriculum, look at a course that you think you can influence, and what better way to have your company be exposed to my students then in the educational process as opposed to you recruiting them at the end of their time, you train them, you spend a lot of money the first two years and then one of your competitors gets them. I think you can short circuit that as well as create a very different environment for students who, as you just mentioned, may be more skeptical of corporate America.
Willy Walker: I had one of your trustees and graduates, Leslie Hale, on the webcast a couple weeks ago - Leslie being the first African American female CEO of a publicly traded REIT in the United States. During our conversation she said I'm not a unicorn and people need to look for talent like me just in different places. Beyond being better at recruiting at universities like Howard, what can both your graduates - you send 2,200 very, very talented graduates into the workforce every year - and those of us who run companies are receiving them in, what should both sides of that equation, if you will, do a better job of to make sure that Leslie Hale isn't a unicorn 10 years from now in corporate America?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: I think a few things - I think that you have to be willing to go to where the students are. I often hear companies say it's hard to find qualified students who are African American. Well, there are 103 HBCU’s in this country, 80 percent plus of the students are African American. We award 22 percent of the bachelor's degrees despite being only three percent of the institutions. It seems to me if you want to get water, you’re going to go to a well that has water in it, and I would say that HBCU’s are that well when it comes to African American talent.
The second thing I would say is I think sometimes in recruitment we think of - and I see it at career fairs at Howard - the one or two African Americans who may be in the HR group recruiting get sent out to do the career day and I tell people all the time that’s ineffective, that's not what my students are looking for, what they're looking for is can they relate to that person. They feel that they are exceptionally prepared. So, again, if somebody takes the time to look at the curriculum and they take the time to kind of think through or even talk to the faculty about what types of jobs they think students are interested in, etcetera, and you send the people who do those jobs or who are leading in those areas and they can have a really fulsome conversation with that student, I think it's a much more effective circumstance than somebody who's been with the company for two years and just happens to look like them and went to another HBCU. We know what they’re going to talk about and that has very little to do with your company and why they should be spending time there.
Willy Walker: So, you talked about the HBCU’s. Tell me about Makur Maker coming to Howard and whether that is truly the game changer that many people think it is as it relates to - first of all it's unbelievable that a top 20 high school basketball recruit is coming your way and turning down UCLA and Kentucky to come to Howard and it's such a wonderful move on his part to basically make an investment, if you will, in the HBCU system. Tell me a little bit about when you got that news and then how is it going to change the focus on either basketball or, more broadly, academics at Howard and other HBCU’s?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: This is an interesting circumstance because he came during homecoming last year, it was in the middle of a board meeting. I brought him into the boardroom just to say hi, he and his handler, and he's a very pleasant young man. I give a presidential address and while I was giving it, he was in the room, so I introduced him to everyone. Kanye West gave a bit of a concert on campus. I happened to be out there. I saw him there. He had a closed practice. I was able to sit in the gym and watch him. My point being is that this wasn't a one off, I had a lot of interaction with him, to really understand who he was about and when I met with him, he was incredible. His conversation about academics, he wanted to know about my own journey to Howard and what I saw in our students. He asked all the right questions that I would want any recruit, athletic or otherwise, to ask so I had a good feeling that if we were going to land a prospect like this it would be somebody like him. We’ve had other recruits come that are pretty high profile, some of them have shown up with a full camera crew, and I was realistic that was not who we were going to land. So, I wouldn't say I was completely surprised, I had a hunch if we were going to get one it would be him.
What does it do for the landscape? I don't think people appreciate just how much college athletics contributes to brand and revenue and so on. However, I'm glad that you mentioned academics because what Howard University does with the over $20 million in scholarships that we give out is that 80 percent of my athletes graduate and I think that is what ultimately the student athlete is about and I think that more than anything else is what we have to sell. We've been on a journey to take athletics in a different direction and to make it look different.
We've been playing marquee teams. We will play Notre Dame this year. We played UNLV a couple years ago and had the biggest upset in college football ever. But we also have been playing Ivy League schools and that's because I want my students, I want my alum, I want parents of potential students to see us on the same fields with people that I feel are just as well academically prepared for college as my students are and they can see their kids attending such an institution. So, we've had a strategy that we've been deploying, and this is yet another destination in the fulfillment of that strategy. It is going to change a lot. We have a 2700 seating gym that might be journalists alone if we're not careful.
