photo by andrea morales
Dr. Marjorie Hass, president of Rhodes College
The gates leading to Rhodes College’s campus have been pulled shut and locked. Only one entrance remains open for faculty and staff use; the parking lots are dotted with a few stray cars. Old oak trees, their generous shade dappling the light and cooling the air, outnumber the people. Since springtime, the Rhodes campus has been as much idea as place: like Ithaca for Ulysses, a space in the memory that its community longs to return to, knowing they’ll be changed by the journey back.
On March 11, 2020, when only one COVID-19 case had been detected in Memphis (as of this writing, Memphis has been home to nearly 30,000 cases), Dr. Marjorie Hass, president of the college since July 2017, announced to the Rhodes community that the remainder of the spring semester would not be conducted on campus. Instead of returning from Spring Break, students would need to remove their belongings from their dorm rooms and scatter to wherever they called home. Reflecting values that she and her COVID-19 incident team considered in arriving at the difficult decision, Hass wrote, “We are deeply committed to maintaining the excellent teaching and learning standards at Rhodes College and addressing this unprecedented situation as equitably as possible.”
Our October 2020 issue.
By the time Rhodes converted its spring semester to virtual, remote learning — one of the first colleges in this region to do so — that incident team had been monitoring the pandemic for two months. Over Zoom, Hass tells me that when she and her team first became aware of the pandemic, in mid-January, they had a sense that the novel coronavirus would be a concern for their community members abroad. “Even though Rhodes is located here in Memphis,” she points out, “we’re a global operation in that we have students and faculty always studying in all parts of the world, and we recruit globally.”
In mid-March — Spring Break — numerous American cities were reporting outbreaks resulting from community transmission. Rhodes students having dispersed for the week, Hass says that for her and her team, “the question became, ‘Can we in good conscience bring them back here?’” Would it be safe for the students, for faculty, for staff, for the broader community? What would the school do if — or more accurately, when — the virus hitched a ride back to campus in a student’s breath?
“We sat down to talk about it, and the first answer was sort of — well, we couldn’t imagine not continuing. We’re a college; it’s what we do! But I asked our team to do some tabletop exercises,” Hass recalls. She asked of them to “sit down and say, ‘We’ve spoken with the health department and we have a case on campus. There will be no way to avoid that. What will we do?’ As soon as they began the tabletop exercise that was designed to play out step-by-step what would happen — who would we call? Who would we notify? How would we manage a quarantine? — we very quickly realized we would be in over our heads.”
By the summer, when the college needed to make a decision about its fall semester, Rhodes had entered into a partnership with Baptist Memorial Health Care to manage the virus on a residential campus. There would be preventive measures, symptom monitoring, regular testing, contact tracing, and care for the sick. In a release issued by the college on June 24th, Dr. Stephen Threlkeld, medical director of Baptist’s infectious disease prevention program, said, “This is a wonderful opportunity to help one of the country’s finest institutions welcome students, faculty and staff back to campus safely.” But again, Hass says, she had a sense that she and her team needed to “sit down today and look at how this will actually play out — to try in real time to imagine the scenarios.” The decision, this time, was simpler. Heartbreaking, but simple.
Photo courtesy Rhodes College
“Never waste a crisis.” That’s what Marjorie Hass told me over hot tea on a September morning last year. She had reached out while this magazine was in the early days of a maelstrom. Memphis had printed a cover image that many took to be insensitive and offensive, raising questions about our organizational values and processes. We did not set out to cause harm — yet that was the cover’s effect. When I saw Hass’ name in my inbox, I half-expected to read a note about how disappointed she was by me, by the magazine, by all of it. I took seriously the anger many people expressed, but after a time, anger burns off, like fire on an oil slick, while disappointment adheres and internalizes.
There are, she says, two core elements to the art of decision-making. “One is what you pay attention to. The other is how and when you make decisions when they’re yours to make.”
Instead, she expressed empathy for what I was facing as a leader and particularly as a woman leader, care for how the heaps of public scorn were affecting me as a human, and advice: to be courageous, to be bold, and to use this moment of disruption — this crisis — for good. She did not excuse our organizational crisis, but rather helped me to reframe it as an inflection point. I’ve kept that advice — never waste a crisis — at the fore of my mind and heart since. Crises can be clarifying, if we allow them.
Hass is a philosopher by training, and it shows in her handling of the role of college president. She taught philosophy for over a decade at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania, where she also directed the Center for Ethics, and holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in philosophy from the University of Illinois – Champaign-Urbana.
Listening to Hass explain her thought processes, I can tell she distills her words carefully; she is measured, deliberate. She speaks in paragraphs.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in my career thinking about decision-making,” she tells me. There are, she says, two core elements to the art of decision-making. “One is what you pay attention to. The other is how and when you make decisions when they’re yours to make.” Plenty of the decisions that need making at Rhodes are not Hass’ to make. “We have a great team, wonderful people, perfectly capable of making decisions,” after all, she says.
