Jahalezansi (Brian) Sibanda learned late Friday night that Pomona College officials had denied his petition to stay in a dorm after the California college converted to online-only classes amid concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.
That cast Sibanda’s future into uncertainty. With no family in the United States, the second-year student says traveling back to his home in Zimbabwe would threaten his student-visa status.
In order to retain his visa, Sibanda must remain a full-time student. As his professors retool their courses for remote instruction, many rely on the videoconferencing service Zoom, which is unavailable in Zimbabwe and 20 other countries and regions because of U.S. sanctions and other regulatory reasons.
“Cases like mine really left me thinking, What was their thought process in denying my request to stay on campus?” Sibanda said. “Where did the school expect me to go as a first-generation, low-income international student who has no family whatsoever in the United States?”
Other Pomona students who cited domestic violence at their family home or housing and food insecurity also had their petitions rejected.
Pomona is among the hundreds of colleges nationwide asking students to vacate their dorms and return home in order to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus in communal and cramped residence halls. But for many low-income or international students like Sibanda, returning home may not be an option.
Within an hour of receiving the decisions — which college executives had said were final — students formed Occupy Pomona, a group dedicated to advocating for those whose petitions had been denied. The group distributed an online survey to determine why some petitions had been approved but others denied. About 70 percent of the survey’s 174 respondents had seen their petitions denied as of Wednesday.
After comparing the findings, the group found, few patterns emerged. Instead, the justifications “seemed completely arbitrary,” said Xiao Jiang, a second-year student and member of Occupy Pomona.
Jiang received approval to stay in on-campus housing but joined Occupy Pomona to ensure that all students who needed housing received it.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
A Pomona spokeswoman did not respond on Tuesday to questions about the criteria used to evaluate the petitions. In a written statement to The Chronicle, she cited concerns about the amount of space as a reason for reducing the number of students living in campus housing.
“Our growing concern is that the current population level on our campus is simply unsustainable under public-health requirements during this crisis,” the statement says. “In this emergency, we see the strong necessity of social distancing and the inherent difficulties in doing so on a residential liberal-arts campus.”
The situation has shifted Jiang and Sibanda’s perception of Pomona, which has increasingly marketed itself in recent years to students from low-income and minority backgrounds.
“The amount of trust I had in Pomona as an institution to provide for me as a first-generation, low-income student has completely disappeared,” Jiang said. “These are the students who are most vulnerable in a situation like this, and what Pomona has done is to completely abandon them.”
Both Sibanda and Jiang also raised concerns about the institution’s transparency throughout the petition process. Pomona initially told students that there would not be a quota on the number of students allowed to remain in campus housing, Jiang said.
Students were given an opportunity to appeal their decision to the college’s deans, and several members of Occupy Pomona met with administrators on Monday, but they were not able to push back the deadline of Wednesday at 5 p.m. for students to vacate their quarters.
Occupy Pomona developed a list of demands, a petition, and a GoFundMe account that had raised more than $87,000 as of Thursday morning. If he is not allowed to remain in an on-campus dorm, Sibanda said he would have to dip into that fund to find housing near campus.
Colleges and universities nationwide have seen students and alumni come together to support low-income students who are being forced out of their on-campus housing. At Harvard University, students asked alumni to crowdsource places for low-income students to stay. Princeton University students started a petition to ask administrators not to evict students without considering their circumstances. Princeton officials revised their policy, allowing students to stay on campus for the rest of the semester, if needed.
Jiang said that ensuring students were able to remain on campus is critical to their being able to effectively continue their education at Pomona.
“We’re making sure that everyone who needs housing will get housing, because some of us just don’t even have homes to return to. There’s simply residences with family members that are not necessarily homes,” Jiang said. “This is very real for a lot of us.”