This is worth it. The sentiment echoed on the steps of the student center, outside the dorms, in a conversation between parents outside the bookstore. Tens of thousands of students were moving back to the University of Kentucky this week after the campus abruptly shut down, in March. They bought new gear. They posted pictures of their dorm rooms. The sweet relief of togetherness, after months of isolation.
This is worth it. The moment’s excitement was a result of the university’s intense planning: The hundreds of pages of guidance. The Zoom meetings. The thousands of pieces of furniture taken out of classrooms, dining halls, and lounges, and put in storage to reduce capacity and create distance. The excitement, for a moment, was louder than fears about student behavior, about faculty and staff health, about the wisdom of the togetherness on which the coronavirus thrives.
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This is worth it. The sentiment echoed on the steps of the student center, outside the dorms, in a conversation between parents outside the bookstore. Tens of thousands of students were moving back to the University of Kentucky this week after the campus abruptly shut down, in March. They bought new gear. They posted pictures of their dorm rooms. The sweet relief of togetherness, after months of isolation.
This is worth it. The moment’s excitement was a result of the university’s intense planning: The hundreds of pages of guidance. The Zoom meetings. The thousands of pieces of furniture taken out of classrooms, dining halls, and lounges, and put in storage to reduce capacity and create distance. The excitement, for a moment, was louder than fears about student behavior, about faculty and staff health, about the wisdom of the togetherness on which the coronavirus thrives.
The Chronicle spent three days on the University of Kentucky’s campus, in Lexington, interviewing more than 50 people about returning to college in a pandemic that has killed more than 160,000 Americans and sent higher education spiraling. There was an eerie dichotomy between the normalcy of move-in — forgetting to pack a toothbrush, a red cup outside an apartment, listening to a cappella “Hakuna Matata” — and what has become the new normal. A Q-tip in a nostril. A parent reminding a child to put on a mask when talking to someone. The acceptance among several students that they are likely to be infected.
Some people are queasy, but many others, many students, are thrilled. This is worth it. Behind masks, sometimes, they’re smiling wide.
Eric N. Monday is eyeing the last Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The university’s executive vice president for finance and administration has worked through his share of crises as a college leader, including Hurricane Katrina at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge 15 years ago. But eventually floodwaters recede. The hardest part about this crisis is not knowing when it’ll end. One morning he told a communications official that all he knew was they were one day closer to the finish line. The last day of fall classes, just before Thanksgiving, is not the finish line — Covid-19 will not be eradicated. But if the campus is open then, he said, they’ll have accomplished something.
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There are a lot of days between now and then. Over the weekend, student social life revved up, with the city police noticing student gatherings and pointing them out to campus police officers, who alerted administrators. By Monday morning, campus leaders were reiterating that the code of conduct, with its new guidelines for Covid-19, applies off campus too. They’re urging students to behave, saying that keeping the campus open until Thanksgiving depends on it.
That’s a big ask. Some students, even those happy to be back, openly say they’ll get the virus, and wonder if dorms will be open or classes will be in person by late November. “People are going to party and go out,” one sophomore said, listening to music outside a dorm. “You can’t stop it,” said another sophomore later that day. If the dorms close, he and his roommate would rent a place off campus. A mother and her daughter, wearing matching checkered UK masks, wandered the campus on Sunday night. The daughter has accepted she’s “going to get it” — the case count in Kentucky is higher than in her home state, West Virginia. Another mother, from Massachusetts, said she knows her son will face a much higher risk on campus. She just hopes, she said, he’ll suffer a mild case.
“I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, I want to have my senior year,” said Khari Gardner, a senior from Maryland, but “I do expect the university will have to move everything back online in the next month or so.”
Gardner, who is immunocompromised, is taking only online classes, and he does not think Kentucky should have brought back all of its students. He came to Lexington because he wants to change the university’s policy on reopening and to stand up for racial justice and other civil-rights issues. A student at a distance, he said, is easier to ignore than one holding a picket sign outside an administrator’s office.
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Nathan Munster has not accepted that he will get the virus. The music-education major — a bassoonist — really, really wants to stay healthy. “My lungs are really important to me,” he said. But Munster, a senior, said he felt in-person courses were the right call, though. He feels safer off campus, on a quiet street, than in a packed dorm.
One afternoon this week, he sat outside on the porch. He knows not everyone will take the university’s rules seriously, and just because he lives off campus doesn’t mean he’ll be free from risk. He’ll be participating in a music ensemble — his scholarship requires it. Think of the saliva. “I’m going to be here until …” he trails off. “Whatever happens.” He doesn’t want to go to remote learning. It was hard to stay focused on schoolwork at home last spring.
Campus leaders stress that a key factor in their decision to bring back students was inequities between who can and can’t effectively learn — or safely live. About a quarter of the university’s undergraduates who completed a federal student-aid form have a median family income of $21,992. In the fall of 2017, a fifth of students received a Pell Grant. Two-thirds of the undergraduates are from Kentucky, which has high levels of poverty and has suffered from the opioid epidemic and high cancer rates.
Colleges nationwide have pared back reopening plans this summer, arguing that population density on campus, in a regional hot spot, is dangerous. It’s a different calculation in Lexington: The state’s case count is lower than that of states to the south, and students may well be living in a denser environment at home, sharing bedrooms and bathrooms with at-risk family members. A heavily controlled campus, the thinking goes, may be safer. The university de-densified the dorms, and officials say all students living on campus will have their own bedroom and share a bathroom with at most one other person.
