Dr. James Dalton recently joined The University of Alabama as executive vice president and provost, and he did so during an unprecedented time – the COVID-19 pandemic.
His first assignment was, and continues to be, helping UA navigate the start of the fall semester during COVID-19. Key to these efforts are to create what he calls a “culture of compliance” on the UA campus so that the University can continue to remain open and hold in-person classes.
“I think the goal is to use all of our preparations and all of the things we’ve learned over the past six months to create a culture of compliance so that we can keep holding classes and keep doing research and keep doing all the other things that make being on a campus special,” he said.
Dalton and Dr. Richard Friend, dean of the College of Community Health Sciences, sat down recently to discuss higher education during COVID-19. CCHS operates University Medical Center.
Friend: Tell us about your new role and what you are learning so far.
Dalton: I’m three weeks into the job. I started on August 1 and I’m excited to join The University of Alabama. My role as executive vice president and provost is to work with the deans of the 13 schools and colleges on the UA campus to oversee the undergraduate and graduate degree programs. This spans from undergraduate admissions, to budgeting, to campus tours, to faculty appointments and to tenure and promotion. Just about the whole gamut of anything that happens in our colleges and schools.
Friend: You came from the University of Michigan where you were dean of the College of Pharmacy for many years. Tell us about that, and what your goals are now that you are here at UA?
Dalton: I was dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan, which is one of the professional schools there that oversees a PhD program in pharmacy and three different PhD programs in pharmaceutical sciences, and it also has an undergraduate program in pharmaceutical sciences. There are about 100 faculty in that college, 100 graduate students, about 400-500 undergraduate students and PhD students in pharmacy. My job was to oversee all the graduate and undergraduate degree programs in that college as well as faculty, research and budgets, and to make sure that the College of Pharmacy was positioned as one of the leaders in the pharmacy profession and in the pharmaceutical sciences for Michigan and beyond.
Friend: You have been appointed to the National Academy of Medicine. That’s an honor that many of us in the health-care field strive for. Can you tell us how that came about, and what your research interests are?
Dalton: I was very honored to be elected into the academy last year. Induction into the National Academy of Medicine is based on research accomplishments and contributions to professional organizations. I’m probably best known for some of my science. I discovered a new group of molecules known as selective androgen receptor modulators. I discovered those while a faculty member at the University of Michigan, patented them and licensed them to a company we had started. I spent about 10 years as chief scientific officer of that company, moving those drugs from early discovery all the way into phase-three clinical trials. We haven’t gotten that drug approved by the FDA yet; we’re still working on it. It’s a muscle-building drug. We were originally developing it for the loss of muscle that occurs during some serious illnesses. But it’s also been picked up by weightlifting and other athletes and is being used inappropriately now. One of my duties is to chair the scientific advisory board for the Partnership for Clean Competition, which is an organization funded by the NFL, Major League Baseball, the U.S. Anti-doping Agency, the PGA Tour and others to try and to prevent doping and its illegal effects on competition, whether it be at the collegiate or professional levels of sports.
Friend: I know transitions can be hard. How has the transition to UA been for you?
Dalton: It’s been different. With any transition, you’re looking at drinking from a lot of water hoses at the same time. With the UA schools and colleges and all the academic programs, and when you layer over that the safety precautions that we’re instituting in research, service, teaching and all across the University (for COVID-19), it’s been even more water hoses. But it’s been a fantastic experience. There’s a great team here at UA, and I’ve been coming up the learning curve of each one of the different activities. Most of my meetings are happening via Zoom, like some of our classes are right now. But it’s been a fantastic experience. I’m maybe 10% up the learning curve I think in three weeks. I hope that within two to three months I can report a much higher percentage.
Friend: As you mentioned, here at The University of Alabama part of your job is to oversee research. What kinds of research are happening now at the University with COVID-19?
Dalton: Dr. (Russ) Mumper (UA’s vice president of research and economic development), has been working with UA deans, associate deans for research and department chairs to re-open our research laboratories. Our laboratories are under the same (safety) restrictions as our classrooms and other facilities on campus, where we’ve got a fewer number of researchers and graduate students in those laboratories, and they’re working in a socially distanced way with masks on. But for the most part, some of the outstanding research, whether it be in the water institute, the health sciences, the basic sciences or the humanities and arts, is still ongoing. I think what gets most in the news has to do with (COVID-19) vaccines that are being developed globally. I think there are 28 ongoing trials right now. I think the most disturbing thing is that there’s so much varying information out there about the progress of these trials and when we might expect to see them actually reach the public. Knowing as I do about drug development, we’re at least six to nine months away before some of these vaccines are going to see the light of day in terms of public use, in my estimation. We’ve got phase-three clinical trials that have started, but they’re large phase-three trials that require 25,000 to 30,000 patients, both those that are receiving the vaccine and those that are not. It takes time not only to enroll those patients, but also to wait and see the outcomes – to see who gets COVID-19 and who doesn’t. There are also efforts in the conventional drug world. Many universities, many pharmaceutical companies, started immediately going back through existing drugs to see whether they are efficacious against COVID-19, and looking for new drugs in the stockpile of things that we developed before that perhaps didn’t make it to the general public for use. That, too, is at least six to nine months away, and probably longer. We have one of the greatest healthcare systems in the world, although it takes its fair share of finger pointing at prices and things like that. We have a great machine that develops new vaccines and drugs and I have a lot of faith that that system will eventually find something for this virus.
Friend: UA started classes this week, both virtually and in person. Is UA prepared for students to come back onto campus? And what about virtual learning? What kind of preparation has gone into this?
