The University of North Carolina (UNC) wanted to have Fall 2020 look mostly like a normal fall semester with students on campus, kids in classes and the football team playing. Sure, there might be a few modifications as everyone would be encouraged to wear masks, and parties would be strongly discouraged, but things would look 85% normal-ish.
Undergraduates moved in about 10 days ago. Dorms were open and at nearly regular capacity. Everyone was finger-wagged on good behavior. There was no entry testing to establish a baseline of community infectivity nor isolate random individuals who were infected and potentially infectious before they could come in close contact with other, susceptible people.
Classes started last Monday. Everyone was asked to report symptoms (although by the time symptoms are differentiable from a hangover, there have been several days of plausible infectivity). Everyone was asked to be socially distanced and there were some huge parties and also the normal day to day interactions of campus and dorm life.
Reality hit on Monday:
Case count in the UNC community went from 11 for the week August 3-10, to 135 for the current week. Four major residential facility clusters had been announced since last Friday. The case count is likely to be low as this dashboard only reports individuals tested in the UNC health system. Individuals who got tested off-campus are not included. There are also likely to be many individuals who are currently non-symptomatic but either in the early part of their infectious period or entering their infectious period who have either not been tested, or are waiting for test results to be returned.
BREAKING: One week into the semester, UNC-Chapel Hill announces that it is transitioning all undergraduate classes to fully online instruction, effective Wednesday.
Story to come. Check this thread soon.
— The Daily Tar Heel (@dailytarheel) August 17, 2020
Last night, UNC decided to stop getting beat by a clue by four.
As long as we have broad, unconstrained community spread, we don’t get to go back to 85% of normal.
My big worry right now is are we creating a dispersed, super spreading event. I am assuming that there are a large number of individuals currently on UNC’s campus that are undiagnosed but infected. If they were infected over the weekend or late last week when the clusters were first being identified, they are entering peak infectious period just as many may be leaving Chapel Hill to return home.
There are few good options to manage this self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. Locking down all on-campus residential facilities for several days in order to do community wide screening testing is a possibility. That might allow for the safe return of dorm residents who have negative results while the university could isolate and quarantine any potentially positive individual for the serial period. However, it does nothing about the off-campus residents and the community spread risk that they pose. Some may stay, some may go. I think if Orange County and Chapel Hill go back to late March regulations, local spread may be contained, but again, state and national spread is likely as people disperse from campuses.
UNC is getting hit by a clue by four early. However it is not the only university that is convinced that it could resume operations at 85% of normal. Duke has students on campus. Duke has a far more aggressive testing plan but higher density residential situations for more students who live off-campus. Notre Dame is seeing high positivity rates of 11.5% of diagnostic (not general re-entry screening) testing since August 3. Positivity rates above 5% is a very strong indicator that a population is not testing anywhere near enough and targeted measures such as tracing and isolating potentially infected individuals are logistically challenging if not impossible.
UNC is the first major university to try to resume business as mostly normal and failing miserably. It will not be the last.
OzarkHillbilly
Fake news,these ivory towered liberal elites just hate trump.
Cheryl Rofer
To repeat my Twitter schtick, this is what exponential increase looks like
ant
Well I aint never seen no plants growin otta no toilet!
wvng
The fact that this is inevitable pretty much everywhere in America is quite depressing. It would be better if we had national leadership who could speak to this, but then if we had that kind of national leadership we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Mandarama
My oldest kiddo is supposed to return to his campus for first quarter at the end of September. I have no idea how things will go, but their policies are MUCH stricter than UNC’s. I’m shocked at the density and screening failures. What were they thinking?
Charluckles
This will be every university that brings students back to campus. College kids are going to do COLLEGE!
And honestly there is a part of me that can’t blame them. How much have we in the older generations asked from these young people already? And I know I was defiant and angry at society at that age.
Ken
“Anna, can I use ‘clusterf‐‐k’ in a headline?”
Google “unc tarheel newspaper” to get the printed page with the headline.
PeakVT
Priorities, people. An open Applebee’s salad bar is far more important to the future of the nation than the health of our children.
Soprano2
Our local state university leased a hotel that was mostly empty to quarantine their cases. I don’t know how it’s going to go; they have a strict mask policy on campus and have reduced numbers in the dorms. I’m not sure if they tested people before they came onto campus or not. Colleges really, really need that cheap saliva test.
ant
May as well just toss the whole bunch in the pile with the incarcerated, the meat packers, and the undocumented immigrant workers.
The teachers can talk to prison guards for needed sympathy.
The only way it could possibly work is by testing everyone Trump White House style, and then isolating the positives.
I told my people to slow the testing down.
Percysowner
OSU is in the process of reopening. An employee says they are having 2 people per dorm room and lots of finger wagging. We are all expecting an explosion of cases here in Columbus in the next week or two.