By the time a situation requiring a decision arrives in the office of the president, it’s likely to be mission-critical. Once the thing in question is on her desk, “the ability to make a decision carefully, thoughtfully, and with all due speed is essential. By the time it gets to my desk, there are so many people who are on hold and can’t move forward until I make that call.” She asks herself what details and context she needs in order to make a good, wise decision. If she struggles with a decision, she works through why she’s experiencing intellectual or emotional friction.
“If I find myself having trouble, why am I having trouble making a decision? Sometimes it’s because I don’t have enough information,” she says. “And sometimes I recognize it’s hard to make a decision because you’re choosing between two bad options. In this case, the decisions college presidents are making — there’s no happy option. Shutting down the campus that you love and that you have devoted your life and your career to serving is heartbreaking. I had enough information if I paid attention to it, but this was about choosing between two heartbreaking options. You recognize why it’s painful — and you have to make the decision.”
Rhodes’ announcements about the spring semester going virtual, and then the fall semester, too, were among the first such public announcements in the South. Her approach is proactive by design. But Hass is quick to clarify that the decisions she’s made at Rhodes are the ones she feels are right for this particular college and its particular community, not what she thinks could or should be translated to other colleges, other communities. “Everybody is making decisions in their own context,” she says. She counts herself fortunate that she need only make decisions for Rhodes. And, she says, “I want to make it very clear that I don’t judge other presidents or other leadership teams.”
photo by andrea morales
Holding certain principles like guiding stars helps keep her thinking consistent and the organization on course. From the start of the pandemic, Hass says, she and her team made a point to set forth their values both internally and publicly. In their first meeting, she says, “We sat down and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to have difficult decisions. What are the principles we’re going to use?’” These turned out to be prioritizing health and safety, first and foremost; maintaining a commitment to equity and diversity; maintaining academic excellence; and maintaining the excellence of faculty and staff.
Not everyone in the Rhodes community greeted the school’s decisions with warmth and respect, at least at the start. “When you’re in pain,” she says, as many were in the early days of the pandemic, “it’s natural to reach out with criticism, to have your first thought be, ‘Couldn’t they have done something else?’” As the months have gone on and the situation has evolved, even those who objected at first have come to respect the choices Hass had made. While they still may not agree with her choices, she says, “Many of them sent me notes and said they respect the way we did this.”
Over the summer, a flurry of articles was published remarking on the fact that countries led by women seemed to be faring better with the coronavirus. From Angela Merkel in Germany and Sanna Marin in Finland to Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Tsai Ing-Wen in Taiwan, women-led countries controlled their outbreaks more proactively than male-led countries of similar size and structure.
According to a New York Times article published May 15, 2020, Amanda Taub writes that while we should “resist drawing conclusions about women leaders from a few exceptional individuals acting in exceptional circumstances, … experts say that the women’s success may still offer valuable lessons about what can help countries weather not just this crisis, but others in the future.”
Writing in the Harvard Business Review on June 26, 2020, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox likewise note the complications in drawing sweeping conclusions from limited data — but go on, “Could this be the moment … to replace our old, obsolete leadership archetypes with more pragmatic and meritocratic models?”
“Women who rise to leadership positions often have to be particularly skilled, often have to combine the best of what we think of as women’s traits, like warmth and the ability to build community, with what we think of as the best of male traits, to lead and to be decisive. That combination, I think, comes as a great help.”
Hass has noticed that people — both within and without the defined Rhodes community — are hungry for what she calls “visible leadership.” In her view, “the gulf of guidance in how to respond to this pandemic — the gulf at the federal level, the gulf in other areas — has left people very much at sea.” Women, meanwhile, she believes are “very good at seeing a gap and stepping in to fill it. We’re seeing that both in terms of the pandemic and in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement — watching women lead because they’ve been called to lead, not because necessarily they’ve been handed the title.”
I ask what she makes of the reports about woman-led countries, and what it means to her to be a woman leader facing these questions, making these tough calls. “It’s overly simplistic,” she responds, “to say, ‘Women lead this way, men lead that way, people who are outside of the gender binary lead this way.’ But I do think there are different kinds of expectations around women. Women who rise to leadership positions often have to be particularly skilled, often have to combine the best of what we think of as women’s traits, like warmth and the ability to build community, with what we think of as the best of male traits, to lead and to be decisive. That combination, I think, comes as a great help.” The combining of traits — picking the best and most useful characteristics from across the spectrum — makes for a stronger amalgam, and stronger leaders.
And it’s not just women who can make conscious decisions about what to include from their leadership styles, and what to leave aside. Women can embody a conscious amalgam of traits, says Hass, but so too “there are men who can embody it, and there are certainly people outside the gender binary who can embody it.” She’s just finished a book, coming out next summer from Johns Hopkins University Press, called A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher Education. The book is a summation of her mentoring work and workshops. Which is to say, she’s given these topics quite a bit of thought.
