Preparing the Public Health Workforce for the Next Global Pandemic

Gil Rogers sits down with Dr. Perry Halkitis about how public health education must ramp up for future a crises.

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Who is Dr. Perry Halkitis?

Dr. Halkitis is Dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, a published author, and board chair of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health.

In this Episode

Perry Halkitis, Dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, published author, and board chair of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about public health’s future. Perry shares his insights on the importance of preparing public health professionals to leverage technology and improve their interpersonal skills. They discuss how public health professionals were heavily burdened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how future pandemics may present even tougher challenges.

 Perry emphasizes the need for reform in public health education, highlighting the importance of a higher focus on the individual person, incorporating more activism, improving communication skills, and rethinking higher education curriculum to better align with the needs of the workforce.

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Episode Transcript

Preparing the Public Health Workforce for the Next Global Pandemic with Perry Halkitis 

Publishing Date: February 27, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we’re going to listen in on a conversation I recently had with Perry Halkitis, Dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, published author, and board chair of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, or ASPPH.

We dive into a number of topics, but the title is Preparing the Public Health Workforce for the Next Global Pandemic. Perry shares some thoughts on how public health professionals need to be better prepared to leverage technology, as well as interpersonal skills, and how the public, as a whole, can better support these professionals during what are truly trying times. Let’s listen in.

Hey, Perry, how’s it going?

[00:00:53] Perry: Hey, good morning. Good to see you. It’s going really well. Thank you.

[00:00:56] Gil: Good, I’m glad. So, for our listeners, I know you wear many hats, and would love to… I know we did a little brief intro, but would love to hear from you and your words what all the different hats you wear. I think that would help our listeners get to know you.

[00:01:10] Perry: Yes, thanks for that. So, I am, I’m the Dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, where I’ve been the dean for the last seven years. I am, by training, an applied statistician, a math guy. But I’m also an infectious disease epidemiologist and a public health psychologist. So, I have training in education and in public health and in psychology. So, my work all comes together to do this work around, mostly, communicable diseases, infectious diseases, my research. But by day, I run the school as an administrator.

[00:01:39] Gil: Awesome. Well, it’s great to have someone with such a broad spectrum of experience. And I know what we’re going to be talking about today is, mainly, the topic will be preparing the public health workforce for the next global pandemic, which I know seems a little sky-is-falling type of a title. But I think it’s a very important topic, given the experiences that we’ve had over the last few years.

I’d love to hear from you a little bit about, how did you get to where you are? What’s the path that brought you here, that cross section of education and policy and, and mental health, right? I’d love to hear your story.

[00:02:11] Perry: The story I tell to doctoral students and to postdocs and people early in their careers is that the direct path is not always or the easiest. It is necessarily the most interesting path. And so, my story is a story of a circuitous path that got me to this point in my career, but I will tell you that I was in college of pre-med, like so many children of immigrants, that I thought that was the only option for me. I realized I didn’t really want to be a medical doctor. I found myself in a crossroad, trying to decide what I was going to do with my life. I ended up becoming a science teacher for elementary school students, which I think is one of the themes that probably will come up again today about teaching science to young kids.

And during that time, I decided I would do a doctorate in applied statistics, because I loved research. And I did it in the psychology department. So, I’ve got the psych there, I’ve got the education piece there. And then, what it became clear, as I was growing up, you know, I was a young man, a young gay man, coming of age in New York City in the, like, 1980s, early 1990s, 

I had this life, by day, as a academic, a scientist, an applied statistician, and by night as an activist, working around the HIV epidemic in New York City and, and trying to advance the issues that we were all facing and, you know, the personal ways that the disease affected my life and the people around me.

And so, in, like, ‘96, I decided to, like, sort of, do what you’re supposed to do, which is, like, shift careers. And I decided to become the head of research at GMHC, which is world’s oldest and I think still largest AIDS service organization. Did that for two years and was recruited by NYU, and then after 20 years at NYU, found myself at Rutgers doing this, you know, the work that evolved into originally HIV work, more focused on LGBTQ populations, but ultimately infectious disease work focused on the population.

So, it’s like this path that got me there has just been this really interesting path. And I think I know I’ve ended up in this place where I need to be right now.

