Alone Together, Ep. 1 with Dr. Mark Peluso

Laurie Patton:

We’re doing something a little different with Midd Moment. People have this longing to be with each other in this space at Middlebury and in Monterey. It’s a kind of Middlebury diaspora all across the globe, so how do we maintain that amazing spirit that is Middlebury?

I’m Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury and professor of religion. In this special series, I’m checking in with our community to see how people are doing so that we might be alone, together.

Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Mark Peluso, college physician and director of Health Services at Middlebury.

Laurie Patton:

Hi, Mark. It’s good to see you again. You and I see a lot of each other these days. You were actually the first name that I thought of, of someone who really had an incredible perspective on what’s been happening on our campus. So, my first question is a personal check-in—how are you doing personally?

Mark Peluso:

Thank you, Laurie. I’m doing fine. It’s a challenging time, I think, for a lot of people and it’s really been great to use my training to help others.

Laurie Patton:

It’d be great to hear from you; when did you first hear the word coronavirus?

Mark Peluso:

I want to say late December 2019, is I think the first time I remember reading about that and thinking, “Hmm, is that going to become a problem?”

Laurie Patton:

When did you realize and how did you realize that the coronavirus was going to have such a dramatic impact, and what was going through your head as you thought about that impact?

Mark Peluso:

First and foremost, I was worried about our students and other community members that were in China. And I remember in those early days it was all about what is coming back to the United States from China, and we started working on how are we going to mitigate that? Is there testing available? Do we do isolation? Do we do quarantine?

Then it slowly evolved in late January and started to become a bigger problem. And by the time we got to really late February, early March, we started realizing, I think, that this is going to have an impact on our campus. And I started thinking about the campus as a large land-based cruise ship and parked next to a very small hospital.

And then Seattle and Italy exploded, and it was clear that they had a real problem with surge. And it was almost overnight. It was Sunday night after the Board of Advisors meeting that my thinking changed and I thought, “We don’t have a lot of excess personal protective equipment. There’s no real good testing capability yet. We don’t have a lot of capacity to handle surge at Porter Hospital.” And almost overnight my thinking changed into, “I think we need to empty the ship.”

Laurie Patton:

I remember very vividly that you were in the middle of that move when you and I actually connected. And I think that was a very interesting moment because Middlebury turned out to be earlier than many other schools in making that decision. That was a tough week for us on any number of levels. I’m wondering if you could describe what it was that pushed you over the edge to work with me in saying, “This is where we need to go.”

Mark Peluso:

We were at the Crisis Management Team or CMT, and we started talking about distance learning. And Jeff Cason, our provost, and Amy Collier in the digital learning office were talking about that. And suddenly, Jeff and Amy had maybe a solution and then the meeting ended. And then I think you called me soon thereafter, after looking at the minutes, and said, “What do you think? How are we going to get through this?” Thinking about lots of students being sick with this and then infecting staff members and then infecting community members, some of whom are going to have underlying medical conditions that would put them in a hospital, really painted a bleak picture. Well, you and I started talking and one thing led to another, and I think, “Oh my goodness, I think we’re closing the College,” which ended up being the right decision.

Laurie Patton:

One of the things I remember very vividly about that conversation was, we had begun I think in the morning thinking about the College and its own space. And then the more we thought about the College in context and what the capacity was for the College to contain a virus, we didn’t know the impact on the community and the impact on the elderly in our community, and then the boomerang effect of the impact on our ability to keep our students safe. All of that was what, for me, was the motivating factor in making the decision early.

Mark Peluso:

It was really, really hard. The announcement went out Tuesday, and I cover the lacrosse games, and so there was a men’s lacrosse game that day. I went to the game—

Laurie Patton:

I think it was Wednesday.

Mark Peluso:

Okay, Wednesday. Everything’s such a blur. But I was at the game and they were playing Plattsburgh. And the news had come out. And the men’s team was playing lights out, amazing lacrosse. The women’s team and several other… I know many of these athletes. The women’s team was right behind them in the stadium. There were tears. People were hugging. This was a defending national championship team on the women’s side. Their season had ended. They weren’t practicing because there was no need to practice, so they went to support the men’s team. The atmosphere was, it was sad, but it was also electric because this team had a chance to play one more game together and they were dominating Plattsburgh.

And I’ll never forget Coach Dave Campbell came over to where Erin Quinn and I were standing and he looked at Erin and said, “I just keep playing the seniors, right?” Because you would take them out and let other people play because they were dominating the game. And Erin Quinn told Dave, “It’s just a tough day to be a Cardinal from Plattsburgh.” And Dave walked away and the seniors stayed in, and it was a tough, tough moment.

And afterwards, walking back into the athletics facility, there were some women’s lacrosse players and they were in tears. And I walked up and I was talking to them and trying to explain why it was important to leave. They seemed to understand it, but it was just so hard for them to swallow. They were upset about their season. Some were upset about research that they were doing. Some were upset about leaving their friends. It was awful.

Laurie Patton:

You’re absolutely right. I was real impressed. You walked right into the people who were the most upset and you were one of the primary decision makers, and just held your own and listened and explained.

Mark Peluso:

The anger and despair that people are experiencing right now is exactly why Middlebury is an awesome place. They want to be here. They want to be with the people. They want to be with their professors. They want to be with their classmates and their teammates. They want to be at this place with these people.

Laurie Patton:

Yeah. If there ever was a proof text for the power of place-based learning, it’s this crisis. Tell me a little bit about what we look like now a month later after all of that hard work?

