Coronavirus: Monmouth University stands ready to help address pandemic | Leahy

At a private college in 1963, President John F. Kennedy asked: “What good is a private college or university unless it is serving a great national purpose?” Throughout my career in private higher education, this question has challenged — and motivated — me.

When I was installed as the 10th president of Monmouth University back in October, I used my address to articulate four primary ways that private colleges and universities can, indeed, serve a great national purpose: 1) educating students with competence, creativity, and compassion for a complex world; 2) making a first-class, private education as accessible as possible to a diverse citizenry; 3) expanding discovery (i.e. research, scholarship, and entrepreneurship) to solve our nation’s problems; and 4) being forces for positive economic, social, and cultural development in our respective communities.

I should have added a fifth: aiding in community disaster relief.

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Back in October I wasn’t thinking about the possibility of a global pandemic, and certainly not one that would find its way to Monmouth County. Yet, here it is. Residential colleges and universities, like Monmouth University, are uniquely well-equipped to aid in the community response, since we are essentially small towns ourselves, complete with residence halls, food service operations, recreational facilities, even healthcare centers. This infrastructure was deployed in 2012 during superstorm Sandy, where Monmouth University sheltered 1,100 displaced residents and fed countless first responders throughout the course of that crisis. Today, we find ourselves called to extend our community support and response once again.

Let me share some ways that colleges and universities — private and public — can aid our communities in what Robert Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, has called in a recent opinion piece “a war.”

First, supplies. Colleges and universities should raid their supply rooms for any and all personal protective equipment. Don’t limit the search to just the health center, but expand it to include sports medicine rooms, science labs, research facilities and bookstores. The hospital workers and emergency management teams need them now. We can restock our shelves before the students return in the fall.

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Second, meals. Most residential students have been sent home by now, but a few students remain on most of our campuses. Therefore, a small food service operation needs to operate in order to provide take-out meals for remaining residential students. We at Monmouth have purchased hundreds of meal vouchers and are distributing them to local EMS units and other mobile healthcare teams. This small investment both helps keep our EMS teams nourished while they are responding to situations and offers some additional business to our faithful food service providers, who, like all restaurants, are hurting during this time.

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Third, volunteers. Ordinarily, community organizations can rely on their local college or university to mobilize volunteers for worthy causes. In this case enlisting volunteers presents a challenge. Many of our health studies students have been banned from their clinical sites, and most of our students have been sent home. However, we are sharing information with our vast network of students and alumni in order to aid healthcare entities with the recruitment of volunteers of all types. The decision to volunteer is, of course, a personal one, but we are a community of helpers and doers and we can connect people with ways they can make an impact.

And, fourth, facilities. This may be the biggest opportunity to aid in the response. For starters, on-campus healthcare centers, which are already furnished with at least fundamental equipment, can be easily redeployed. Residential colleges and universities have plenty of beds available, if they are, in fact, cleared out, which presents its own set of challenges. And, all of us have large, interior recreational space that can be fairly easily converted into makeshift healthcare clinics, even field hospitals. Many colleges and universities have already transformed these spaces.

Aiding the community response to this expanding pandemic should grow right out of our missions to be good partners to our host communities. If that’s not enough, we should feel obliged by our tax-exempt status. Whatever the case, all colleges and universities should stand ready to aid the life-saving work that is happening on the front lines of this global pandemic. Monmouth University will do its part.

Patrick Leahy is president of Monmouth University.