[00:04:01] Gil: That’s awesome. That’s a great journey to showcase. I love having guests on that have this origin story, that is they’re working in a role and in a world where they’re supporting something that is close to them or has been a part of their life for a long time. I think that there’s important elements to really consider there.

So, I know you’re very involved with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. I’d love for those who may not be familiar with that association, what does it do? What’s its role? And what’s your role in it?

[00:04:30] Perry: Sure. So, I’m currently the chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. I was the chair elect last year. I’ll be the past chair next year starting in March. The organization was founded to bring together all of the educational entities, both schools and programs, that provide public health training to students in the United States and now more broadly to the globe.

So, it is a conglomerate. It’s an educational organization focused on the education of public health, on academic public health, and how we think about our programs, how we deliver our instruction, what we need to do to make sure that students are aware of public health as a potential career, but also how we make sure that our delivery of our courses and the way we’re teaching our students is relevant and modern and addresses the public health needs of society.

So, we work very closely with the American Public Health Association, with our accrediting agency, which is CEPH, and we do work that is focused on the training in schools and programs around public health, both at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level. And so, this year, I’m the chair of the board of this organization that is really, really a proactive group that’s thinking about issues, not only about public health, but public health as it relates to social justice and diversity, equity, inclusion, and public health as it relates to artificial intelligence. These are all of the things we’re tackling right now and thinking through what our educational programs look like, moving forward.

[00:05:50] Gil: Great. And if you could define programs of public health, I know that, especially during the COVID pandemic and also with… when I think about my kids with devices and access to information and there’s a… it’s a broad term, right, when we talk about programs of public health. For the layman’s term, what are programs of public health? And what types of institutions are offering them?

[00:06:11] Perry: Yeah. So, the organization has over 150 members. There’s probably close to 200-plus schools and programs. So, the difference between the two are the following. Schools are entities. They’re self-contained units, like mine, the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, which is a school. I’m the dean of the school. And we are a standalone entity within the, within the university.

Then, there are programs which are somewhat smaller, which are departmental level structures that exist within other schools that provide public health training. What do I mean by public health training? By public health training, I mean either at the undergraduate level, a degree in public health, or what is the most popular or most, what was the original degree that, sort of, emerged as something for students to pursue, the master’s in public health, the MPH degree.

Now, many of the schools and programs also offer doctoral programs, PhD programs, and DRPH programs, but the MPH is some… in some ways, the bread and butter of the public health field. And when you see people’s titles, and you often see MPH after it, and it is the degree that is viewed as critical for anybody doing the work that we’re doing in our field. And so, we train students in that regard, both at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level.

[00:07:24] Gil: Great. Awesome. And that… I hope that helps our audience with, kind of, getting a baseline understanding, as we turn to the, the next phase of our conversation here in a little bit. So, last question before we take a break is, I need to understand from you, this is the fun part of the conversation a little bit, is, how do you deal with the traffic in the New York metro area living and working between those two areas?

[00:07:51] Perry: I mean, things are, things have gotten so much more complicated over the last 20 years. First, just full disclosure, born and bred New Yorker, right? New York City guy through and through. I’m not like a guy who came to New York later. I was born here. I was born in Astoria General Hospital, like, in Queens. I’ve been here my whole life. I did all my degrees here, you know. And, like, driving was just part of our, my repertoires growing up. I will tell you that the last few years, with congestion pricing and the bicycle lanes, it is impossible.

However, for someone like me, it was always difficult, right? So, I just, like, navigate it, right? I’ll tell you what drives me the most nuts about driving in the city. And I live in New Jersey during the week where I’m doing my work. And I come to the city on the weekends where my family is. But when I drove, and I drove again last night before I came to New York, there’s this, like, I live all the way down in the financial district, right? So, at the tip of the island of Manhattan, which is the original New York City, right? So, very, very narrow, very narrow streets. And for anybody who knows London and New York, it’s like the streets are all, like, tiny, right? They’re not like the grid we’re so used to in New York City. But there’s the bowl, the Wall Street Bowl, which is like, for some reason, a popular tourist attraction. I don’t know why, but it is.

