WEST LAFAYETTE – A few days after he delivered a video message to campus about the uncertain times facing Purdue University in the coming months, even after the anticipated surge of coronavirus cases subsides, President Mitch Daniels said he was as anxious as anyone else to know where members of his new “Safe Campus Task Force” was heading on questions about the fall 2020 semester.

“I’m trying to discipline myself not to bother them, so they can keep on working,” Daniels said.

When he assembled the collection of a dozen deans, professors and administrators, Daniels called for “special preparations and perhaps radical changes in traditional practices,” no matter what ways coronavirus concerns linger. His directive: How can Purdue do things when the fall semester start that make the campus as safe as possible while still keeping students’ academic careers and research on track?

“Who could be certain?” Daniels asked this week. “If we thought we had clear ideas, we might not have had to impose on a group like that. They really have jumped on it aggressively, and we really appreciate that.”

The group is led by David Hummels, Krannert School of Management dean, and Willie Reed, College of Veterinary Medicine dean. Hummels laid out what a phone call from Daniels might produce.

Q: How are things starting?

Hummels: First, this is moving very fast, and things are subject to change. Willie and I got the assignment Tuesday afternoon (March 31), the task force met virtually Wednesday (April 1), we broke into working sub-groups Thursday, and each subgroup began work Thursday and Friday. We began soliciting input via a webform from the campus community (the morning of April 3), and ideas are flowing in at a rate of about one every 10 minutes. In normal times, just getting onto the calendars of senior administrators and faculty can take a month or more, so this is an unheard of pace. But it’s a necessary pace.

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Q: What questions do you see as highest priority as the task force begins?

Hummels: The task force is organized into six groups: workplace safety; academics; residence halls and student spaces; health and safety; visitors to campus; command and control. That’s more or less everything that happens on a campus, and our brief is to rethink everything about what we do with the health and safety of our campus community foremost in our mind. Very quickly the task force will zoom in on a set of key issues that need to be addressed. At a basic level we need to address questions like: How can we safely house and feed thousands of students in close proximity? How will we teach hundreds of students in large lecture halls, or even smaller groups of students in laboratory settings where close proximity is necessary? How will we protect the health of faculty and staff members who may be more vulnerable to the virus? But there will be much, much more.

Q: What assumptions are you using about Purdue as you go into this? Or, what are you going into this thinking campus will be like in the fall – and even beyond that?

Hummels: What are we assuming? This is tricky. We started our first call with scientific advisers telling us what we know now about the disease; what we’re likely to know later in the summer; and what we won’t know yet in August. In a fundamental sense, the task force has to plan and provide options for a future that is far less certain than any of us have experienced in our lifetime. A big part of that is identifying triggers – critical control points – that will tell us when certain options need to be exercised or taken off the table. That could be due to new information about the disease, its detection and treatment; new information about the economy; new information about the campus community and student enrollments.

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Q: Do you believe there’s any question that there will be a return to typical classroom settings for the fall 2020 semester?

Hummels: To directly answer your question, can we assume right now that we are going to operate in fall 2020 exactly the way we operated in fall 2019? Absolutely not. Maybe we’ll get really lucky and everything is more or less back to normal, but right now we have to assume we’re living in a new world and our job is to prepare us for it as well and as quickly as we can. It’s important to note that, whatever the fall looks like, we are committed to providing students a great education, committed to our faculty providing deep research insights, committed to providing a safe and meaningful campus experience.

More:Daniels to Purdue students amid coronavirus restrictions: 'We will get through this'

Q: When will results from your task force be ready?

Hummels: We’re aiming for an initial report to the president by the end of the semester, but anticipate that this represents phase one and considerably more work will need to follow on from there.

Q: From your school’s standpoint, how has the transition to remote learning and coping with changes on campus been going?

Hummels: We are heading into what is normally the very best month in the life of a college student, and that usually means being part of a vibrant on-campus community. Our graduating seniors have lost that, and a normal commencement, and we’re just heartbroken about that. We’re certainly not alone in this unfortunate situation; two of my own children are graduating from other universities this spring and they deserved something better than hearing me hum “Pomp and Circumstance” for them.

With that said, I could not be more proud of how our faculty, staff and students have responded to this crisis. At Krannert we began preparing for disruptions back in early February – we saw how this was hitting Asian and European universities and decided then to enlist our IT and online programs staff to make us ready for a switch to remote work and instruction if it became necessary. That involves a lot of moving parts – making sure everyone has up to date operating systems, VPN and video conferencing software, figuring out what constraints we would face in serving content and students would have in accessing it, and making recommendations on that basis, assessing faculty technical capacity and running training sessions while we were still all face to face and had full staff support. We did all that in February and early March, and so when the decision came from President Daniels, we were as prepared as we could be.

The faculty and staff have stepped up really, really well in delivering courses. There are glitches here and there, which is understandable in this environment, but we react fast to fix problems. Faculty research seminars have moved online, administrative meetings are fully remote. Just yesterday we had our first virtual all-faculty meeting and had the largest attendance we’ve ever seen for a meeting in which we approved two new (undergraduate) degrees for start in fall 2021 and heard proposals for two new online master’s degrees for start in January 2021. Everyone is pitching in to solve problems and just get things done.

All in all, this is going better than we had any right to expect. And we want it over with as soon as possible.

Who's on the task force

Here are the members of Daniels’ Safe Campus Task Force:

David Hummels (co-chair), dean of the Krannert School of Management

Willie Reed, (co-chair), dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine

Lisa Mauer, professor of Food Science and director of the Center for Food Safety Engineering

Pamela Karagory, interim head of the Department of Nursing

Gerry McCartney, executive vice president of Purdue Online

Beth McCuskey, vice provost for Student Life

Bill Bell, vice president of Human Resources

Gail Walenga, director Purdue University Student Health Center

Carol Shelby, senior director of Environmental Health & Public Safety

Keith Gehres, university registrar

Jay Wasson, associate vice president, Physical Facilities

Rita Clifford, executive director of Information Technology Enterprise Relationship Management

The scientific advisers are:

Richard Kuhn, Trent and Judith Anderson Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences and Krenicki Family Director, Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease

Phil Low, Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery and Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry – Biochemistry

Richard Mattes, Distinguish Professor of Nutrition Science

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.