Early on Thursday afternoon at North Carolina State University, students were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Their rival sibling , the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had announced the end of in-person classes on Monday. To students like Karsh Agbayani, a freshman majoring in electrical engineering, it seemed only a matter of time before N.C. State would follow.
“A few days ago, I was kind of thinking maybe N.C. State was doing a good job,” he said. To clarify, when he says “N.C. State,” he means the “Wolfpack” student community on campus. “Well, right now,” he said, “it seems like the Greek villages are having the biggest issues, because they’re having these big parties and not being responsible.”
To prove his point as he sat in a quiet corner of campus in a hammock, interviewed by a Chronicle reporter, Agbayani read an email from Randy Woodson, the chancellor: Because of five clusters totaling 217 coronavirus cases, mostly among the Greek houses, the university would cease in-person classes on August 24. Students who choose to move out would get a prorated portion of their room-and-board money back. Classes would continue online, and tuition would not be returned.
A question hung in the air for the most plugged-in students here: Who’s responsible? Woodson’s email lamented the “negative impacts caused by those who did not take personal responsibility” — in other words, the partying students. Others cast blame elsewhere.
One student pointed to the Board of Governors, the state’s politically appointed body that supervises the system. “The Board of Governors forced the university open, forced their hands,” said Keegan Burkhart, a sophomore majoring in computer science. “So it seems like a lot of the anger and frustration should be directed at them.”
Chancellor Woodson held a press conference in front of the administration building on Thursday afternoon; then he sat down for a short interview with The Chronicle. This interview has been edited for length and clarity and includes some of his comments from the press conference.
Why cancel in-person classes but leave students in the residence halls? At UNC, Covid-19 spread through the residence halls, so it’s always a possibility here, too.
We have fantastic resident assistants that have been keeping our residents safe — they have been very good. And I’m not saying that they’re not good at Carolina. Honestly, I think a big difference is that Carolina does rush — and they did rush the first week, and all those kids that were rushing live in residence halls. We don’t do rush until late September or early October — and for us, it’ll be all virtual.
I have a lot of faith in the medical system of producing solutions to mitigate this virus, but I’m not sure they will be here in December.
Look, we know that we could have a challenge. We could have a cluster in a residence hall and have to deal with it. But we’re already only at about 60-percent occupancy. We feel like we’ll get down to a level where there’s one person per room, and then we’ll be in a better position to quarantine and manage.
Any sense of what this will cost?
A lot of the costs associated with residence life are fixed, because it’s fixed debt associated with residence halls. That doesn’t go away. There’s only so much you can do to reduce the cost associated with residence life through staffing, etc., because it’s largely a fixed-cost process now. Dining is more flexible, because if you have fewer mouths to feed, you have less cost. To give you a sense, last year, when we shut down in March, when we were about 50 percent through the semester, and we returned all that, it was about $23 million. A semester for us is about a $50-million revenue stream.
I have parents writing me every day demanding that this be the normal experience they have always dreamed of. And then I hear from those that say, It’s unsafe — what are you gonna do about it? We hope that we’re able to keep residence halls open. And while I’m sure many would believe that to be associated with money, we’ve already lost of a lot of money given the amount of the students who live there.
But the big issue is really that our students want to be here. I do worry about if you kick them out of the residence hall, they’re going to go straight down to Hillsborough Street and rent an apartment, and that’s not particularly good for them or for the university. I think they’re going to be better supported by having access to libraries and friends.
You pointed out the problems associated with Greek life, which seems to be taking the blame for this. But as you know, many people said the universities shouldn’t open at all. What do you say to that?
In North Carolina, we’re heavily supported by the state. We have some of the lowest tuition in the country, some of the highest state appropriations in the country. And so I think it provides a sense of obligation for public universities in North Carolina, because of how heavily the taxpayers of the state support us.
Because we’re so heavily state supported, lost tuition revenue is a driver, but it’s not the driver that it is at Notre Dame. For us, it’s an obligation. Most of our students by state law come from North Carolina. For us, the big driver is meeting the needs of the state.
When we were working hard to get ready for this, all the models had this going in a very different direction. And as that changed, we went back to the parents and students in July, before tuition bills were sent, and when they had already signed housing contracts, and gave them every option to take a gap year. Or if they didn’t feel comfortable living on campus, we’d do everything we could to meet as much of their educational needs online. We went to them offering all of those options, and we had very few takers.
Speaking of governance, to what extent was the Board of Governors the real push behind the reopening?
Well, the Board of Governors feels the same obligation to the state. They certainly were hopeful that we could reopen and provide a fair amount of our instruction face to face. But having said that, this is the same Board of Governors that granted UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State approval to do what we felt like we needed to do in light of the challenges that we’re facing with these clusters.
Remember, the president of the system throughout this planning was Bill Roper, former director of the CDC. We met every week as chancellors with Dr. Roper and talked through the issues that we were facing and how to best navigate them. And so it was shared governance from the chancellors’ and president’s perspective. But yes, there’s no question the Board of Governors was asking us to move forward with opening our campuses.
Do you think that was wise?
Well, we had a good plan. And by and large, that plan has been phenomenally successful on campus but not so much off campus.
With the University of North Carolina shifting to online classes only, did that make it easier for you to make this decision?
If it did, I would have made it right away, wouldn’t I? Really, NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill are the Research I flagship public universities in the state. So the state looks at our two institutions as leaders. So if either of us do anything, it has an impact on the system. And I think it went south pretty fast at Carolina, and we just weren’t experiencing that — and our students had been here a week longer. We started moving in students very early because we wanted to spread it out. But it caught up.
So if you’re asking me, did it make it easier? It certainly made it clear that these kinds of outbreaks were going to be difficult to navigate with a number of quarantines and the amount of infrastructure you need as a campus to support students in quarantine. It certainly opened not only our eyes, but eyes all over the country.
So will there be a spring semester or not?
I don’t know. I can tell you that I thought we’d be in a very different place now. I was watching all the early models and seeing us as a state with a very low rate of community transmission. At this point, that’s clearly not the case.
I’ll tell you, I don’t know how successful we’re going to be with a vaccine. My background is agriculture, and in agriculture, there are many diseases that affect livestock that are coronaviruses. And they’re tricky. They evolve quickly. But, then again, no one has ever spent as much money on vaccines for animals as they have for you and me. So I have a lot of faith in the medical system of producing solutions to mitigate this virus, but I’m not sure they will be here in December.
We’re going to have to make a decision about the spring semester long before Thanksgiving. If you just think about higher education from the calendar standpoint, you’re already locking down the courses for the spring semester by mid- to late October. That was different for us this time. Literally, up until two weeks before the beginning of the semester, we were still trying to figure out what the mode of delivery was going to be for each of the courses. So we’re going to have to do better at that.