And there’s often dozens and dozens of people there, standing around the billboard, posting pictures. And somehow you have to drive through this, I don’t want to say, like, 10-foot drop lane, past them, while they’re sitting in the street. So, it’s chaos down there, right? And more often than not, I find myself thinking, “Oh, my God, let me find another way,” because the last thing I need to do is, like, have, like, public health dean run over somebody looking at the bowl in New York City. So, I navigate it because I know, I know no difference, right? So, when I go to other cities and there’s, like, these big open roads, I’m like, “Wow, this is amazing. Wonderful.”

[00:09:38] Gil: My family is originally from Connecticut, and so we do trips into the city from time to time. But then, when you’re driving up Merritt Parkway back up to Connecticut, it just starts, you get the trees on the side and it starts, I mean, obviously, traffic there gets nuts, too, but it’s, it opens up a little bit more and more. And then, Connecticut becomes the parking lot that’s between New York and Massachusetts, but that’s a whole separate conversation.

[00:09:58] Perry: Yeah, and I just look, I just came back from London, which I think is also congested, but it just feels different, right? It feels like somehow they’ve, like, managed it better. Sure, there’s less people. Sure, there’s a much smaller population. But, sort of, this, like, chaos of New York, I’m never really honestly afraid of having an S speeding out to New York City because I’m not sure I ever go more than 10 miles an hour even driving here.

[00:10:19] Gil: Benefits. There’s benefits to all.

[00:10:21] Perry: Exactly.

[00:10:22] Gil: Great. Thank you so much. So, we’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to dive into the topic of the day, which is preparing the public health workforce for the next global pandemic. So, we’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back.

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[00:11:30] Gil: All right, we are back, and we are with Dean Perry Halkitis from the Rutgers School of Public Health, who is an avid driver through New York City and makes it through traffic and survives. We are talking about preparing the public health workforce for the next global pandemic. And I think, before we look to the future, maybe we should go to the past a little bit and talk about, kind of, how we got to where we are and the current state of affairs.

And we’re in a unique time on the back end of and… I hate to use the term “unprecedented,” but we’ll use the term, “unprecedented,” the unprecedented global pandemic that we went through and the strain and the stress that was put on our public health systems. So, Perry, I’d love for you to give us a little bit of, kind of, that ground level insight, what we faced, the challenges, what you observed. And then, we can talk about what we’ve learned and we can apply moving forward.

[00:12:25] Perry: So, I love this question because I think it’s a complicated one. And I’m in the middle of the final chapter of a book I’m writing right now, which is called, People and Public Health: How Americans Created the HIV and COVID-19 Pandemics. And it really focuses on trying to shift the dialogue from the pathogen to the people who passed the pathogen on and what role we played as citizens and politicians and family members in creating these pandemics. So, stay tuned for that. I’m close to finishing.

But, you know, public health is one of those areas that when you are tightening your belt, as was the case in the beginning of the 2000s, late 1990s, the funding to public health got more cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. It seemed like one of those things that just seemed superfluous and unnecessary. And, you know, these are the things that often happen when you have organizations that are trying to, like, reduce their budgets.

So, we found ourselves in 2019, right before the pandemic hit, in a place where the infrastructure for public health was extremely lean, particularly at the local level. So, when you think about small towns and municipalities and small states, it was where a lot of the public health work happens, right? Because it’s not all federally controlled. We had organizations that had one or two people trying to run, like, the health issues for a whole, a whole area, right? And it was, you know, we, anybody, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know that something bad happened, right? Like, it’s, kind of, let’s take it back to the parking analogy. If you’re, like, on the bandwagon, for those of you who are in the New York area, which is the highway that takes you to the JFK, God forbid there’s somebody who’s, like, stuck, because there’s no, like, side lane, right? So, like, you are, like, just stuck there, like, for hours and hours. So, it’s the same thing. That’s my analogy here, which is, like, you… this was working fine until it wasn’t working fine, which is what the crisis is, what happened with the COVID pandemic.