JML
My university has reopened, and students return next week. (Faculty are back this week; staff were back 2 weeks ago). I would say we are trying to reopen at something more like 40-50% of “normal”? Maybe less? I dunno how to evaluate it, I guess.
We have far more classes being conducted online or with a hybrid model. Residential students are all in single rooms (the one good thing about the decline of students in the dorms and an enrollment decline). We have a mask policy in all public spaces. They’ve reset areas to get better spacing in common areas. More front-facing desk/support areas have plexiglass shielding (still finishing that one, sigh). We have a screening tool that everyone is supposed to complete every day they come to campus.
But no one knows how well it’s actually going to work. And we don’t have capacity to test everyone to establish that baseline.
I’m back in the office 2 days a week; remote the other three. But I’m at the Foundation and we don’t interact with the student population the same way.
Eric U.
Well, at least Columbus is big enough that it’s going to dilute the effects a little. Penn State UP is in a town that is going to be twice as big next week as it was last week. A university spokesperson said the faculty group that tried to guide the university to a reasonable response “didn’t want any campuses to open.” I think that’s a tell, because the group wanted more testing. They have some dorms set aside for quarantine. No word about what is going to happen to the infected when the university shuts down in 2 weeks.
I think the way covid is spreading on some campuses, the students have taken to licking each other’s eyeballs as a greeting.
Amir Khalid
@Cheryl Rofer:
I’m impressed. In the seven days up to today, my entire country reported 116 cases. ETA: And that was not a good week by our recent standard.
JMS
Our daughter is returning to Pitt on Monday, although other students started moving in last week. Classes start (online) this week. She is living in a dorm with one roommate and they have a private bathroom. The policy is that they must shelter in place at home for a week and then shelter in place for a week in the dorm. There was an outbreak in Pittsburgh generally over the summer but things are now back in line with most of the rest of the state. Surveillance testing of random students has picked up 2 cases for a .44% positive rate, but that’s just for 2 days.
Pitt is better off than some with a lot of in state students and a not out of control prevalence in the state, as well as good medical and testing facilities. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if we are summoned back sooner rather than later . My daughter is really regretting not getting off campus housing.
The Thin Black Duke
And when the inevitable outbreaks happen, everybody will be shocked.
David Anderson
@Mandarama: A reactionary Board of Governors took away local control from the system campuses chancellors is the shortest story.
Eric U.
@JMS: My wife talked to a student yesterday that was really happy with her new room. Fortunately not a dorm room, but an apartment downtown. I told my wife about my newly adopted motto, “don’t borrow trouble,” which in this case means don’t tell students they aren’t going to be going to in-person classes for very long.
This student’s classes are all online anyway. Which leads me to wonder why they are in State College instead of whatever place their parents live. Yes, I’m selfishly thinking bringing students into our community is asking for trouble.
Cheryl Rofer
@Amir Khalid: What we are willing to tolerate is horrendous compared to the rest of the world. But we also tolerate hundreds of kids getting gunned down in schools.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ken:That gets me one result:
How’s about a link?
Bobby Thomson
The cynic in me says they just wanted to steal room and board charges.
Bobby Thomson
@Eric U.: they are in State College because administrators wanted the room and board money to cover overhead and local businesses needed head count for obvious reasons.
Eric U.
@Bobby Thomson: I think most universities are promising refunds if they kick everyone out of the dorms. My thought is that they figure students will finish out the semester even if all their classes go online. Many students would have skipped this semester if they knew all their classes were online. This is true of a niece of mine.
Haroldo
@OzarkHillbilly:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Efn2Rs-WoAc1860?format=jpg&name=small
Here is an image of the UNC student paper’s front page (if that’s what you are searching for).
Eric U.
@OzarkHillbilly: not sure I can sucessfully post a link https://twitter.com/paigemasten/status/1295361024846180352
AM in NC
As a retail business owner here in Chapel Hill/Carrboro (and a UNC alum) I am seriously pissed off. This was not only predictable, our county health department did predict it and recommended UNC not reopen for in-person learning. Orange county COVID numbers were very low and declining before UNC started back up. And now, as you point out, we are the epicenter for super spreading. Our GOP-appointed Board of Governors forced all UNC-System campuses to open for in-person learning, and now “it is what it is”. I have employees dealing with customers every day who are being put at risk because of this. I have numerous friends who are doctors who are being put at risk because of this. I want to stab things. Or maybe just force every member of the BOG to live in an on campus dorm for the next month.
Barbara
It’s like a very large number of us simply can’t believe in consequences, that this stuff is happening to us. That somehow we were destined to be granted good things, not that those things require if they are not actually the result of a functioning civil society. Take away public health, and you are left with high wire amazing one off interventions right alongside a raging epidemic that shatters your normal.
