This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 20th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For Universities, now is the time to innovate.

Emily Chamley Wright, the head of the Institute for Humane Studies,

argues that in a world where the traditional college experience may be radically altered in the

near term, universities focused on delivering value, must create new ways of doing so.

We spoke last week.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the economy.

There's a lot of uncertainty in higher education.

From your conversations with either university administrators or individual scholars,

what are the big concerns that they have about potentially going back to school in the fall?

Thanks, Caleb. It's great to be here. The uncertainty has multiple sources. One of the things that is obvious is that we don't

know what the fall is going to look like. So if we have the foremost on every university and college

president's mind right now is what should we be doing in the fall? And so we don't know what the optimal start date is, for example,

we don't know what the optimal mix of in-person

versus online instruction is and that will be different for different

kind different places the solutions can look different so that's clear that's no one's fault. That's the reality of the situation, right? But then there's also other layers of

uncertainty that are coming from a pretty noisy environment from Washington in particular, but also from states themselves that are trying to figure out how best to manage the stay at home orders, for example,

but also a lot of confusion around what's the best advice to listen to in part because that information has

become so politicized. So Purdue University's president, Mitch Daniels, also known as The Blade, has said they will

are planning to reopen in the fall. For bigger schools like Purdue that may be fine but for

uh... small liberal arts colleges that maybe

...