The Orange County, N.C., health department asked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week to move the campus online for the fall semester, but the university has declined to take the health department’s recommendations, moving forward with in-person operations.
“If students begin to move back on campus next week, we could quickly become a hot spot for new cases, as thousands of students from all across the country/world merge onto the UNC campus,” wrote Quintana Stewart, Orange County’s health director, in a memo to UNC’s chancellor, provost, and vice chancellor, dated July 29.
Stewart’s major recommendations were for the university to restrict on-campus housing only to those students who need it most, so that everyone can have a single room, and for the university to hold all classes online for the fall. Barring a move to a virtual fall, Stewart recommended the university teach online-only for the first five weeks of the semester to give the department and university additional time to monitor the coronavirus’s spread after students’ return.
The university did not respond to The Chronicle’s questions about the letter on Wednesday. Late in the afternoon, the chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, posted a public statement. “While the OCHD letter was not an order or a mandate for the university to take any specific action, as always, I took their recommendations very seriously,” he wrote. “We believe we have made significant progress towards aligning with the OCHD’s general recommendations and considerations.” The statement then listed actions UNC has taken, including reducing classroom- and dorm-occupancy levels, but it didn’t say whether the new occupancy level means students will have single rooms, as Stewart recommended.
The health department’s memo pointed to clusters of Covid-19 cases among UNC’s athletes, who returned for voluntary workouts, and cleaning staff. “We’ve seen the off-campus parties and gatherings at Greek houses,” Stewart wrote. And when health officials tried to do contact tracing, some students wouldn’t cooperate.
“All of that has added to the concern of bringing basically 30,000 people back into one very small community,” Todd McGee, a spokesperson for the health department, said. Orange County has a population of about 146,000. “That’s just going to multiply the potential for problems, so that’s why she felt the need to go ahead and get it on the record what the recommendations would be.”
Community opposition also played a role in Stewart’s call for closing. “I have received a massive amount of emails from community members, UNC staff, faculty, and students,” she wrote, “sharing their concern for fully reopening campus for the fall semester.”
The UNC system has said it would move as one regarding whether campuses are open for in-person instruction; across the system, campuses are welcoming students back. Generally, individual campuses’s chancellors would need to consult with the system president and Board of Governors if they wished to go all virtual, Josh Ellis, a system spokesperson, told The Chronicle last month. However, the chancellors are also “being directed to follow what the county health director is saying,” Ellis said at the time.
Ellis didn’t return a Wednesday request from The Chronicle seeking more detail on the system’s guidance to campuses.
The county has the legal authority to close a property by declaring it an “imminent hazard to public safety,” McGee said. “That’s a very high bar to leap over. That’s not an option at this point.”
North Carolina law defines “imminent hazard” as “a situation that is likely to cause an immediate threat to human life.” One part of the law makes the county potentially liable for any financial losses UNC incurs, as a result of being called an imminent hazard, according to McGee.
The health department’s letter prompted Guskiewicz and the provost, Robert A. Blouin, to appear at an emergency meeting of the faculty executive committee, late Wednesday afternoon. During the meeting, committee members seemed to assume the health department made the memo public; McGee later emailed to say it had not. Guskiewicz and Blouin said at the meeting that they received no warning that the health-department letter would be made public and did not know the department’s motivation for doing so. When a committee member asked if it was a sign that the health department felt that university leaders were not listening to them, Blouin demurred. “I have really enjoyed our conversations. They have all been positive, collaborative, and collegial,” he said. “Even in our conversations since we received the letter, it’s been the same. Nothing really has changed.”