I lived in Chapel Hill for a year. The first night that students were back in the late summer of the year I moved there, I was walking down the main street (Franklin St.) back to my apartment when a little girl (I mean, I was 23 and she seemed like she was 10) asked me politely for directions (lost freshmen). As I was telling her which way to walk, her very drunk boyfriend began vomiting onto the sidewalk, luckily away from us — looked up and belligerently asked me what I was looking at. I walked away. The people who run the school have been there a long time, sometimes for decades. They know what it’s like. It is not conducive to controlling an epidemic.
ETA: And as much as I dislike ganging up on athletes, so much of this charade is triggered by the boosterism of donors who are adamant about having a football season. I mean, if you know anything about football you know that UNC is not a powerhouse. Doesn’t seem to matter to anyone. So the school has to PROVE why it’s not possible by sacrificing a few more souls to the virus, not to mention disrupting hundreds if not thousands of peoples’ lives. I don’t think I am ever going to watch a college level athletic event again.
RobertB
@Percysowner: My daughter is going to UC, and will be moving in next week. Fairly terrifying.
David Anderson
@AM in NC: At some point, we need to get together for a drink of our choice and collective voodoo doll pinning torture session.
AM in NC
And one more point. I’ve seen efforts to blame the students for their irresponsible behavior off campus, which, of course, is true: many of the 18-21 year old college students were acting irresponsibly, i.e. acting like 18-21 year olds throughout human history. I mean, in all honesty, could I have spent an entire college semester not seeing friends or doing the basic social things college students do? Of course not. It was up the the adults in charge of decision-making to take reality and actual human behavior into account when making real-world decisions, and they failed. And now they want to blame the kids for their failure.
AM in NC
@David Anderson: Name the time and place. I’m originally from New Orleans, so I am down with the voodoo.
Eric U.
@Barbara: the boosters are crazy, I’m a little surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a big outcry that Penn State’s president voted to suspend the football season.
I had the misfortune of riding my bike through Shippensburg last year the Saturday night before the first day of classes. It was a madhouse. I see no reason why it’s not going to be a madhouse again this year. At least in State College, the bars are open, albeit with reduced capacity.
OzarkHillbilly
@Haroldo: @Eric U.: Thanx guys, both worked.
David Anderson
@AM in NC: Let’s get a coffee and a walk along Bolin Creek trail sooner rather than later.
I am pissed at the the UNC BOG — they have a world class research institution with deep expertise in public health and all the experts were going NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
And you don’t want to see my wife as she is even more pissed as we started our first day of online elementary school yesterday and she is just asking “Why the fuck are we forced to do this, the best of truly shitty options when the rest of the world doesn’t have to do this….” repeatedly.
cmorenc
If you want to see the real trauma inflicted on UNC-Chapel Hill, just wait until they end up forced to announce cancellation of the sacred men’s basketball season. The Rams club members (who pay big bucks for their memberships and season tickets – trust me, I used to be one of them) will have a major case of the vapors over that, get the fainting couches ready all across the Tar Heel state…
Barbara
@cmorenc: Oh yes, I am sure they will be willing to sacrifice untold numbers of student athletes for their own pleasure. Fucking nuts.
AM in NC
@David Anderson: I’m just glad that our school board had the good sense to choose the remote-learning option for at least the first semester for k-12 students. And yes, you’d think having a world-class school of Public Health where everyone was saying “DANGER,DANGER DOES NOT COMPUTE” would have made a difference. The only thing that will make a difference will be sweeping the GOP from the NCGA.
And I’d love to do a Bolin Creek walk soon. Email me and let’s set a time!
Barbara
@Eric U.: I have this vision of people for whom college really was the highlight of their emotional lives. I actually do understand this — it wasn’t for me, and I now realize what a good thing that turned out to be. My nostalgia for Charlottesville lasted about two days. Not that I had an easy transition, it’s just that I wasn’t the kind of person that college life revolved around and I knew life would be worse if I couldn’t leave it behind in toto.
PenAndKey
My wife and I are both working and we have a 5th grader at home. He’s going to be responsible for himself alone at home for about 3 hours a day and I fully expect to need to give him a sit-down lecture on “do you want to fail the fifth grade because you’d rather play video games?” talk at least once. La Crosse County in Wisconsin has a fairly well put together virtual school that anyone in the districts in the area could sign up for so we’re crossing our fingers it doesn’t completely suck. The in-person schools? They’re going to be virtual for a month and then go full physical, as if that’ll be time to be better…
We also have two universities and a tech college in the namesake town 15 minutes from my little slice of suburbia and the whole place is about to be a hot zone. Anyone who thinks their kids will get to have in-person classes this year is fooling themselves.
