The Johns Hopkins University on Thursday reversed plans to bring undergraduate students back for in-person classes, housing, or activities, urging them to stay away from Baltimore for the fall semester. Employees, the campus said, should expect to work from home through the end of the year.
Previously Hopkins said an in-person undergraduate experience would be available “to all who want it.” Thursday’s announcement is the latest shoe to drop in a late-summer wave of announcements, one after the next, of scaled-back reopening plans.
The decision by Johns Hopkins — with its deep endowment, breakthrough research on and tracking of the virus itself, and close ties to world-renowned medical services — demonstrates that even higher education’s heaviest hitting research universities may see their in-person plans stymied by Covid-19.
“Based on extensive consultations with our faculty experts in public health and medicine, and emerging guidance from public-health officials, we have concluded that returning in person would pose unacceptable risks for you, our faculty and staff, and our neighbors in Baltimore,” wrote Ronald J. Daniels, the president, and other campus leaders in an email to students.
The decision follows months of planning for the Baltimore university. Administrators shook up the academic calendar and planned to offer courses online and in person.
The university also put forward an exhaustive testing plan: Hopkins, one of the wealthiest colleges in the country, said it would test everyone on campus twice weekly, developing a capacity of multiple thousands of tests daily.
“We’re not saying we know 100 percent we can pull it off,” Jonathan Links, vice provost and chief risk and compliance officer, told The Chronicle in May, “but we’re going after it.”
That testing frequency was still the plan, but it was an “incomplete defense” against the virus’s spread, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a member of the university’s health-advisory group.
Campus leaders determined that several public-health measures were trending in the wrong direction. The average local number of cases per hundred thousand hit 27, compared to just two or three elsewhere in the country, Inglesby said. The percent of tests that came back positive remained high. And more than 30 percent of Hopkins students would come from areas of the country with high case counts.
So reopening for fall would mean not only would Hopkins be bringing many people from hot-spot regions to Baltimore, it couldn’t seal the urban campus from the city, where case numbers are high.
For Hopkins, “there’s an enormous amount of interaction” with the local community, Inglesby said. “Even if you test every single student on Day 1, that test only tells you that they’re negative on Day 1.”
Turnaround times for testing in many regions have been “brutally long,” Inglesby said, which may challenge other campuses’ reopening plans. “You need to have quick information about who to isolate.”
He said he doesn’t expect Hopkins’s announcement to be the last. Every other campus is dealing with enormous numbers of variables, including housing, testing, and case numbers — and knowledge of the epidemic changes constantly.
Inglesby said many officials had been preparing for fall for months. It was worth the effort, he said, despite the outcome. “Hopkins felt it owed the undergraduate class its best efforts to open.”
The university in the spring announced a net loss of $475 million through June 2021, and officials attributed much of that deficit to the loss of physician clinical revenue. Hopkins will reduce undergraduate tuition by 10 percent for the fall.
The campus will also incentivize out-of-region students to stay home, said Alanna Shanahan, the vice provost for student affairs. It will distribute already-designated funds to students receiving financial aid and planning to live off campus, and it will give an additional several thousand dollars to those students if they stay home, away from campus neighborhoods.
