This fall, if a Vanderbilt University student walks around campus without a mask, a “public-health ambassador” might stop the student, remind them that the institution requires face coverings, and hand over a packet stocked with a mask, gloves, and hand sanitizer.
Vanderbilt’s ambassador program, which debuted last month, is part of the university’s plan for ensuring — or, at least, encouraging — compliance with public-health guidelines designed to ease the spread of Covid-19. The first group of ambassadors are campus public-safety employees who have received special training. University officials say they soon hope to train “other members of our community.”
This fall, ambassadors will encourage mask-wearing — the university is requiring them in all public spaces, including outdoors — and attempt to ease congestion at building entrances and exits. They’ll answer people’s questions and direct them to the nearest hand-sanitizing station. If there are any government-ordered restrictions on, for instance, sizes of gatherings, they’ll assist with that, too, according to the university.
A Vanderbilt spokesman declined to provide additional information about whether or how the public-health ambassadors would enforce any of these measures, or who else might serve. Their goal, he said, is “promoting and encouraging social norms that are to be expected of our community with regard to health and safety.”
I really wish I could tell you that I have faith in students to comply with all of these rules. But I don’t.
To return to learning in person this fall as the pandemic rages on, many colleges will require or recommend face coverings, physical-distancing, limited gathering sizes, and travel restrictions. But how will they get their students to follow the rules?
Colleges already struggle to get students to abide by health and safety policies, particularly those governing alcohol and drug use. The Covid-19 restrictions at many institutions — which will upend most typical aspects of student life — will be even more stringent and challenging to enforce.
Compliance is “the true wild card upon returning to campus in large numbers,” wrote Jean Chin, former executive director of the University of Georgia’s health center and chair of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 task force, in an email.
The public-health risks are immense. On college campuses, designed to encourage social interactions, students could easily spread the virus to one another and beyond. While most traditional-age students aren’t at serious risk of developing complications if they contract Covid-19, many faculty and staff members are.
Some colleges are adding language to their student-conduct codes about Covid-19 and outlining consequences for violations. Others plan to invoke existing policies, like “failure to comply with a university directive.” Punishments could be required trainings or workshops, or, for repeat offenders, removal from campus housing.
At the same time, colleges are crafting “pledges” and “compacts” for students to sign. They’re empowering student committees to come up with plans for getting their peers to buy in to the rules. They’re creating student-ambassador programs to model good behavior.
Campus officials acknowledge the limitations of such measures. They can’t control what students do off campus. Meanwhile, skepticism is widespread. Faculty members, researchers who study student behavior, and even some students question administrators’ optimism about whether 18- to 22-year-olds, a group known for risk-taking, will do as they’re told.
“These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty, and staff,” wrote Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University, in an op-ed in The New York Times.
Interventions designed to encourage young people to avoid risky behaviors, he wrote, “have an underwhelming track record.”
Expecting compliance with student pledges and compacts sounds naïve, Steinberg wrote in an email. “There have been a few studies of ‘virginity pledges’ by high-school students, and they don’t work,” he said. “In fact, many kids who make these pledges not only have sex, but are more likely to have unsafe sex. So these pledges may backfire.”
“I really wish I could tell you that I have faith in students to comply with all of these rules,” said Nicholas Batman, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But I don’t.”
Up to Code
Student-conduct codes are the bedrock of campus behavioral expectations. Largely enforced by students and faculty members, they are the basis for adjudicating allegations of plagiarism, cheating, underage drinking, and sexual misconduct. The documents also cover things like disrupting classroom environments or failing to comply with campus directives.
Wayne State University, a public institution in Michigan, is among the campuses that’s proposing to revise its student-conduct code with language about face coverings and social-distancing.
If the university’s board signs off on the changes during a meeting on Friday, failure to comply with Covid-19 policies would join the university’s list of prohibited conduct.
The proposed requirements include completing a daily self-screening for symptoms before coming to campus; following campus-health-center directions when sick; wearing a face covering in public spaces; maintaining six feet of distance from others; and complying with signage in hallways, elevators, and stairwells.
University officials proposed modifying the code because they wanted to be specific about what’s acceptable, said David Strauss, dean of students. Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been widely distributed and the threat of the virus has disappeared, any added provisions can be removed, he said.
Other institutions, like Purdue University and Texas A&M University at College Station, plan to use existing conduct policies to handle Covid-19 issues. “We’re not looking at adopting any student rules, since compliance already is a rule,” wrote Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, in an email.
According to the university, before returning to campus this fall, Texas A&M students will need to self-certify that they haven’t tested positive for the virus, that they don’t have symptoms, and that they haven’t traveled through an area in the past 14 days where local guidelines mandate quarantining upon returning home. If they provide false information, they’ll face disciplinary action. Brown didn’t answer a question about what that might entail.
Meanwhile, the University of Rhode Island is working on a Covid-19 addendum to its student handbook, on face coverings, physical-distancing, and group sizes, said Kathy Collins, vice president of student affairs. The document — which Collins envisions as a “community promise” — will incorporate state guidelines as well as feedback from students and faculty and staff members, she said.
Facing the Consequences
When it comes to enforcement, colleges probably aren’t going to discipline students for standing too close to one another in line for the dining hall, said Martha Compton, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration and dean of students at Concordia University Texas.
But say a student repeatedly brings a guest into a residence hall, even though an institution has banned visitors. That might be grounds for the disciplinary process and a significant sanction, like dismissal from campus housing, Compton said.