I was a non-traditional student that started classes at 28 after already being married, in the workforce for a decade, and having a kid so my memories of college are of scheduling stress, being better friends with the staff and professors than my “peers”, and rolling my eyes at all the on-campus idiocy. When you experience college from anything other perspective beyond the “18-21 year old finally away from Mom and Dad” perspective most of the things they consider the “college experience”… aren’t. Thinking college is the best part of their emotional lives is barely a step up from thinking Homecoming is the most important night of their life, or that their HS football stats matter.
Jamey
Silver lining: Duke and Notre Dame in the mix ought to make fans of basketball, football–and critics of administrative laxity re: sexual assault perpetrated by major revenue sport participant–kinda happy.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: Yeah, but how many NCAA basketball championships has your country won? Huh?
Ken
@OzarkHillbilly: Sorry, should have been “unc tar heel newspaper”, tarheel is not one word.
UNC editorial
Press Club Institute with newspaper image
The UNC paper also has an article explaining why they will no longer be using that phrase:
mrmoshpotato
@Gin & Tonic:
@Amir Khalid: Not so much “check and mate” as “slam and dunk.”
(And “we are” and “so fucked”)
Red Cedar
Selfishly, I was actually relieved to read that UNC’s reopening plan was such a pathetic mush of denial and refusal to even try to stop the virus. I am currently almost home from driving cross-country to drop my son off at Fordham University in NYC, and when I saw that UNC had closed I was picturing doing this nightmare drive all over again next week. Fordham hasn’t even opened yet, but we had to get the boy out there for a 14-day quarantine before he’s even allowed on campus. Once on campus, they’re requiring all students to do a daily health check-in online—they need a new QR code daily to access anything on-campus, apparently, and there will be testing and tracing etc etc. We’ll see. It’s New York. I keep thinking that if any schools make it through the semester, it will be in NY, since they have a damn clue and are really serious about not going back to April.
Barbara
@Ken: I would put it in quotes, but I lived there and went to two other ACC schools and I still feel like it’s unfair to be too judgmental about the concept. Most of the athletes really are students first, and those who aren’t are sometimes forced to be there. It’s really not fair, in fact, it’s outrageous.
Mel
@Eric U.: That eyeball licking image gave me a much needed gallows humor laugh.
You are so correct, though. There just is no truly effective way to “socially distance” unsupervised (or even loosely supervised) large groups of kids and young adults. Most teachers and counselors know this, and are terrified for their students, for themselves, and for everyone’s families. Many parents understand this, and are worried sick as well. But money and political pressure override humanity and common sense when it comes to administrative level decisions.
Some of the problem comes down to simple structural and density issues. Shared rooms, bathrooms, elevators, dining halls, snack machines, water fountains, laundry facilities, large-scale, interconnected ventilation systems (many of them past their prime), classrooms and dorm rooms which might have “safety windows” which do not open fully, and a large on campus population do not equal effective distancing nor the ability to effectively disinfect / sanitize.
Some of the issues are due to the age group, as well. Mix close quarters and hormones with young adults’ youthful sense that they are indestructible, toss in the fact that they might have been having to isolate while under their families’ jurisdiction and are itching for “fun”, add alcohol and the thrill of parties not just being parties, but also now being !!!forbidden!!!, and, well, the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan.
Sadly, though, it isn’t just the kids that are the problem. I’m in a state with a recently instated in-school mask requirement. Friends who are still teaching at the high school and college levels are reporting that some support staff, volunteers, visiting parents, and a few faculty are refusing to wear their masks over their noses, or instead are wearing those useless, ridiculous “chin shields” that do nothing but direct the wearer’s breath and droplets right up into the air and into the nostrils and eyes of anyone standing or sitting nearby.
Way to keep colleagues and kids safe. Way to set an example and set a standard for students.
It’s a bad situation now, and promises to get worse quickly as cooler weather drives people indoors, and flu season complicates things.
I feel heartbroken for parents struggling to afford/ find childcare so that they can keep their younger kids safely home and still be able to work. I know what it feels like to be financially and physically on the edge and wondering if you’re going to have the bare basics a month, a week, a day in the future, and I wish that no person ever had to endure that, much less with the nightmare of coronavirus thrown into the mix. I know that shutdowns are exceptionally difficult and scary for families whose kids rely on in-school services for assistance due to disabilities. But these are problems that are not the fault of teachers and school staffers. These are systemic problems that most teachers ring the alarm bells about their entire careers. Should school employees have to pay with their lives?
We really need to ask out loud and repeatedly when the subject of school openings comes up: why is the life, the actual life, of a teacher or food service staffer or school janitor or counselor or a parent with a health condition worth less than the in-school lifestyle of a student? Why is it assumed that a teacher’s or support staffer’s child losing their parent to a frightening, lonely death has less impact on that person’s child than being schooled online for a semester or two will have on a student? When you think about it that way, what is being demanded of school employees is even more clearly ridiculous.
