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Morehouse President David Thomas Talks Football, Virus and Race

Morehouse President David Thomas Talks Football, Virus and Race

David Thomas took the job as president of Morehouse College in 2018, leading the prominent historically Black college for men in Atlanta after a distinguished two-decade career at Harvard Business School and then as dean of Georgetown University’s business school.

Morehouse was among the first schools to announce it was canceling fall football because of Covid-19, voicing concerns about the health and safety of its athletes. The school this year was on track to draw a surplus of about $250,000 from football, the first time it would have been a positive contributor to the athletic budget, Thomas said.

The school, with enrollment last year of 2,200, has an endowment of about $150 million, a fraction of the endowment of his former school, Harvard, at about $40.9 billion.

Morehouse President David Thomas Talks Football, Virus and Race

Since Morehouse’s announcement, the Ivy League also scrapped fall sports. The Big 10 and Pac-12, which include powerhouses like Ohio State, Michigan and Stanford, have said they’ll play games only within their conferences.

Morehouse announced on Monday that its classes would go fully online for the fall, given the worsening spread of the virus in the county. That reversed an earlier decision for a hybrid model.

Bloomberg News spoke with Thomas, 63, an expert in organizational change and workplace diversity who is the author of “Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America,” about the decisions facing the school. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Why announce now the switch to going fully virtual?
A: From the time this virus hit, we’ve really tried to operate consciously from the stance that our goal is not to be right, but to make the right decision. We shouldn’t be afraid to reverse ourselves. We were also very conscious of time. The school owed it to our families to make decisions.

Q: Why did Morehouse cancel fall sports including football?
A: Our student athletes are students first. They chose to play football, but they don’t choose to put themselves in harm’s way in regards to this virus.

Q: What does enrollment look like for the fall?
A: We’ve already forecast that our enrollment will be down by 25%. I do worry that it could be worse than that, especially given that Morehouse is the only historically Black college in the country solely dedicated to the education of men. Ninety-five percent of our students are African-American or Black, and the community is being disproportionately impacted by both the health and economic consequences of the coronavirus.

Q: What keeps you up at night?
A: It is likely that for economic reasons, like parents being laid off or losing their jobs or getting sick, we’ll have students who at the last minute will just realize that they cannot afford to come to Morehouse College in the fall. Because of our relatively limited resources by way of endowment, we wouldn’t be able to supplement those losses for those students. And I worry about that every day. Not just from a financial standpoint, but what it would mean for our students not to be on track to finish at Morehouse College.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.