Yale’s Fall Term: Over Before It’s Over?

By Lee Bolman

So far, not so good, for universities around the US bringing students back to campus for the Fall, even with aggressive measures to try to minimize the spread of Covid-19.  A headline in Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education reads:  “Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream Is Crumbling.”  Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton are among the many schools that have reversed course even before students came back.  Yale expects to welcome almost 2000 undergraduates to campus today, but their stay may be shorter than planned.

Cautionary tales abound.  In a triumph of hope over expert advice, for example,  the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill brought the students back despite a plea from the local health department not to.  After a week of classes, the campus had accumulated 135 Covid-19 infections and had to tell the students, sorry, but it’s not working.   Think of how we’d have felt if Yale had told us to go home a week after we arrived for freshman year, and you’ll probably have a pretty good sense of the dark mood on that campus. Another example is Notre Dame, which at last word was up to more than 400 cases, even though it had mailed testing kits to students, and 99.7% tested negative.  The student newspaper has pleaded with the administration not to “make us write obituaries.”

So Laurie Santos’ warning to Silliman residents of life-or-death consequences is only slightly hyperbolic. A large group of students coming from many different places will almost assuredly bring some coronavirus infections with them.  The Covid-19 death rate in people aged 18-24 is very low, so there are likely to be few if any student deaths, but there will be some students who get very sick and find that recovery from infection is slow and difficult.  Meanwhile, some of the adults on campus and in the community are at greater risk.   Many employees, such as cafeteria and custodial staff, will need to come to work. Some of them will be frightened and will feel caught between their safety and their livelihood. Meanwhile, with all instruction online, faculty can stay safe by working from home and interacting with students only via phone or Zoom. (Other campuses where faculty are being required to return to the classroom are seeing demonstrations, class action lawsuits and strike votes.)

Parties, often off campus or in fraternities and sororities, have been blamed for much of virus spread on campuses, but there are also problems enforcing distancing measures.  A graduate student resident assistant at Cornell reported seeing a student who was supposed to be quarantining wandering in the dorm hallways on three different occasions. The first time, he reminded her to stay in her room.  By the third time, he gave up.  “Don’t do it” messages don’t work very well unless they’re paired with good alternatives, and campuses have struggled to invent attractive substitutes for the parties that undergraduates crave.

Yale has acknowledged that its health measures for the Fall will feel intrusive.  How long and how well will undergraduates conform to the university’s social distancing guidelines?  Will infections be few and manageable?  We’ll find out soon.

[The link to Lee’s earlier report on this topic is here.]

 
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