College leaders who made the call to close campuses during the coronavirus pandemic are now facing more unprecedented decisions: whether to reopen in the fall and, if so, how to go about it.
Tell us whether your campus intends to bring students back this fall.
Some colleges have already decided on whether or not to reopen in August. Pamella Oliver, provost at California State University at Fullerton, announced on Monday that students will begin their fall coursework online and, if regulators allow, will slowly transition back to in-person learning.
Purdue University’s president is taking the opposite approach. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. wrote that he intends to reopen dormitories in August and resume in-person classes soon after. It won’t quite be business as usual for the fall semester, but Purdue is the first major institution to put forth a plan to bring students back.
Daniels wrote that “shutting down campus has come at extraordinary costs, as much human as economic, and at some point, clearly before next fall, those will begin to vastly outweigh the benefits of its continuance.”
His plan to reopen the university comes with caveats. It relies on extensive testing and contact tracing.
Other colleges have shied away from making an early decision. The University of South Carolina doesn’t plan to make initial recommendations until the end of May, according to its website. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Susan R. Wente, acknowledged on Twitter that there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution for reopening all of the programs at her university.
We are considering all possible options, recognizing that there will not be a one-size-fits-all solution across Vanderbilt’s undergraduate, graduate and professional programs, and that our fall semester may look very different than it has at any other time in our history.
— Vanderbilt University Chancellor (@VU_Chancellor) April 21, 2020
Some, including the interim provost of Emory University, Jan Love, remained hopeful about an in-person fall semester but added that such classes might look different due to more safety precautions.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
“My own dream for the fall is that we will be able to bring everyone back to campus,” Love told The Emory Wheel. But “it will obviously be [under] some new conditions to mitigate health concerns.”
The decision-making process might also fall to health officials. A health commissioner in Montgomery County, Ohio – where the University of Dayton is located – told WHIO-TV that “Universities should plan for distance learning for the fall unless we hear otherwise from the state.”
The University of Dayton acknowledged in a response that officials are “planning for options for the fall semester, ranging from full, residential in-person learning to a hybrid approach to continuing remote learning.”
The financial stress brought on by the pandemic also means that some colleges won’t be reopening at all. Urbana University, a institution in rural Urbana, Ohio, cited the coronavirus as one of the reasons for its permanent closure, according to the Dayton Daily News.