Eli Capilouto, the president, is adamant that this would not be the case in students’ hometowns, where they would also be susceptible to contracting and spreading the virus. And those students wouldn’t be living in “a single room in a fancy house,” he said, stressing that many are in multifamily, multigenerational homes.
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Rebecca Dutch, a virologist and chair of Kentucky’s molecular- and cellular-biochemistry department, is on a team of doctors and scientists advising campus leaders. The university asked the team whether it was possible to reopen safely, and how to optimize the environment to maximize safety, she said. Nothing is risk-free. But there are competing risks, including students’ housing situations, food insecurity, and struggles with anxiety and depression.
She still worries, and she hopes the tens of thousands of students will do a “risk-benefit analysis” before they gather. Bars could be disastrous. You speak loudly, projecting virus particles into the air. And no one stays six feet apart.
Dutch watches local and campus case numbers carefully. The university is requiring all returning students to be tested when they arrive on campus, and is making such tests free for faculty and staff members, too. So far, with more than 10,000 processed, less than 1 percent of the arrival tests have come back positive. That’s a good thing, and it’s expected — with mass testing, the prevalence rate is naturally lower than when only the symptomatic are tested. County numbers are rising, but that hasn’t yet produced an uptick in hospitalizations or deaths. That’s also a good sign.
What Dutch wishes is that the campus could become a bubble, and forbid anyone to leave campus, visit home, bring who-knows-what into the Lexington area, and take who-knows-what to the surrounding region. (A spokeswoman said the university strongly encourages, but does not require, students to remain on campus throughout the semester.)
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If the campus becomes a hot spot, Dutch said, perhaps the smartest thing to do would be not to send students home but to lock down the campus, preventing the virus’s external spread.
Propelling the reopening plan forward is an organizational machine touching nearly every part of the university. The campus in June announced it would bring students back, and quickly set up working groups to do that. Many groups will continue to meet, and plans, including for when and how to conduct repeated testing, are still in development.
While some parts of the plan are fluid, its core — arrival testing and contact tracing — is already up and running. Contact tracers track the web of the virus’s spread, and care coordinators ensure that those who test positive and those who must quarantine get food. The coordinators also answer questions on laundry, remote learning, and other logistics.
The team is based in a faculty club, the Boone Center, locked in a gated patio. On the walls are portraits of horses and campus presidents, and floor-to-ceiling curtains. A handle of hand sanitizer sits on a bar. The group of contact tracers and case managers is outgrowing the space: Many of the desks, spaced apart, are occupied.
Eryn Clayton makes calls from a corner of a back room, where bookshelves amass titles on Kentucky’s history. Around Clayton, previously a business manager for a local brewery, is a quiet buzz of calls, chatter, and promises to call right back.
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Clayton’s lined notebook is open to a blank page as the phone rings through over-ear headphones. She feels anxious before the students answer, not sure how they’ll react. She has a baby boy, and she sometimes thinks about how it would feel for him to get such a call. Someone picks up. Clayton asks if the student is available, to please confirm his or her full name and date of birth.
Later in the call, Clayton will ask a litany of questions: How high was your fever? Have you lost the ability to taste and smell? Do you have pre-existing medical conditions? Did you go out to eat? Get any food? Go to Target? Did you ride with anyone there? How many roommates do you have? Are they UK students? Do you work anywhere?
Later in the call, Clayton will try to provide some information: Yes, you can miss those classes. We’d like you to start isolating today. Helping us gather this information could prevent others from being infected. It will be confidential, she pledges, between you, me, and the health-care team.
First, though, she had to break the news: “You’ve tested positive for Covid-19,” she says, her voice calm. “How are you feeling?”
Earlier in the week, students debated which dining hall serves the best food. One student, immediately after getting tested, walked to meet a friend for lunch at one of them. There are fewer chairs around tables inside, and stickers on the floor mark six-foot spans for when students line up. But students are still eating together.
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It’s indicative of what being on campus this fall means: a constant push and pull between normalcy and ever-present risk.
Parents take photos of their children, by a wildcat sculpture, in an Adirondack chair, getting a Covid-19 test. Strangers connect on Snapchat, complimenting one another on their dorm decorations, and then walk the campus together in masks. There are signs advertising off-campus parking and housing rentals, and signs reminding pedestrians to walk six feet apart. A dorm room’s whiteboard has guidance on signing for packages, and reminds students to wear a mask. There are anxieties — about finding the way to class, about making friends, and about the virus — and there is a lot of joy.
“I do not want to go home,” said Tanner Thompson, wearing an American-flag mask and ripped blue jeans inside the business-school building. “It is worth it to me to be here.”
Samari Israel El and his father, Alfonso, unloaded their car into grocery carts one night, finishing up a quick move-in. Samari hasn’t been inside a physical classroom since March, when his senior year of high school was disrupted. He hopes his in-person courses last through the semester, but he knows he may have to go back home, to Louisville, should there be an outbreak on campus.
Alfonso gives his son advice. Keep your room clean, he says. He reminds Samari that he knows how to grind, to be serious. “You’re not a rookie. You know how to deal with high expectations.”
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Expectations vary when there are this many open questions. Will students behave? Can leaders make the campus safe? How many will fall ill?
This is worth it. Is it? Every morning brings more data, more questions, and one day closer to the other side.