There’s a distinction between students who don’t obey the rules by accident, and students who intentionally flout them, student-affairs leaders said. Some level of compassion will be key, Compton said: “We need to understand that we’re asking folks to make pretty significant changes in their day-to-day activity.”
Cynthia Teniente-Matson, president of Texas A&M at San Antonio, has floated the idea of having “classroom stewards” who would promote the university’s rules within classrooms, and perhaps do the same in building hallways or other gathering places. The stewards wouldn’t be “running around giving demerits or citations,” she said.
“I want it to be clear that, however we do it, there’s going to be some external influence that helps define that classroom experience to ensure public health and safety of our faculty, staff, and students is adhered to,” she said.
Colleges don’t have as much say in what happens off campus. But if a fraternity holds an off-campus party that’s larger than what the university allows, for example, the fraternity and its members could be subject to the student-conduct process, Compton said.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the city police will partner with the college to promote social-distancing practices off campus. “Our experience thus far has been, for the vast majority of people, letting them know what the expectations are and why that’s important is enough,” said Dan Jones, associate vice chancellor for integrity, safety and compliance.
Education should be the first step for any students who don’t comply, said Chin, the Covid-19 task-force chair for the American College Health Association. “They have to understand that they are a member of a campus community whose health and safety is dependent on individual and group behaviors,” Chin said. “The conduct stick should be a last resort.”
Initiatives that successfully discouraged smoking and encouraged seat-belt wearing have relied on public-information campaigns about the health and safety benefits of following the rules, with consistent reinforcement, Compton said. “Most people don’t change their behavior because they’re yelled at or chastised,” she said.
A Cultural Shift
Student-affairs leaders acknowledge that enforcement has its place, but looking ahead to the fall, they prefer to focus on student buy-in and community values.
At Wayne State, after conduct-code amendments are finalized, Strauss said, he’ll convene a group of student ambassadors who will help promote a campaign on campus expectations. Riya Chhabra, president of Wayne State’s Student Senate, said she’s glad the university has involved students so extensively.
Students want to go back to normal and hang out with their friends, said Chhabra, who’s studying public health. If her peers understand that following these rules will allow them to do that sooner, she believes they’ll comply. “We definitely don’t want to have students get in trouble for it,” she said.
Wake Forest University has brought together a group of students to craft a “student compact” — a final name is still in the works — that is designed to guide student behavior off campus and in other scenarios where faculty and staff members aren’t around.
Some of those involved are student leaders, but Adam Goldstein, dean of students and associate vice president, said he also wanted to involve “social influencers” — a broad network of students who can hold one another accountable in dorms, off-campus apartments, and fraternity parties. Staff members nominated students to participate.
The students were briefed by public-health experts so they could understand why restrictions will be necessary. After several Zoom meetings, the students broke into smaller groups to focus on specific issues and will wrap up early next month. Their work will inform a prevention-education campaign and a policy on expectations for students.
Modeling the new behavioral expectations could look a lot like bystander intervention, which has prompted a cultural shift in preventing sexual misconduct in recent years, Goldstein said.
“When we talk about off-campus parties, it’s going to be incumbent on other students saying, I’m not going to go, or if we’re going to have a gathering, it’s going to operate this way,” he said.
‘Unrealistically Optimistic’
At Purdue University, officials plan to “create a culture of safety and accountability through a universal pledge,” which every student and employee will have to sign and adhere to, on and off campus.
“We believe that our students will embrace these regulations on their own, without requiring any type of heavy enforcement,” Tim Doty, a Purdue spokesman, wrote in an email.
Purdue employees don’t share that belief. A recent poll of 7,200 faculty and staff members, and graduate students, conducted by the University Senate found that nearly 93 percent were not confident that undergraduates would abide by social-distancing guidelines off campus, said Deborah Nichols, chair of the University Senate and an associate professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences.
That fear is echoed nationwide by faculty members who are worried about their students putting them at risk. To them, it seems like a distinct possibility that some students will refuse to wear masks in classrooms, given that mask-wearing has become politicized.
Covid-19 restrictions just don’t line up with how most students exist in the world, said Kris Renn, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University who researches student success. Renn said she was recently talking with a colleague who’d developed a tracker that could use students’ phones to enforce six feet of distance. Renn shook her head. She thought: “You know they share shower rooms?”
If students know they are getting tracked, Renn said, they’ll leave phones behind when they head to a party. “Students spend an awful lot of their time outside the physical and social structural boundaries we set for them,” she said.
Alexis Dennis, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UNC, said she was sympathetic to the challenges facing university leaders. But she doesn’t trust that they will be prepared to reopen campus this fall without having a Covid-19 outbreak. If that happens, “students are going to die, and faculty and staff members are going to die,” she said. “To me, that is unconscionable.”
This summer, Dennis has already seen students crowding on the main street just off campus, talking without masks on, and hugging each other. She’ll do all of her teaching online next semester: “I don’t plan to go to campus at all.”
Batman, the UNC senior, plans to avoid libraries, dining halls, and lecture halls. He would like to see more transparency from UNC leaders about how they’re making decisions and how they’re going to enforce public-health measures. Kevin Guskiewicz, Chapel Hill’s chancellor, wrote in a statement that masks will be required in classrooms, indoor common spaces, and when entering and exiting buildings, and that he believes students “are more than capable of meeting that challenge.”
Colleges are asking students to make even greater sacrifices than employees in their day-to-day lives, said Britt Hoover, assistant dean of students for student support at Reed College, a private institution in Oregon. She urged colleges to have compassion for their students.
Her worry: “I fear we are asking students to do something impossible.”
Megan Zahneis contributed reporting.