The only sure way to prevent the inevitable school-related community spread is to do online schooling. It’s glitchy, it requires lots of bandaids and temporary fixes, and it is absolutely not ideal. But it’s temporary, and it’s sure as hell better than widespread death and potential long-term disability for a generation of students and a generation of educators and parents.
Frankensteinbeck
The whole school mess surprises me not at all. One major component of conservative, and especially evangelical philosophy is that children are property. In particular, a child’s primary value is fulfilling their parent’s ideal, with value as a person being a distant second. This is a major tenet of evangelical faith, something they are frothingly passionate about. The evangelicals launched a PR war in the 80s to have this be the accepted definition of good parenting, and largely succeeded. It took an entire generation for that to start changing.
Now, people are not monolithic, but ‘after considerable struggle, my child’s happiness is barely more valuable to me than their being what I want them to be’ is considered an unusually good result when queer children come out to their parents. When you apply wishful ‘but it won’t happen to my child’ thinking and egging on from authority figures, they will fight to make sure children die for an abstract cause like More Guns. Throw onto that conservative leaders are the most insulated personal loss in any conflict between value of children and philosophy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Barbara
@Frankensteinbeck: I am more pragmatic. I am simply pissed that an overabundance of wishful thinking has largely prevented institutions like UNC from being as effective as they can be, both in teaching and in doing their part to combat a public health catastrophe. No matter what our IQ, our accomplishments or anything else, when we follow or allow ourselves to be guided by stupid people we make ourselves stupid.
Eric U.
@Mel: The thing is we’re going to kill a lot of staffers/teachers and still not have school for very long. Schools couldn’t get subs before this, why would you go into a classroom for less than $100 a day and risk your life. And the risk would be obvious, because they already sickened the teacher that you are replacing
Penn State made all the profs name a successor instructor in the event they became ill.
Roger Moore
@Eric U.:
Even if the bars weren’t open, the liquor stores would be, which would be enough.
Mandarama
@David Anderson: Of course, the BOG. I should’ve thought of that. People who actually do the work at universities tend to feel differently.
Just One More Canuck
@David Anderson: my daughter is starting grade 10 and is eyeing universities (she’s a competitive soccer player and is great academically) – she’s been looking closely at UNC as a target so I read yours and Am in NC’ s comments with great interest. What’s happening there is so stupid yet so predictable. she is such a wonderful kid and I hope she gets to live out her dream (and I would buy both of you a beverage of your choice when the time comes).
Mandarama
@Red Cedar: I am hoping for a similar situation to yours. Chicago is also taking this very seriously: cut density by 50%, dining by 75%, masking, code access to buildings only, tracing app, constant testing, quarantine on arrival. And in fact, since we are from one of the shithole states in the South, my kid has to quarantine longer and we have to fill out all kinds of stuff to be able to move him in. I know kids will be kids, but at least mine is very serious: he has said no public transit, no drinking for him. I think a whole quarter online from his childhood bedroom scared him into being willing to do whatever it takes to get to return to Illinois!
Mel
@Eric U.: Absolutely true. A private school where I used to work usually doesn’t hire subs – instead, it has other teachers cover the ill teachers’ classes that coincide with the healthy teachers’ free bells / planning periods.
Can you imagine? Your colleague tests positive for coronavirus, and now you have to teach their class, interact with the exposed and potentially infected students, and attempt to sanitize the room / desks / books/ tech before use, with only the minimal PPE that you can find and afford as protection?
Good times.
Martin
I think the ongong problem at unis is going to be the migration between classes. UNC didn’t do remotely enough, but even if you really go to town on the dorms and communal dining, and instill the right attitude with students regarding social distancing outside of class (clearly the hardest part of this) then you’re still forcing students to sit in confined, indoor spaces, and then after an hour getting up and mixing into another group of students in a confined, indoor space for another hour.
If you were willing to accept some infection (because it’s basically unavoidable in the US), you’ve guaranteed exponential growth even with all of your other measures, because you never addressed the intersection of students in class – something that the university has enormous control over, but never uses.
JMS
@Red Cedar: It also seems to me with K-12 schools that the schools in areas with highest prevalence take the fewest precautions while schools in low prevalence areas are extra careful. Prevalence is a thing. Personally I’m not an abstinence-only type person, but I’m all for properly deployed barriers, so to speak. I expect it’s less likely that schools taking a lot of precautions in low prevalence areas will have major outbreaks.
David Anderson
@Just One More Canuck: If she is recruited by UNC, and takes a campus visit, hit me up if there is anything I can do to help facilitate a good visit for her.