So, so, that, that sets the stage for what happens in 2020, 2021, 2022, where we get bombarded with this reality, right? It was, like, for me as a young man in the ‘80s and going through this with COVID later on was just, like, “Oh, my God, this is like deja vu to me, what’s going on here.” But there was this scrambling to do the work we needed to do to keep people healthy now. At the same time, what was a little different this time, although not completely different, was that there were these political realities that were shaping the way people were reacting to the pandemic. And that made the job of already overburdened, exhausted, minimally resourced, underpaid public health individuals get even more worse, because now they were being attacked.

So, you got this, the country saw the manifestation of that, like, the attacks on Tony Fauci. But imagine, Tony Fauci is like this superb guy who, like, you know, has a good living and, like, is, you know, very, very powerful in his position, was very powerful in his position. But can you imagine you’re, like, a $40,000, $30,000 person working in a Department of Health, and you’re just trying to do your work, which is get people vaccinated, keep people safe, and you’re being attacked?

And so, what happened was that there was this great departure, as there was for many professions, but particularly for public health, over the course of the pandemic, and then shortly thereafter from public health. And we find ourselves now even in a more difficult position because, one, we are under… even understaffed now because people are not there to do the work, but two, trying to convince people that public health matters, and that if a field in public health is a field, a career in public health is a career that they should have. But I think we’re struggling because we have all these other forces that are diminishing the importance of public health.

And, you know, if you’re a 19-year-old student or a 16-year-old student or a 24-year-old student or a 40-year-old student, you’re thinking like, “Why would I go into this area when I’m going to be as attacked?” So, that’s where we are, right? And that’s what we’re struggling with right now, to figure out how to make sure public health gets its rightful place in society and, at the same time, making sure that the politics align.

One more point. Over the course of the last 30 years, also, there’s been other really interesting phenomenon going on, which is, like, very often, medicine, which thinks it’s the center of the world, has tried to usurp the identity of public health. And so, medical doctors think they’re public health people, which they’re not, right? They’re clinicians and they’re wonderful, but they’re not public health people. And so, we are now also being challenged by another discipline, which is trying to do the work that we should be doing instead of doing the work with us.

[00:16:47] Gil: Well, I think, to bring it back to the comment about people working in public health being attacked and the stresses of, they’re overburdened with the influx of people to help, I take a step back and I look at industries like education, nonprofits. And obviously, public health falls into that category of the people who enter these fields don’t necessarily do it because they are looking for jobs that are going to pay them millions of dollars every year. They do it because they’re mission-driven. They care about people. And they want to help people. And to turn on that group of people that, like you said, are just trying to do their job with the best information that they have in that moment and make it, and make it a challenge for them, that’s what leads to, and you look at other industries with great resignation and you look at, if people can make more money and have less stress in other careers, that’s a bad recipe for health of that industry and of those programs.

[00:17:39] Perry: I mean, I think that the analogy of education is perfect, right? I mean, I was a school teacher at one point in my life, so I know the challenges of being a school teacher every single day and being under-resourced and having 40 kids in your class and all of that. And I think that, when parents are attacking you, which I’m not saying was the case for me, but when parents are attacking you, well, you ask yourself, “Why am I doing this,” right? Or, when you’re asked, like so many teachers, including my husband, who is a school teacher, who is asked, like, do Zoom meetings with all day long with children who are in these homes who, who can’t even focus when they’re in the classroom, makes it a really difficult situation.

So, yeah, let’s not attack the people who are trying to help us, right? And this is, like, you know, and that’s all we were trying to do during, like, we don’t, like, let’s be frank, nobody wanted to wear masks. I didn’t want to wear a mask, but I did. But I was just trying to keep people healthy. And so, being attacked for trying to keep people healthy, for thinking about the good of the whole over the good of the individual, which is, I think, honestly, what we should have been the focus of our world, created a very difficult situation. And, you know, the Great Barrington Declaration didn’t help, right? Because, like, the onus on us as being the bad people and basically made, you know, individual rights the most important thing in the world. And that’s just a mixed mischaracterization of what individual rights are and civil rights are and personal rights are when you’re living in a civil society.