Mark Peluso:

Right. It’s definitely a different campus. We’ve talked about this. It’s eerie to walk around campus. The dorms are filled with students’ belongings that have been boxed up to the best of their ability before they left. We realized that we needed to bring them a little bit closer together and keep them still spread out within the dorm, but to have capacity to help them. We have now three dorms in the middle of campus that are occupied, one to two students per bathroom, per hallway. And they’re somewhat spread out, but still within three buildings.

We are asking them to really maintain social distancing. Only go into town if they want to go get some groceries or supplies or medication or something. And the rest of the campus is pretty much shut down. The athletic center isn’t open, people aren’t playing tennis or going to the Grille, for example. And so I think it’s a bit of a tough existence for the students that remain. There’s a lot of support for them, but it’s not the Middlebury campus that most people know.

We do have, I think, a very good plan in place if we ended up having a case on campus. We designated some of our smaller houses to hold individual students. If they became sick and needed to be tested, they would be a person under investigation and we’d want to isolate them from the rest of the students. And we have plans in place to bring them meals and we can use Zoom counseling and Zoom medical checks and so forth. We have a transport team that can bring them to and from the hospital or to and from testing sites as needed.

And so all that infrastructure has been designed and ready to go. And that’s, I think, reassuring. The work it took to get there from our facilities colleagues to clear some of those buildings and spaces and keep our student belongings safe was a very heavy lift done in a short time by really dedicated employees. It was great. And also for Porter, as you know, helping some of their medical staff with some housing issues.

Laurie Patton:

Because our campus, currently, and that could change in a minute, doesn’t have any known folks on it who are COVID positive.

So you’re also a Middlebury parent and you have your daughter Sophia as a field hockey athlete and your son Jake, is he at home with you as well?

Mark Peluso:

Yes, they’re both at home.

Laurie Patton:

Okay, so what’s it like at the Peluso house these days?

Mark Peluso:

They’re both doing their distance learning. They’re both seniors, a senior in college, a senior in high school. And Jake’s planning to come to Middlebury next fall, or ready to go.

Laurie Patton:

Nice.

Mark Peluso:

Yeah. He is getting absolutely crushed with work. Sophia, she’s just doing par for the course for her. She seems to take things in stride. And I think it’s been interesting and it’s not ideal, and they miss their friends. There’s a lot of Zoom meetings going on.

Laurie Patton:

Are they aware of how much of a kind of central figure you are for policy making, both at the College as well as in the town?

Mark Peluso:

Maybe. I get home and I try to talk more about how their day was and what they did. Yeah, it’s been an interesting time for the family, but we’re getting through it like we all are doing.

Laurie Patton:

This definitely falls in the, you didn’t sign up for this, at least many, many folks could say that they didn’t sign up for this. You and I probably wouldn’t have put pandemic as the first crisis that we would have to deal with, and it definitely has not been the first crisis for us. But how has this challenge been different for you than other challenges that you faced in your career?

Mark Peluso:

I think the magnitude of some of the decisions we’ve had to make and having them not just be planning decisions, but actually having to implement those plans on a large scale affecting many departments, many individuals has been a challenge. And wondering, are we doing the right thing?

I think we both acted knowing that we really firmly believe to our core that we were doing the right thing when not many people were doing that. It felt really great when the NBA ended their season a few days later and then the NHL and then eventually the NCAA, and other schools started doing the same thing. But to take that leap really required some conviction, I think, and belief that we were doing what was in the best interest of our students and faculty and staff and community and the College.

In medicine, we have to make lots of hard decisions. And I think we applied that to this situation. Now just thinking, there’s a medical way of thinking and a surgical way of thinking. Medical folks will analyze and try different treatments and try different approaches, where surgeons go in and they’re decisive and definitive. And I think we had to start thinking like surgeons. You make that decision, you take out that organ or do whatever you have to do, and that’s it. It’s done. You can’t go back.

Laurie Patton:

Yeah. It’s funny you say that because I remember when I first started doing high level administrative work, I always thought of my father who is a surgeon, as you know, and you’ve met him. And he would come home every morning and he would describe the decisions he’d have to make. You have to clamp that artery in a B+ kind of way because you’ve got to do A+ work over here because that person’s life depends on that. I remember thinking very early on that I was doing the work of surgery. Do you think that this experience has changed you?

Mark Peluso:

Oh, definitely. Hopefully, for the better. I think it’s making everyone appreciate community we have, our friends, our family, my aunt. I had an aunt pass away last week from COVID.

Laurie Patton:

I’m so sorry.

Mark Peluso:

Yeah, I think it’s happening to a lot of families. My niece had it and her sister delivered a baby at NYU in the middle of the COVID outbreak, and everyone’s fine and everyone’s doing okay. But you think about all these things, or watching other people struggle with losing their job. Not at Middlebury per se because we have a great wage continuity effort going on, but other folks are really struggling economically.

At home, I say, I tell the kids, “What are you going to do to come out of this better? Is it getting better at playing guitar? Is it working out more?” Really, for Jake cranking down on his statistics or econ or whatever he’s doing. And I think they’re connecting with people they haven’t connected with in a while. I think it’s changing all of us to appreciate some of these things that we maybe take for granted.

Laurie Patton:

Mark, I just want to end by thanking you again for being the amazing leader that you’ve been during this crisis. I am sure that not every president of an academic institution has someone to work with who’s as positive and as solution oriented as you are. And it’s been a real delight and I want to thank you for sharing some of your experiences with us.

Mark Peluso:

Thank you, Laurie, obviously for your leadership, for listening to me and taking a big leap of faith back in early March and all the support you’ve given me. It’s been a pleasure working with you and getting through this together.

Laurie Patton:

All right. We’ll see you in a couple hours at our next emergency meeting.

Mark Peluso:

Yeah. All right.