David Anderson
@Just One More Canuck: If she is recruited by UNC, and takes a campus visit, hit me up if there is anything I can do to help facilitate a good visit for her.
Barbara
@Just One More Canuck: Allow me to make my plea that an academically gifted kid just shouldn’t bother with Div I athletics. Seen it with my niece and nephew. I am sure they would not have changed their college experience, but they didn’t do as well as they could have academically (admitted to by all) and definitely limited their social experience to a very large degree to hobnobbing with other athletes.
Martin
@AM in NC: I’m going to push against this.
It is not a fait accompli that young people will behave irresponsibly. They are not that different at 19 than they are at 22 when they become your nurse. What’s different is the context and the signaling from the institution, something which institutions can control.
My institution is more academically oriented. We signal that very strongly. As a result, there’s very little problem with student drinking here. Now theres self-selection in that, but we’ve also seen that we can fairly well control student behavior even on a small scale. There are programs on campus that have really invested hard in bringing undergrads into the professional fold, and they respond to that. There are tangible benefits to good behavior, and missed opportunities from bad behavior. And that even causes some chafing across the campus as more free-wheeling student populations run up against increasingly career minded populations. And that shift has had a measurable impact on the need for student discipline. In short, by treating them more as adults, they act more like adults, but that’s a function of how the administration works. The administration needs to make that cultural shift. They need to be overt about that shift that covid changes the context – college can’t be what we wanted it to be a year ago. It needs to be this other thing, or else they all go home and back on Zoom. It’s not easy, it’s hard work, it requires discipline and strategy from the administration and an understanding of how to influence collective behavior, but it’s very possible.
And part of it does involve removing those temptations if only as a signaling device, and more actively intervening where you know they will struggle – not punishing, but guiding. The message becomes, we want you here, you want to be here, but the following things must happen because we pull the plug when we get to x. If you don’t communicate with them, they’ll infer their own rules. They’ll convince themselves that the university won’t close after they worked so hard to reopen, and you need to make clear that’s not true. Give them the number – x new infections in a week and we close everything. They’ll start to create their own pressure internally once they know that.
The problem I see is that we treat these young adults like children and then complain that they acted like children. Well, no shit.
For a school with a party reputation, making that shift this quickly might be too much of a lift, but for schools where that isn’t the case, I believe campus leadership could make it work – but they have to try, and everyone needs to be on board. From what I’ve seen every campus is mostly still adrift, with poor internal communication and if there is a strategy most of the staff are unaware of it or uncertain of their role within it.
Barbara
@Martin: Daughter #2’s school closed fraternity houses before the semester began. No group living arrangements. And, of course, those houses are the epicenter of what little “party culture” exists on this particular campus, so that’s out as well. So yeah, it can be done, but that would require the university to show a single minded purpose in promoting academic life that includes tamping down on the things that are going to make it difficult to carry on with this year.
Ken
I think the cause-and-effect runs the other way. Being extra careful is why the area has low prevalence.
Martin
@Barbara: I think that requires a bit of qualification. If we’re talking about women’s soccer, that gets relatively little status on almost any campus, even in Div I.
What I think is the more common dynamic is that Div I schools tend to be larger, higher achieving schools overall, and as a result, students get caught between the athletic pressure of Div I from coaches and other players (who will have eyes on USNWT and such) and the difficulty of larger, higher achieving schools to accommodate student athletes. Schools with small class sizes work much better – so Stanford as a Div I school is a pretty good academic experience even for athletes, compared to UCLA which is not a good experience. And that’s even before we get into sports and campuses that run their students through bullshit academics [cough]SEC[/cough].
So, I’d argue Div I at a smaller private would be very good, but I don’t know any large Div I that gives students a particularly good experience, even my campus which is VERY academically focused. Simply put, there aren’t enough student athletes for the administration of academics to make it work well. Our intention is good, but the student athletes mostly get lost in the academic shuffle because our faculty just can’t give the kind of direct student attention that they need. We’re too big and too efficiency motivated, so outliers suffer. If we could bundle the student athletes up a bit, that would help, but every sport is doing its own thing and we can’t build any meaningful structure around that.
The Div I CSUs being non-research universities might do a decent job – I certainly wouldn’t assume they can’t, but from an administration perspective I don’t believe it’s possible to mix research ambitions, athletics ambitions, and academic ambitions in a large university and not sacrifice at least one of them, and research universities make so much money off of research relative to athletics that it’s usually academics that loses out for undergrads, and athletics for grads.
Martin
@Ken: 100% correct.
Barbara
@Martin: They went to Stanford and Yale. Yeah, they are totes okay — I mean, a degree from one of those schools is worth a lot no matter what. But they changed their post-graduate plans as a result of not having done well enough to get into graduate programs of their choice. Stanford throws incredible resources at athletes, e.g., tutors — which throws you together for a lot of your free time with other athletes. I just put it out there because I think the downsides of athletic scholarships don’t get weighed enough in the balance. Were it me, I would go to the school I wanted to go to academically and then figure out if athletics is in the cards.