I mean, I went to Columbia and did an undergraduate degree there, and I, you know, I’m steeped in the humanities. There’s a course of studies that all undergraduates do at Columbia, which is, like, the core classes, like, contemporary civilization, stuff like that. And I just remember reading all of those works by, like, Rousseau and others about the social covenant, right? When you make a decision to be part of a society, make a decision to be part of a society is that you give up certain rights, right, for the good of the whole. And I think we’ve, sort of, lost that. And that was what, what led to so much of the attack that public health people were facing.

[00:19:23] Gil: Yeah, and I think sometimes there winds up being truth somewhere in the middle and we focus so much on the fringes, right? But I feel like, in a perfect world, the vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. But we… the fringes is where the entertainment is. And it’s where the… it’s like watching a car wreck, like, you can’t sway, right? And so, when, when there’s the conversations on the far ends, that’s what gets all the media coverage, that’s what gets all of the attention because it’s an attention-grabbing thing, right?

[00:19:52] Perry: Right. It’s exactly right. And we know from statistics regression towards the mean, so most people are in the middle somewhere, right? But, you know, I mean, the question I have, I’ll even… I’ll take that idea and, like, add something to it, which is, like, what role does the media then have in all of this, right?

So, if you, like, cater to the extremes and you’re not focusing on the middle, most people are in the middle, but if you’re catering to the extremes, you’re going to miss a big part of the country. I also, like, have talked about for a very long time in my own research, which is, like, I did a lot of work around meth and HIV, methamphetamine use and HIV in the early 2000s. And my focus was, like, I was trying to shift the dialogue. Why are we focusing on the people who are using this drug instead of focusing on people who are not using this drug, which is the vast majority? And what are they doing to not use it? Why are we focusing on why people use it? So, this is a positive psychology, you know, a strength-based, not deficiency-based approach, is what we should be focusing on in public health. And the media need to join us in that and, like, focus on what people are doing right and not what people are doing wrong.

[00:20:47] Gil: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But in the age of social media and clickbait and all those sorts of challenges, we have to… it takes a village to change, make those changes. So, that’s a lot to unpack. And then, what we’re going to do is we’ll take a break. And when we come back, what we’ll do is we can talk about the future and what, what some lessons learned and how we can apply them and build on the conversation that we’ve just started.

[00:21:10] Perry: Awesome.

[00:21:11] Gil: So, take a break and be right back

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[00:21:54] Gil: All right, we are back. And we’re talking about the, how we’re preparing the public health workforce for the next global pandemic. And in our last segment, Perry, we, we dove in about a lot of the challenges that the workforce faced, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. But also, prior to that, under-resourcing and stress, I feel like it was just compounded during that time. And now we’re in a, a world where we brought up the issue and the, the challenge with media around these challenges and the role society, as a whole, needs to play rethinking how we support these professionals. And we drew parallels from industries like education and others, where we have mission-driven people who are, at their core, go into these positions and roles because they want to help people and they want to support society. And so, for society to under-support them and put more stress on them and attack them is not a recipe for longevity for that type of work, because people will flock to other opportunities where they might be treated better.

And so, I’d love your thoughts on what the future needs to be and what needs to look like. We’re solutions-focused here at the FYI Podcast. And so, what solutions we might have to, to support and overcome these challenges over the next few years.

[00:23:09] Perry: Yeah. So, that’s a multi… I think, like, a complex question that has multi-level answers, because I think that there’s… when I think about interventions and I think about change, I think about systemic and then interpersonal and then, like, the personal level changes we need to make in order to advance all this. But I’m going to focus on a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about. And I’m going to focus, first of all, on the focus, the focus in public health has often been on policies, and I think there has got to be much more focus on the individual person.

And I think what we learned over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic is that one size doesn’t fit all. So, when you say vaccine hesitancy to me, and people have asked me this on interviews, they’re like, “What’s vaccine hesitancy?” And I’m like, “What population are we talking about?”

And so, I think that requires a shifting of the kind of paradigms and theories we use in thinking through public health, which focus not only on cognitions, meaning decision-making, which I’ve been saying now for, like, I’m going to say 30 years. This idea that human beings make rational decisions. No, they don’t. Human beings don’t make rational decisions all the time. And I remember very early in my career in, like, 1998, I think I was at a CDC meeting and I was doing, getting… I had this huge grant on HIV work. And I was in a meeting, and there was all these, like, important people there. And I was, like, this little young researcher there. And they were talking about developing an intervention, because if you increase people’s self-efficacy, which is an idea in, in, in one of the social learning theories, which is, comes out of Al Bandura’s work, that if you increase people’s confidence in their ability to do something, they would do it, right?