Dalton: I think we’re tremendously well prepared. And I think faculty, staff and students walking into our classrooms or walking across campus can see that – whether it be signage to direct you to the right place to go, reminders that face coverings, hand sanitizer and social distancing are important, or getting into the classrooms and seeing that we’ve got social distancing and plexiglass shields where necessary, both for the students and the instructors. I think we’re very well prepared. And we’ve got the test, train and check protocol that all of our faculty, staff and students are following right now.
Friend: Virtual learning has really come to the forefront. Are there advantages or disadvantages to it in higher education, or has that been looked at on a grand scale?
Dalton: I don’t think it’s been looked at on the grand scale that it is now (being used). I think if you look at what you’ve done in medicine with telemedicine, there’s been a lot of learning that’s occurred there. Coming out of a pharmacy and health sciences background, I’ve seen our health centers start to embrace virtual experiences with patients and their providers in a way they didn’t think was possible before and still achieve some of the same goals. I think we’re doing some of the same things in the classroom – the ability of students to sit in the classroom or participate online if health reasons or other things prevent them from being in the classroom. I think we’re doing a good job and meeting the goals, the mission, of the University to provide a great educational experience. I think faculty, staff and students come to the University not just because of what happens in the classroom but for what happens outside of the classroom as well, whether it be co-curricular activities, some of the social interactions that we have, those hallway conversations – some of the things that I miss and that I think we lose most quickly in the condition that we are in now. I think we do a good job of delivering on the academic mission, but that’s not to say that we’re not missing out on some of the really important interactions, whether it be a peer-to-peer interaction between two students in a classroom talking about the notes that they’ve taken or questions that they had, or a professor that may be more difficult in a socially distanced or online form or an interaction between an undergraduate and a graduate student. Some of those interactions get compromised. We’re doing our best to make sure that we retain them as best as we can whether they be chat rooms, online office hours and things like that. To say that we’re 100% where we were back before COVID-19 I don’t think is accurate. But we still are delivering on our mission from what I’ve seen.
Friend: One of the impressive things I’ve seen in this transition from completely virtual to back to campus is the work that has been done getting classes back in-person. I believe almost 50% of our classes are in person and another 25% or so are hybrid classes, where some part of it is in-person and some from a distance. I think that’s an amazing accomplishment and a credit to the hard work that everybody has done.
Dalton: It’s a real credit to everyone at the University – deans, faculty, staff and even our students. Looking at other universities, UA has done a great job making sure we have a high percentage of our courses available in an in-person format, or at least a rotating attendance format. We still do have some classes that are online and we’re working to make sure those are great experiences as well. We’ve hit a good place at UA in terms of making sure that people get all of those experiences.
Friend: Do you see universities going to more virtual experiences in the future?
Dalton: I think you’re already beginning to see that, much like we do in the health-care world with telemedicine. Some of the things that seemed impossible or not desirable previously we’ve learned are not as undesirable or not as impossible as we thought they were. I think there’s still a great value in having an in-person, residential experience at a university. And I hope that never goes away. One of my jobs as provost is to make sure we do our level best to maintain that. It’s one of the reasons why you see all these signs and reminders on campus and in emails reminding our students, faculty and staff that wearing masks is important, staying apart is important. It’s the difference between being here and being able to partake in this experience and not being able to.
Friend: We saw this week that the University of North Carolina switched fully to online courses. Can you tell us about UA’s plans to monitor COVID-19 on campus and what students and faculty should be doing to minimize the chances for that outcome here? What would need to happen to make classes move online again?
Dalton: It’s a complex answer to that question. North Carolina has gone completely online, and North Carolina State made a similar decision. Notre Dame moved to two weeks of online courses within the last week. How do we stop this? Face masks, social distancing and following the guidelines – not only in our classrooms, but our students, faculty and staff need to know that when classes are over and they go home or think about social events, we still have to follow these guidelines. When you think about it, students might only be on campus or in class four to six hours a day. We need to make sure that the 24 hours of the day is covered. The University has a number of criteria, or metrics, that we’re following. We had a fantastic entry testing that occurred at this University, which will be completed by August 26. The University is looking to move to sentinel testing beginning on August 28, where about 5% of our population will come in for testing again on, hopefully, a weekly basis. So, sometime in the first or second week of September we will see the numbers coming out on our sentinel testing. We are following the number of new cases that we have on campus and where they might occur, whether in academic buildings, fraternities, sororities and dining halls. We’re also closely monitoring the capacities we have on campus and around campus for quarantining folks, as well as what’s going on in the healthcare system, to make sure we have the isolation capacity that we need. Although everyone wants us to put out a single metric that makes the decision about whether we go online or not, the fact is that we have a variety of different metrics that we’re looking at, and we look at those on a daily basis and make smart decisions as we move forward. I think we’re very well positioned. Everyone (at UA) has done a great job making sure that we are prepared to start this fall semester.
Friend: UA recently released new rules and consequences for off-campus student social activities as a way to mitigate on-campus risk. Can you talk about those rules and why they’re needed? And can you also talk about your expectations for this academic year?
Dalton: When we leave our offices, our classrooms and the campus, we need to be diligent in making sure we’re wearing our face masks, washing our hands on a regular basis and maintaining social distance. And that’s just as important on the Strip (in helping to) control the spread of this virus. We’re going to have to start monitoring on a more close basis what’s happening not only on campus but around campus, and at some of our student organizations, to make sure that there is compliance and that everyone remembers that this culture of compliance is critically important for us continuing down this great path that we have started on.