Martin
Absolutely. But the only thing I hear from other universities is the impact of this on their budget. But it’s extraordinarily rare for a university to correlate student behavior with budget. We do very slightly, but that’s mostly a byproduct of other things. The UCs are weird in that in theory we’re 10 equal campuses (don’t tell Berkeley or UCLA that) – none of us are satellites. But we’re also encouraged to be distinctive of each other, so that students find a good fit – so we have party campuses and sports campuses and academic campuses, urban and rural and suburban campuses, etc. We are the academic equivalent of Hondas car lineup – something for everyone.
So we have always been more sensitive to maintaining our academic campus role. We deliberately avoided having a football team in part for that reason (the other reason is we did the math and unless you’re Div I in a top conference, you will lose money like Uber trying to run a football team, and there was no chance we’d be able to break those monopolies). So we have been trying to make the case that our budget is wildly dependent on student behavior, and if we can channel that and turn the students into institutional partners (as they always should have been) then we have an instrument to help address the budget.
Conceptually that’s gotten through, but organizationally we just aren’t there yet. The other problem for large universities is that we’ve spent decades decentralizing, providing academic units more flexibility and control, and suddenly we need to pull all of that back in a big way, and our infrastructure simply wasn’t up to that task. As it happens, we wouldn’t have reopened in fall anyway.
So I think we have agreement on what needs to happen, we’ve simply fallen short in execution. FWIW, a national response would have suffered similar problems. When you delegate infrastructure, you lose the ability to act as one, even if you have agreement to do so.
Kent
I’m pretty sure they will happily deliver kegs.
mvr
I’m afraid this is my future. We opened this week with students arriving and taking virtual classes this week with in person classes starting next week. The decision to have on-campus instruction was made in May, and if testing and such were in place it would have made sense. They are in fact offering free on-demand testing 5 days a week, but there is no random testing or initial testing when students show up. The University has a good mask policy on campus requiring them indoors and outdoors when not distanced. (Though no one will tell me what the rules are about Frats and Sororities which rely on being approved by the University so we could have put restrictions on them.) But the dorms are only somewhat depopulated from a normal year and I am not comforted by the beds being 6 feet apart. And when I drive by certain parts of campus I see large, closely spaced, single-gender groups walking down the sidewalk without masks.
A large number of my colleagues are still teaching remotely, for good reason. For one thing, with the rooms modified for social distancing, most of us can’t get even half of our students in the room at once. Because it seems like a bait and switch not to have in-person classes when the University has told students there will be significant on-campus components to their classes, I decided to meet my smaller class in a really big lecture room, and a discussion section of my large class in an even bigger room so that they do have some in-person instruction. I also figured that masked and distanced classes were not the most likely places for the virus to spread. But that was before I found out that the university will not be telling us when our students test positive (because with the chairs distanced it doesn’t count as close contact) and before the prominence of aerosols in the discussion of how spread happens. And they won’t be reporting out on-campus positivity rates. I was counting on knowing the rates so that I could decide for myself whether it is unsafe for us to continue in-person. So I’m hoping that I don’t catch anything in the weeks before things go sideways and they pull the plug. I’m also hoping that I’m wrong about my future.
J R in WV
@Ken:
OK, now I’m really curious — what phrase will they be using to describe college athletes who are also students going forward?
I personally think unions for athletes who produce major profits are a good thing, and that for the NCAA to form a combine to limit wages paid to their athlete employees to zero is probably a violation of the intent of anti-trust laws.
I enjoy college football on TV, but think the waterfall of monies related to the broadcast of those games needs to fall into the pockets of the people doing the work on the field/court, etc.
Haddock Branzini
I’ve been a bit of a lurker and haven’t commented, but this whole college reopening thing is blowing mind and I am choking on my own rage. I am in greater Boston and we are expecting 150K students to arrive in September. This is despite the fact that 75%+ classes are online. Already we are back to waiting in line to get groceries and there have been massive house parties on my block the last two weekends. You can’t take your dogs to a park because there are maskless throngs playing frisbee and setting up hammocks (when did that become a thing?).
Its getting hardly any press at all. Even when college administrators refuse to answer questions from city counselors. Even when the “mandatory” testing is not going to be enforced.
Everyone makes a big deal about the idiotic Trumptards and their sacred right not to wear masks. But what I see every.single.day are not moronic MAGAts, but large crowds of 20-somethings in large lines, mostly maskless, waiting to get into any establishment that serves booze.
The numbers in Boston are going to explode. And it won’t be the fault of Trump for opening the residence halls.