So, if you increase the people’s confidence or their self-efficacy to do, to use condoms every time, they would use condoms. And my response was like, but not three tequila shots in, right? So, what role does emotion play? What role does, like, socialization play? What role does psychological realities play? It’s something that public health has not thought about and needs to think about.

And this is what this book is about, that I’m writing, right? And I’m privileged because I live in this public health psychology space to be able to think this way, right? But to me, like, thinking about how human beings act is critical. Telling them they’re bad because they don’t get vaccinated doesn’t help. Understanding why they don’t want is an important issue, right? People don’t just wake up one morning and decide, “I’m going to be a meth addict or I’m going to be an anti-vaxxer.” They get there during the course of their lives, right?

And so, what is it in their past that gets them there? And how do we work with that? That’s a huge undertaking, but it means thinking about public health differently. That’s number one.

And I’m going to keep pushing this agenda because I think that it has to be, it has to be person, emotion, cognition-based. It’s just not going to work otherwise. Number two, because, let me just actually say one more thing, because this notion, and this is what I worry about, the over, over-medicalization or the over-biomedicalization of public health, which is like, “Okay, we have a vaccine, so now the problem is solved.” No, because there’s human behavior involved. And anytime human behavior is involved, it’s not just about, like, it’s going to solve the problem, right? It’s just not, it’s not a lab with mice in it. We’re humans. Okay, number two.

Public health, also, at the academic level needs to rethink how we train our future students, right? And so, for me, and I’m speaking for myself as a person, as a public health person, but as an activist also, I think our students, of course, need to get the core skills that they’re getting now, but they also need to learn how to do the following things. How do they speak to the community? How do they speak to politicians? How do they write for lay audiences? How do they interact with people and be able to be forceful if they’re asked to present at their local, political entities, or at the federal entities, or in the newspaper to communicate effectively, to, in a way that’s compassionate and not derogatory, right, and engages people to actually change their behavior.

And I don’t think we do that particularly well in any field. I think medicine doesn’t do particularly well, either, in dealing how you do provide patient care. But I think, thinking about the curriculum so that it is much more focused on how we have students actually working out there with people is big.

But I want to add one second piece, which is the more radical piece, which is, like, public health has to be more activist, too. It’s just like, when you think about what changed the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s or around 1990s, it was activism, right? And I think activism has to be at the heart and soul of public health. It doesn’t seem like, “Oh, well, but how does it fit into school?” And my argument would be, like, teaching people advocacy and activism has to be part of the curriculum, right? And otherwise, they’re just, like, pushing buttons. When I, honestly, frankly, when I got to Rutgers about seven years ago, people were doing public health work, really good work, but they were doing it behind computers. And my response was, “I can’t… this school has to change. This school has to be about people being in the public, right?” So, when I look at my folks who are there now, they’re out there engaging with people all the time. That’s what we need to do much more of, I think, if we’re going to change, change things.

And I mean, a third thing I would say is, like, people who have training like myself and people who have public health experience need to think about politics as an area for their future, right? If we have people making decisions who have no idea what is going on with public health, then they’re going to continue to make bad ideas.

Last point, and this is just my corollary point. This is my point that I wish I can just have a magic wand and change it. We’ve got to think also about how we’re training kids and how we’re educating kids, right? So, we know over the last 30 or 40 years, there’s been a focus on reading and math at the expense of science and civics and social studies., totally. And look what happens. You have a pandemic, and people don’t even know what the science is. They don’t understand that there’s three branches of government.

And so, I’m challenging this education system of elementary schools and high schools to, like, rethink their focus and stop worrying so much about spelling and focus more on how they create, like, citizens who are engaged and knowledgeable about science and about civics.

