As the coronavirus pandemic has closed campuses, forcing higher education to reinvent itself in a matter of weeks, some colleges are also meeting this unprecedented moment with a renewed sense of purpose about their role in the community. They are contributing and producing medical equipment, offering buildings for use as overflow hospitals, and developing food-supply trackers. From Bonnie Resinski, the costume designer and wardrobe manager for the Center for Fine Arts at Saint Francis University, in Pennsylvania, who realized she could turn yards of fabric left over from a 1998 production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest into medical masks, to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are developing a design for a simple, inexpensive emergency ventilator, the sector is responding to what the Tufts University president, Anthony Monaco, has called “a Dunkirk moment for our country.”
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