How Prayer and Science Prepared Palm Beach Atlantic’s New President for the Pandemic

Author - Umn ministry

October 05, 2021

After months of leading the school and holding Zoom calls with isolated students, Debra Schwinn will finally celebrate her inauguration.

At 5 p.m. every day, students in quarantine at Palm Beach Atlantic (PBA) University get a Zoom call.

The face that pops up on the screen is their school’s new president, Debra Schwinn, checking in on them.

The calls, which ran the entire 2020–2021 school year and have continued this fall, last about 20 minutes. Schwinn chats with the students about how they are doing, prays with them, and offers bits of motherly advice.

For Tom St. Antoine, the faculty representative on the committee that chose Schwinn to be the new leader of the university back in January 2020, it’s a perfect example of the personal approach she has taken since becoming president at the start of the pandemic.

“That just sends such a statement for the president to take time to build relationships and to get to know those students one by one,” he said.

Schwinn’s inauguration was delayed by COVID-19. The ceremony will be held on October 8, but she’s already spent more than a year and a half demonstrating her leadership in trying times at the Florida university with about 2,100 traditional undergraduates, 400 masters students, 350 professional students, and 200 adult students who take evening classes.

Schwinn was not planning to be a pandemic president, but when she thinks about how everything happened, she can’t help but see God’s hand in bringing her to the school: “I think God’s timing was perfect.”

The call to Palm Beach came before COVID-19 was even being talked about.

Schwinn was working as the associate vice president for medical affairs and professor of anesthesiology, pharmacology and biochemistry at the University of Iowa when she got the job offer. She and her husband, Bob, went to a ...