So, those are the things that I think get us potentially moving forward in a way that we are better prepared for the next pandemic. Last point, people are going to make mistakes. History repeats itself. Like, we know this, right? How do we not make those mistakes again? Well, you don’t make mistakes again by using more radical approaches than just hoping to God that things are not going to be as bad next time around. Because they are. Because the next pathogen is going to be even more virulent, and it’s going to be even… spread even faster. So, we’ve got to have the toolkit to, like, be able to deal with that.

[00:29:18] Gil: Yeah. I think for the first points that you made, to me, my background’s in marketing, and everything always, to me, boils down to what’s the marketing issue. And the marketing issue typically, in the old school, four Ps of marketing, it’s promotion and positioning, are the two things that, oftentimes, can give a lift. And obviously, for my marketing friends, I get that there’s more to it from a strategy perspective and things have evolved. But at the end of the day, when it comes to advocating for change, what is advocate, what is advocacy but promotion by another name? And it’s, you know, I think that when it comes to the challenges that this segment is facing is, it’s, there’s marketing issues when it comes to positioning around the roles and promoting the importance of them and promoting the science and promoting the rethinking of the educational programming that’s led us to these issues. I’d love your thoughts on that. Am I off base or am I on base?

[00:30:15] Perry: You’re 100% on base. You’re on base because I’m thinking the same thing, which is, like, and I’ve said this often, which is, like, why during the course of the pandemic, did we not marry our efforts with industry? Like, the Amazon people, the other companies, they know what they’re doing, right? They know how to market. They know how to sell, right? Schools don’t know how to do that, right? Public health is not in the business of trying to sell things, right? And so, we develop things internally, like we develop… here’s, like, a very basic example. Like, we did… New York City developed a portal for people to sign up for vaccination kept crashing. Well, okay, but there’s, like, people in the world who do, like, web design and who do computer programming who would be able to do this very easily. Or the way we were marketing things. We were giving messaging to things. Like, well, there’s all these people who do marketing and communications, advertising agencies all over. There’s mad men all over and mad women and then mad people all over New York City. Why aren’t we working with them more effectively, right?

So, this notion that, somehow, academia has to be separate from industry is not one that I buy. My wildest idea was, you know, for people who are very privileged and that power, like, we know, and I’m one of those people who has so much privilege, the Amazon person kept coming to my house during the pandemic, right? You know, I needed a book, I needed a saucepan, I needed something, right? Maybe, we should have had, like, an injector, like, a vaccinator on the truck, who was there with a person. Like, that’s a wild idea, but why is that a bad idea? Why do we keep expecting that people are going to go to health? Why don’t we just bring health to them, right?

And that’s, I think, a big part of what public health also needs to think about. You know, one of my colleagues, early in the HIV epidemic, or in the middle of the HIV epidemic, start to do STI testing in sex clubs. Right! Because that’s where people are getting infected, potentially, right? Not… we can’t wait for people to come and go to the doctor. And I think one of the big problems was with vaccinations that we just made it so difficult for people to get to things. And if you have less financial needs and you’re making people travel far, I mean, you’re putting all these impediments in the way. West Virginia had actually a really good turnout because what they did was, they work with their local pharmacies. And people have trust with those things, right? And people went and got their vaccination.

So, these are just, it means what I’m trying to say to you here, Gil, is, like, kind of, like, blow it all up, right? It’s like it’s not working, and…

[00:32:32] Gil: Well, and you mentioned the piece about education and industry. And I think that’s a valuable point. And, you know, a couple weeks ago, we had Ryan Craig, who’s the managing director of Achieve Partners on as a guest. And he wrote a book, Apprentice Nation: How to Earn and Learn Alternative Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. And that book talks about the need for skills-based education and connecting curriculum to workforce needs. And we also, we recently… I’m going to put links to these books and your books in the episode notes for our listeners. But Brian Rosenberg, he joined recently. His book is Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education, right?

And so, we have a lot of people talking about addressing these issues, because I think, at its core, how higher ed can help with solving these challenges is rethinking of curriculum and rethinking of how programs can map through careers and where the role programs of public health play in addressing these challenges. So, I think you hit the nail on the head. That’s a big part of this. And obviously, the further down we can go, the K-12 space would be a game change zone.