Willy Walker: I would think you might be bumping Georgetown out of the Cap One Center soon enough and having them go over to your gym and you taking over the Cap One Center. But Dr. Frederick it's interesting to me that here's this high schooler who's made a decision to pass up UCLA and Kentucky to go to an HBCU. That could kick off - I mean at the height of athletics and at the height of entertainment in America it is filled with African Americans at the very, very top levels who have also made huge sums of money. And as I think about the opportunity to turn around and invest in the next generation of African Americans I look to those people in the sports world - obviously LeBron James has been doing a huge amount - but to look to people like Michael Jordan who may be giving back to UNC but might think now about giving to an HBCU to build up a program that could help both from an athletic as well as an academic standpoint. I saw Reed Hastings make his donation and where he went to Boden college but has just given $120 million to three HBCU’s. This really could be a turning point. I find it to be very interesting that here's this high schooler who's a top 20 pick who is kind of leading this effort. And it's my hope, and I'm just curious about your opinions on it, whether we could look back 10 or 20 years from now where some of the HBCU’s have really become hot top notch athletic programs in either basketball or football, two sports which are dominated by African Americans and it all started with Makur Maker coming to Howard University.
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Yeah, it's a very good point and, yes, that's obviously a narrative we’d like to see but I think you can broaden that narrative. The 103 HBCU’s have a combined endowment of probably just over $3 billion, that represents 10 percent of Howard’s endowment and that right there just gives you a perspective. Yet, still, Howard University with an endowment of $750 million has sent more African Americans from our undergrad program to medical schools in this country. We send more every year than anyone else. We send more to STEM PhD’s than Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Yale combined and the combined endowment at those four institutions is probably, depending on how the market did today, probably $95 billion if not over $100 billion compared to Howard’s $750 million. So it is an issue of if we can replace resources that probably have been misplaced and I think that if you can do that you absolutely will have an impact that’s incredible and athletics is one potential place that that can happen without a doubt. But I would say that our calling card at the end of the day, in my opinion, is extremely strong academics and I think that that's an opportunity for people to invest in who want to see probably a more just and fairly distributed society in terms of resources.
Willy Walker: I’d jump down that for a while with you as it relates to talking about how we attract more African Americans to this field of medicine and law and others but we're going to run out of time pretty soon so I want to shift to a final question to you which is that your grandmother played a very large role in your life as a boy and her first plane trip actually ever was to attend your graduation from Howard. What's the biggest lesson you took from your grandmother and what can all of us keep in mind as we move forward as a country during these challenging times?
Dr. Wayne Frederick: My grandmother turned 96 on June 19 which was World Sickle Cell day. Howard celebrated World Sickle Cell Day and had me as their keynote speaker. I mention that because as a three-year old I overheard her talking about sickle cell and I asked her about it. She recalls that I responded to her saying I was going to become a doctor. She instilled a confidence in me, about that to me, that I have never been able to shake. And I always tell people that if you really instill confidence in a child there's nothing like it and I still believe that today.
But she would lay in a field in Trinidad and see the first planes come into Trinidad when planes started coming in, that's how long she's been on this earth, and for her to get on that plane to come and see me graduate, as she would always say, it was one of the highest points of her life. And yet still to this day whether I’m getting on your webinar or a meeting at the Federal Reserve or I have something really major to do I still call her before to get her words of encouragement. I think what she has demonstrated to me is that if we just simply love each other in the purest way that we can, in the way that represents our humanity and we provide the opportunity to listen to one another, to respect and understand each other's challenges and to be the cheerleaders that we can be, not necessarily by doing the big things but simply by being good to each other every single day, I think there's a lot more progress that we can make than any technology or any major legislation would ever provide for us.
Willy Walker: That’s a wonderful note to end on and I would only underscore that with something I was going to bring up at the beginning but skipped over it which is that the first time you and I met we were with Vernon Jordan and Vernon has been I know a great friend and mentor to you and many years ago when I was in my 20’s Vernon turned to me and he said, “Willy, I can give you one piece of advice which is talk to your mother every day” and I have not been able to live up to Vernon's advice as it relates to talking to my mom every day but I try to talk to my mom as much as I can. And you bringing up the fact that you spoke to your grandmother - and also I will tell you, Dr. Frederick, when I read about her I didn't expect for her to still be alive and so I'm thrilled to hear that she is still alive and just celebrated a birthday.
I greatly appreciate you coming on and sharing your thoughts. I know you're jumping off this to go to something else immediately so I'm going to let you jump.
To everyone who joined us today, thank you very much. Dr. Frederick, thanks for your insights and your thoughts. Good luck getting Howard back online this fall whether in physical classes or online and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Dr. Wayne Frederick: And thank you.
Willy Walker: Have a great day.
Dr. Wayne Frederick: Stay safe and healthy.
