We sat down with Michael Weishan, Executive Director of the FDR Foundation, to hear him recount the efforts of the Adams House Alumni and the Foundation during the COVID move out.
GC: So in March it seemed the whole world was shutting down. How did you find out about Harvard’s decision to send the students back home early?
MW: On Monday March 16, everyone associated with the University received an email out of the blue, saying that the University was closing and all the students had to be out by Saturday morning – and I mean, totally packed up and gone. It couldn’t have been a worse week: we had midterms and it was right before spring break. It was an incredibly stressful environment. It reminded me of 9/11, because the atmosphere at the college was a combination of shock, disbelief, and sadness, mixed with a rugged determination to carry on. It caught a lot of the students by surprise, though the University administration had been monitoring the world conditions closely and making contingency plans for a while.
Leaving Cambridge, March 2020. Photo courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education
GC: Where were you? What was your reaction to seeing that decision?
MW: I was home in Southborough, Massachusetts. I immediately called the Palfreys, our Adams House Faculty Deans, and asked them what the Foundation could do. They said, listen, we’re going to need your help in trying to get the students out of here in terms of finding emergency funding for our lower income students. And I said okay, let’s do it. The problem was that, while the University really took herculean steps to get this process moving and get six thousand students back home, there was a whole host of immediate financial issues that the University couldn’t quickly address. I mean, how could it? Something like this hadn’t happened since the College decided to flee to Concord in 1776.
GC: And that’s where the Foundation came in?
MW: Exactly, this is where being a small nimble non-profit really helped out. I immediately sent a notice out to the alumni explaining the situation. Perhaps it was a little less carefully worded than it should have been, because it appeared to suggest that the College was not fully stepping up to the plate. There were a number of somewhat irate calls to University Hall, demanding: what’s going on over there?! Fortunately that was quickly clarified, but it taught me a very valuable lesson about the need for precise communication in a crisis!
GC: What was the alumni response?
MW: Immediately, donations started pouring in. It was astounding how quickly our Adams alumni responded, but not only that, they inspired other classmates from other Houses to contribute as well. The class of 1984 deserves a particular shout-out for raising almost 10K in two days! I was particularly fortunate to work with one of our students, James Bedford ’20, who founded the FYRE program. (Ed. note: FYRE aims to provide first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented first-year students with the resources and community to feel supported, celebrated, and ready to start their Harvard experience). James sent out our call to the first-gen and low income students saying we would be helping with emergency donations and telling them to come on down to the FDR Suite the next day.
GC: So I take it students came?
MW: It was an inundation from across all classes and houses. I ran out of checks and had to go to the bank to get more temporary checks—much to the consternation of the banking staff. I sat myself down at the FDR Suite and the students started lining up. At one point I stuck my head out the door and saw that the line stretched all the way down B-entryway and out the door to Bow Street.
GC: What kind of things were you funding?
MW: At first it was mostly emergency travel needs: tickets, extra luggage fees, storage costs. But a lot of the requests involved incredibly poignant stories. There was a young lady asking for gas money to help her parents come get her—we learned they had to give up their food truck business in order to drive up to Cambridge. We had a young man who chose to drive a classmate’s car across the country because it would get him closer to home. He asked for a tiny amount to face expenses along the road—we had to convince him not to sleep in Walmart parking lots and to take enough to break up the trip with nights in a motel.
That day, I quickly ran out of checks again, but I was also running out of money, so we went back out to the alumni. Once more, the alumni were so incredibly generous. This time around though, we funded things a bit differently.
GC: What do you mean?
Well, for starters, the students were already home so we moved from checks to wireless transfers through Venmo and Paypal. But also, being home, the students now had totally different needs: parents were suddenly unemployed; families needed to pay for food; students’ home internet wasn’t strong enough for virtual classes; they needed to fix or replace laptops, everything you could think of, even emergency dental surgery. You got to see how tenuous the circumstances of some these students are in ways you would never realize otherwise. When they’re back in residence, you don’t always see the differences in family income. But in these circumstances, you really saw the disparities. A lot of these kids had been working two or three college jobs to contribute to the household, and now suddenly had no funds to send back home. I should also add that many of these kids had no homes to go to. For various reasons—abuse, homelessness, gender issues—they didn’t feel that home would be a safe environment. Some 400 were allowed to stay at the College, and others found perches wherever they could, with distant relatives, friends, or shared apartments. When I asked one junior why he didn’t return home, he told me his parents never really wanted him, were glad to get rid of him when he left for Harvard, and didn’t want him back now. What do you say to something like that, except: What can I do to help?
GC: What ended up happening when the University started funding students?
MW: Eventually, when the University’s mechanisms really came into play, the situation changed. The University was incredibly generous in taking care of the students. For us, the students all signed agreements saying that if the University paid for any of these expenses, the students would reimburse us to make sure that we could spread the money to their peers. And they were true to their word. Harvard went above and beyond, but we were there to catch anyone who fell through the cracks and make sure that all unfunded educational expenses or anything that improved the health and well being of the students was paid for.
To read the final report of the Remote Scholars program, hear the students’ and project leads’ views on the initiative, or learn more about the next summer;s Roosevelt Scholars Program, click the photo above.
GC: What did the Foundation do after the semester came to an end?
MW: The second part of the process began when we realized that University aid stopped at the end of the semester—by federal law, colleges can’t support non-enrolled students. Add to this that most summer internships and jobs were being canceled left and right. I’m not precisely sure how this idea came to be, but it occurred to me that the graduate students might be in need of summer researchers. In particular, Dev Patel, one of our Adams alumni and a graduate student in the Government Department came to me saying how he might have a small amount of funds to pay for a research assistant for the summer. I thought, wow, how generous, I wonder how we can expand that? So using our experience with the Roosevelt Scholars program, and taking a page out of Roosevelt’s WPA jobs programs, we set up a new initiative to fund research assistants for graduate students across the University. We ultimately found 55 different projects for which grads were willing to hire an undergrad this summer, and then I went back out to the alumni to see if they’d be interested in funding specific projects.
GC: 55 different graduate student projects is a significant size. How well did this plan work?
MW: In the end, we funded 36 undergraduate positions at $3,000 each. As summer research assistants the students gained both valuable skills and much needed income. For the remaining projects, the undergraduates agreed to participate without funding because they were very interested in the research. It was an all-around success. Of all the things the Foundation has done, this was the most gratifying for me personally, not only because of its scope and scale, but because of the tremendous results it achieved in such a short time. As I said, it was right out of FDR’s playbook, and we hope to continue it, albeit not remotely and with an added scholastic emphasis through our Roosevelt Scholars program. (Ed. note: you can read the final report on the Remote Summer Jobs Program, hear the students’ and graduate students reactions’ to the experience, and learn more about the Roosevelt Scholars by clicking the report cover above.)
GC: As you look back at the early days of the pandemic crisis, what do you reflect on?
MW: It was a surreal experience. I will never forget opening that door and seeing all those students sprawling down the entryway. I called down the hall: “Don’t worry! I will stay here as long as it takes to see you all!” And I did, over seven hours. It was wonderful to be able to help so directly, and I am very glad that we were able to complement the magnificent work the College did. Most people don’t realize it, but early on, the Financial Aid office folks, the House Deans and their staff, the University Hall people, all were selflessly working 20-hour days to land these kids back home. It was a D-Day like operation, and they really deserve tremendous credit. And I am SO proud of our alumni—they superbly answered the call and showed that the Harvard community is just that: a caring community that doesn’t end at Commencement.
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