[00:33:41] Perry: Yeah, it would be amazing. Like, we do it at Rutgers. We do a high school program every year, which is like a week, like, public health camp for students in Newark and then in New Brunswick also. And I’ll tell you, like, we have these kids who come in who have no, who can’t tell you the difference between nursing and medicine and public health, but after a week they can. And it’s like you’re elevating. I’m totally with you here. I think that it’s all about developing. We can’t… like, right now, we’re in the middle of this. Like, “Oh, what are we going to do with AI?” Well, how do we use AI, right? AI could be beneficial to us, right? So, let’s not stay the status quo, because I think the status quo, ultimately, is going to be problematic for higher education. And we have a new group of students. We have students who are more diverse, who have different expectations, who have different ways of thinking. And if we think that we’re just going to do the same old things that we’ve been doing for 40 or 50 years, we’re totally missing it.

[00:34:34] Gil: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting you mentioned AI, because in a couple of weeks have an episode featuring Laura Magaña, who’s the president of ASPPH, and we’re going to be talking about AI and the impact on the workforce. And I think it’s going to be echoes of this conversation and the role that can play as a piece of this.

But you’re right, it goes beyond just, well, can AI solve all of our problems? And it’s more about, globally, how does technology generally better support people in these roles? But even beyond that, it’s educating ahead of that, right, and changing the narrative around the role in the industry. So…

[00:35:09] Perry: Yeah, I was going to say that I think that, as an educator, I want to harness the power of these innovations before it gets in the wrong hands, right? So, you know, 70 years ago, people were screaming, “Oh, TV is going to be the downfall of us.” But why didn’t we harness the power of television? Why didn’t we harness the power of, like, social media? We just sat back and complained.

I remember a colleague 20 years ago, 10 years ago, saying, “Oh, my God, Twitter’s going to teach… it’s going to ruin the way people are writing.” I’m like, “No, we just need to use Twitter to our advantage to teach people how to write.”

It’s like, I’m like… and my response to her at the time was, like, it’s not Jane Austen time anymore. We’re writing, like, five, five-page letters, right? It’s like… and that’s where higher ed needs to be, like, much more proactive and less reactive. And I think that’s exactly what you’re saying.

[00:35:56] Gil: So, do another… I love to do this on the podcast. Let’s talk about past guests so that our listeners go back and they find these episodes and then they end up in this crazy cycle of only listening to FYI and no other podcast. But Paul LeBlanc, who’s the retiring president from Southern New Hampshire University, he was on a couple weeks ago as well, or last season rather. And he had the same thought process on, well, we got, we messed up with social media, right? And we missed the boat and we handled it. And right now, it’s an advertising channel. And it’s a crazy conversation piece. The algorithms have it, completely unable to adapt. And we can’t make the same mistakes with the use of it, with, with the role of AI. Otherwise, we’re going to be in a far more challenging position, I think. Fortunately, we’ve got great minds and ideas around this. And I think we should, really, you know, continue these conversations as it helps us move in the right direction.

So, Perry, I thank you for your time and for being a part of this conversation. What are some of the best ways for people to get in touch with you if they want to continue the conversation with you?

[00:36:58] Perry: Yeah. And I love to hear from people. And I’m very good about, like, writing back and quickly and talking to people, because the more people are interested and engaged, the better we’re going to be. So, I would say a couple places that first. The first is my email, which is perry.halkitis, H-A-L-K-I-T-I-S at rutgers.edu. If you’re interested in learning more about me and the work that I’ve done, you can go to my website, which is perryandhelkitis.com. And that’ll direct you to all of my stuff, to, like, my X account, which, Twitter and my other things where you can see my postings. And look on Amazon for some of my cool books that I’ve written in the past, and look for the new one that’s going to be coming out hopefully in the next year and just reach out and talk to me.

I’m always looking for really interesting, innovative thinkers to, like, join the conversation at our school, in our discipline, and as students, as faculty. So, let’s have, let’s keep the conversation going and let’s keep pushing, right? Because we need to keep pushing the agenda forward.[00:37:54] Gil: Absolutely. And I thank you for your commitment. And I thank you for being a part of this conversation. And to our listeners, thank you for listening. And we will see you next time on FYI.

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