Convert Campus Spaces to Health-Care Facilities

As hospitals have braced for — or are already treating — a surge of Covid-19 patients overwhelming their capacity, colleges have stepped up by offering space in empty dormitories, gymnasiums, conference centers, even ice rinks.

The offers have come from institutions including Tufts University, which announced on April 6 that it would make its residence halls available to house medical personnel and first responders, as well as patients. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Lowell Center, a conference and hotel facility, reopened on April 1 as a voluntary isolation center for people who have tested positive for Covid-19, while Dejope Residence Hall has become a respite facility for health-care workers. The University of Nebraska system has signed an agreement with the state to provide quarantine housing on the Lincoln, Kearney, and Omaha campuses; Oakland University, in Michigan, opened up a 750-bed residence hall to health-care providers; and Middlebury College drained its Kenyon Arena ice rink so that the space could be used, if needed, as a temporary hospital.

For Moravian College, in Bethlehem, Pa., this kind of community partnership dates back centuries. The 2,000-student liberal-arts college, founded in 1742, offered a dormitory to George Washington as a hospital during the American Revolution, and more than 5,000 patients, including the Marquis de Lafayette, were treated there. The college has a letter signed by John Hancock, John Adams, and others thanking Moravian for “a humane and diligent attention to the sick and wounded,” says Bryon Grigsby, the president. Now the college is planning to convert its gym and field house into an overflow health-care facility, he says. “It’s nice to continue that history.”

How is your institution contributing to the “war effort” against the coronavirus? Tell us here.