For Hass, and seems a central word and idea. Her leadership style isn’t about leaving parts of herself at the door, but rather inviting all of herself in. This and that. She says she shows up on the Rhodes campus as a “Jewish woman, as a mother, as a wife, as somebody with spiritual beliefs, as somebody who believes in building community. And that isn’t seen as diminishing my capacities as a leader. I’ve been very fortunate to be at institutions — Rhodes absolutely among them — that embrace who I am as a whole person.”
photo by andrea morales
President Marjorie Hass with her husband, Dr. Lawrence Hass.
What in your own life, I ask Hass, in your background, have you drawn on for wisdom during these difficult months? “This is a moment where you have to draw on everything,” she answers. When she had just been named Rhodes president, Hass was diagnosed with breast cancer. She responded with action and honesty, drawing on every resource at her disposal. She’s trained in philosophy, guided by her Jewish faith and spirituality, supported by a team whose caliber she mentions several times in our conversation, strengthened by her family. (Hass’ husband, Dr. Lawrence Hass, is a sleight-of-hand magician and former philosophy professor himself, They are the parents of two adult children, Cameron and Jessica.) “Making such existential decisions for your institution,” she observes, “takes a great deal of energy and a great deal of humility.”
She listens to wisdom from Rhodes’ most senior trustees, and she listens to wisdom from the housekeepers who clean the college’s facilities. “You have to draw on everything” — and everyone. Because she and her team identified equity as a key value when this process began, she says, “we were not tempted to make decisions that would protect the health of one group of our community, but expose others to greater risk.” Instead, they have chosen to think holistically — considering the perspectives of housekeepers, students, faculty, staff, trustees, everyone.
I ask, what gives you hope? What about this strange and difficult year has been energizing rather than exhausting?
“Our students,” she says, “are figuring things out and paving the way. I think we’re all going to learn a lot from them.” They are sussing out in real time, thanks to the conversion to remote learning, what it means to emerge into adulthood without the trappings of independence and adulthood usually afforded college students. How do you find your newly independent self when your introduction to college takes place at a computer screen in your childhood bedroom?
In 2020, we are using our collective energy not to distract ourselves from difficulty, but to devote time to conversations with others and with ourselves about race and racism
She’s keenly aware of what’s lost when instruction shifts away from the classroom. As a philosopher, Hass has studied phenomenology, and understands that “the being-with, physically, is part of how we know things. There are huge pieces of knowledge and information that aren’t available to us in this [virtual] format, no matter how hard we try.”
What else gives her hope? “Every time I see a person wearing a mask,” she says. Mask-wearing is, she goes on, a choice that we make out of concern for our neighbors, for our community. When we see others wearing masks, we know that they have made a choice to protect us. Despite all the social distancing and mask-wearing, there’s a sense of fellow feeling in members of a community taking steps to protect each other.
At Rhodes, Hass says she is inspired by “how deeply everyone that has a role to play has stepped up to the plate. … Our team has been working every day [over the summer]. Our students who are in leadership roles, our whole community has stepped forward and said, ‘We recognize this is a moment for Rhodes College, and we’re going to be here for it.’”
We are confronting multiple pandemics in 2020: COVID-19, and also deep-seated racism that badly needs rooting out, not to mention employment and economic crises. Hass has said that much is determined by what we choose to pay attention to, and she points out that, in 2020, we are using our collective energy not to distract ourselves from difficulty, but to devote time to conversations with others and with ourselves about race and racism. It’s painful, she says, and “as a white woman, it’s called for a lot of personal self-reflection, reflection on behalf of my community and of Rhodes. But it’s also inspiring, and it’s filled me with a sense of hope and possibility for the future that is often challenging at this moment to find.”
That piece of advice Hass loaned me last year floats to the surface of my mind: Never waste a crisis.
The iron gates will open again, someday. Each week, Hass and her team speak with public-health experts to hone their sense of where Rhodes stands in terms of being able to move back to campus, creak open the gates, give the oak trees some company. First-year students have been told that they may receive an invitation to spend time on campus later this fall, though academic learning will remain remote; this would give incoming students a chance, at least, to feel what it is to wake up and go about their days in some semblance of the way they might have imagined college, pre-pandemic.
For now, Hass is focusing on gratitude — for her health and the health of her family, for work that she finds fulfilling, for the unexpected opportunity to spend time in one place. Most semesters, her work requires her to spend a lot of nights on the road. She finds a certain luxury now in waking up in her own bed, eating breakfast at her own table, and sharing space with her husband, who also travels frequently in non-covid times. Now, she’s grounded, and finding the experience grounding.
“Not every single moment of every day,” she says, “but certainly in moments every day, the overwhelming feeling I have is gratitude.”