Martin
@Barbara: Ok, yeah, I would have expected those two to get it as right as possible.
Just One More Canuck
@Barbara: thanks for the food for thought – she’s both academically and athletically gifted and she wants to see what she can get out of soccer. Your points are well taken though, and fortunately we are still a ways away from having to make a decision. Hopefully things will return to a state where it becomes a choice between a D1 school like UNC, a smaller school or staying in Canada
Just One More Canuck
@David Anderson: thanks – if in a couple of years you see an old schlubby looking guy showing up with a tall blue eyed blonde kid and a highly protective mother with a lot of questions, that will be us
LongHairedWeirdo
Here’s a quick question, in case anyone knows the answer off the top of their head. (I hate to ask people to “do my homework” but this is one I think you’ll agree would be hard to research using Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo.)
I understand that a 5% positivity rate can be a danger sign, but to me (mathematician with interest in prob&stat) , I feel there has to be a caveat. For example, if you test at doctor’s offices, and hospitals, but then introduce drive-through testing, it wouldn’t surprise me if the positivity rate went up, because you’ve changed the strategy.
You see what I’m saying? If you had 3% positive, but only for people who were concerned enough to be tested (or even “everyone who visited the doctor for any reason” – like a flu shot, the doctors offices might ask everyone to be tested). If you then say “hey, you don’t have to go to the doctor, you don’t even have to leave your car; you just have to be worried, *or* interested, enough to grab a quick check. If the positivity rate shot up to 7.5%, but then started to drop, I wouldn’t see that as a warning sign per se, but simply one of many results that you could reasonably expect when you change strategies.
(Kind of like your favorite football teams’ “rebuilding year”. I didn’t know much about that concept until I heard someone cheerfully bragging about the Eagles, who weren’t doing very well, and explaining “yeah, but this is a rebuilding year.” For a Philadelphia fan to be glowing like that, I guess a rebuilding year must be a thing, and not just an excuse for ignoring poor playing :-) I’m a Washington transplant, born and raised in Philly, and perhaps the worst (sportsball) nightmare for me is a bunch of friends wanting me to watch the Seahawks vs the Eagles.)
Where was I? Right: when you make changes, statistics will change, so you have to wait until things shake out. Like, drive-through testing might be crowded the first few weeks, because everyone who’s worried will wait a long time for testing, while those who are only curious will decide it’s not worth it; after those weeks, when the lines are shorter, *then* I’d expect a healthy populace to start showing much better (lower) positive-percentage.
I’d be prudent to the point of moderates complaining, when it came to releasing restrictions, but it strikes me that if every other number is good, and positive-percentage is bad, *but* you’ve just expanded testing availability, it’s okay to hold steady where you are, and give at least a few days to see if the percentage stabilizes and starts to drop (and to react strongly if the other numbers start to move).
That’s a mathematician’s insight – anyone know if it’s maybe-right or known to be totally wrong?
Barbara
@Martin: It probably made a difference that they were both studying sciences, and it’s just harder to really excel when you have to devote upwards of 25 hours a week to something else. And if you are at an elite school, the competition is already fierce. One of my cousins abandoned a full athletic scholarship after one semester because he knew he wanted to go to medical school, and he just didn’t see it if he had to play sports. I mean, these two are totally fine, I just wonder at the “what ifs” for them.
AM in NC
@Just One More Canuck: If you have any questions about the school or about town life, I’m happy to talk with you or your daughter – either virtually or if y’all make a visit here.
Chbnna
@AM in NC: This. Exactly this. All the “adults” in our government and in positions of power are failing us. There are no easy answers but I can see they continue to make the wrong ones.
Just One More Canuck
@AM in NC: tank you and than you JC for creating such a great place
Feathers
@J R in WV: Side note to a dead(ish) thread. The student athlete came about to allow American athletes to support themselves while maintaining amateur status for Olympic and other international competitions. Previous to this the level of competition which is currently collegiate was sponsored by local companies. A company hired someone, paid them a salary, but their work was to train for and compete on the company’s baseball, football, track, etc. team. However, this system left many of America’s best athletes at risk of losing their Olympic eligibility. So, what the American Olympic committee came up with was a system where colleges and universities offered scholarships to “amateur” athletes, with the NCAA enforcing the strict amateur rules. Of course, the Olympics have now gone professional, but the US is stuck with a college athletic system that seriously hampers our universities’ education mission and erodes every aspect of the high school experience. There was a story about a poor high school in Texas that ditched athletics (and boosted non-competitive exercise for everyone) and ended up with violence plummeting, academics going way up and everyone far happier.
Info on corporate to collegiate athletic funding came from a Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, that I read for a class, which convinced me we need to return athletic sponsorship to local communities (with a separate budget from the schools) and corporations.