AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Historically Black colleges and universities have an extra factor to consider as they plan on how to operate this next school year. Black communities are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. According to the COVID Racial Data Tracker, Black people are dying at 2 1/2 times the rate of white people from the coronavirus. Colette Pearce Burnett is the president of Huston-Tillotson University, a private HBCU in Austin, Texas. She recently announced that students there will not be returning in the fall but that classes will all be online. She joins us now. Welcome.
COLETTE PIERCE BURNETTE: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
CHANG: So tell me a little more about how you arrived at this decision to go fully online. Like, what were the conversations like leading up to this decision? What other options did you consider?
PIERCE BURNETTE: We actually - my senior leadership team and I actually did a series of listening sessions across campus with our various constituents. And we must have looked at over a dozen different scenarios from being fully online to being fully on ground here on campus. And the one thing I'd like to say is the students' health, the safety of our faculty, our staff, the people who work here was paramount.
CHANG: And why did you ultimately come to the decision to go fully online as opposed to online in a limited way but still have some in-person, socially distanced components to the curriculum this upcoming year?
PIERCE BURNETTE: We followed the science as well as the cost associated with the PPE, testing, quarantining. It becomes overwhelming for a small school such as us. And then you add on top of that my concern for the safety and well-being of our students. It was just - actually, it ended up being a complicated decision to make, a very hard decision to make. But I slept better that night once the campus decided that this is the best thing for us to do for our students. And it's temporary. It's not long-lasting. We are not becoming an online school.
CHANG: How do you feel your responsibility as the leader of an HBCU - how do you feel that responsibility compares to the responsibilities of a leader of another college during this time? Like, what feels different about your job, you think?
PIERCE BURNETTE: My role as an HBCU president of what I consider to be a jewel in a prosperous city like Austin yet is somewhat fragile because of the population that we serve. It's expensive to serve people who are low-income. And sometimes I listen to some of my fellow presidents in different forums and different meetings that I'm in that are presidents of large majority institutions - of majority institutions of similar size and worry about making payroll or worry about enrollment, worrying about the challenges known and unknown that COVID-19 has placed on us because we can't do business as usual, consistently...
CHANG: Right.
PIERCE BURNETTE: ...Having to think of new, innovative ways. That's my life as an HBCU president every day. It's compounded now by a crisis. And I believe that my brother and sister presidents of my fellow HBCUs - we would all lean into the fact that we are postured for moments such as this. You're almost groomed for moments such as this to guide your institution through an unexpected storm, whether it be through an era of discrimination, the civil rights movement, Jim Crow laws. My institution is 145 years old. We're the oldest institution of higher learning in Austin. We're older than University of Texas. So this scrapping; this being innovative; this taking a deep breath, stepping back and serving your students because you care so deeply about the mission - it's personal. That's not new.
CHANG: Well, I wish you the best of luck as your school weathers this storm as well. Colette Pierce Burnette is the president of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. Thank you so much for joining us.
PIERCE BURNETTE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
