Effectively booted off campus in an effort to contain coronavirus contagion, hundreds of thousands of college students are reacting with shock, uncertainty, sadness, and, in some cases, devil-may-care fatalism. Even as they hurriedly arrange logistical details, the stress of an uncertain future is taking a toll.
“A lot of people are anxious because not everyone can afford a flight home or a flight to campus to pick up their stuff,” says Alana Hendy, a Georgetown University junior studying international relations. She is among the rapidly growing number of students nationwide who were urged not to return to campus after spring break as courses shift online.
Hendy too is anxious, she says, but she is more confused as she sorts through uncertainties concerning her living and academic arrangements. A low-income student from Bowie, Md., she says it would be better if she stayed on campus because her father suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes, and is particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. She filed a form asking to be allowed to remain in her dorm but may not get an answer until next week.
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.
Among the questions on her mind: What will happen to her work-study job, in the dean’s office at the School of Foreign Service? How will her responsibilities as a teaching assistant in a geography class change with the new online format?
But counterbalancing the uncertainties, she says, is support offered by the university. It is helping defray low-income students’ costs for shipping medication, books, and other necessities, for example. And the campus’s food pantry is open and stocked twice a week, which, she says, “we’re grateful for.”
So she’ll cope with the situation, week by week. And after law school or a doctorate in history, when she’s a professor, she imagines she’ll look back at the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study.
For Rachel P. Angle, a Georgetown senior from Middletown, Conn., studying government and living off campus, the academic disruption should not be too drastic. But, she says, “It’s my senior spring. There were so many things I was planning on doing, and now that’s sort of thrown into flux.” Her grandparents had planned to go to D.C. for her graduation.
Angle knows, however, that “there are a whole lot of people suffering a lot more from this. I have a safe home to go to, parents who are happy to take me in. It’s mostly just the stress of uncertainty.”
‘Utter Pandemonium’
Not everyone is adjusting so philosophically. Students are “definitely freaking out,” says a junior at Harvard, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal by the university. The week before spring break is academically hectic, so students were turning in problem sets and papers, then heading home, when they learned their classes would move online and they were to leave campus. In some cases they zipped right back to Cambridge, Mass., to try to pack up, store, or ship their belongings.
“It’s utter pandemonium on campus right now,” the student says. “Everybody is partying all day or incredibly stressed out about homework, or both. People really seem upset and confused.”
And they’re not exactly following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s protocol, the student says, with parties outdoors and in, “scorpion” punch bowls, and games of beer pong, “one of the least sterile things to be doing right now.”
Students are often accused of living in a ‘campus bubble,’ immune to wider social concerns, so it doesn’t seem surprising that on some campuses there would be outbreaks of partying.
Similar seize-the-day mayhem broke out at the University of Dayton on Tuesday, when it said its classes would be moved online. What was initially reported to be a protest against the university’s anti-virus measures was in fact, the administration says, “one last large gathering before spring break, and the size and behavior of the crowd required police to take action.” More than 1,000 students gathered in the streets, according to local news coverage, and when some students stood on cars and the situation grew rowdier, the police launched “pepper balls,” which contain irritants, into the crowd.
“Students are often accused of living in a ‘campus bubble,’ immune to wider social concerns, so it doesn’t seem surprising that on some campuses there would be outbreaks of partying,” says Mikita Brottman, an author and psychoanalyst who teaches literature at the Maryland Institute College of Arts.
“It’s hard for some students to take the virus seriously. They’re often cynical about ‘media panics,’ and even if they do follow the mainstream media,” she says, they feel that “this is a virus that targets ‘old people.’”
“Beyond that,” Brottman says, “I think the celebrating reflects both a feeling of disaster-inspired togetherness — and togetherness is part of the spring-break tradition anyway — along with a sense of social constraint collapsing.” The partyers “are like the inhabitants of Prospero’s palace” in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” she says, “getting drunk while plague ravages the nation.”
‘Stay in the Routine’
The stress of uncertainty can be very unnerving, says Alise G. Bartley, a clinical assistant professor in the department of counseling and director of the community-counseling center at Florida Gulf Coast University. The most constructive way to approach it is “to focus on what we do know” staves off illness: wash hands, avoid high-density groups, get sufficient sleep, eat well, and exercise.
As students are yanked from their campus settings, it will be crucial for them to retain structure in their academic and personal lives, she says. They need to “stay in the routine and feel like there’s a purpose so that they don’t fall into depression.” If they’re used to Friday pizza night with friends, then they should have pizza night together online.
There’s a difference between healthy concern and fear. … Let’s make smart choices, but let’s not be afraid.
Counselors, in person or in teletherapy sessions, need to push beyond vague recommendations to help students “operationalize” good habits and a positive outlook. Don’t just advise them to get exercise, says Bartley. Talk through with them exactly what walking, jogging, or bike route they’re going to take, for how long and how often. It’s a disconcerting time, she says, but “there’s a difference between healthy concern and fear. … Let’s make smart choices, but let’s not be afraid.”
Gregory Roper, a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is more afraid for his grandparents than he is for himself. He was already visiting them, in Fairfield, Conn., during spring break, and “it looks like I might be doing that for a while longer,” he says, now that the New York college has announced that classes are going online and students must move off campus. His parents are in Santa Clara County, Calif., which has a high concentration of coronavirus cases. They’re considering going somewhere safer, so he won’t be joining them at home for now.
A computer-science student, Roper says a lot of his coursework was already online, but the lab sessions in his biology class “are still completely up in the air.”
Reactions to the crisis among his friends, Roper says, “are very much a mix.” Some think fears are “sort of overinflated.” Others, particularly “friends with weak immune systems, are very scared.”
In addition to fear, students are aggrieved over losing life experiences like spring of senior year, says Nicole Danforth, director of outpatient programs for child and adolescent psychiatry at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, in Massachusetts. Acknowledge that grief, Danforth recommends, but challenge yourself “to limit how much you let your anxious brain take over.”
The bachelor-of-fine-arts students of Jillian Harris, an associate professor of dance at Temple University, felt “a strong sense of disappointment” that showcase performances of their senior choreography projects couldn’t proceed when Temple announced courses would move online starting next week.
But “everyone is trying to be creative,” producing instead online rehearsal-progress portfolios with written analyses, Harris says. On stage and in life, she says, “fortunately dancers are very good improvisers.”
Technology will be a defining aspect of the mental-health challenge, Danforth says. A life behind blue screens can already be isolating, she says, and we’re in danger of succumbing further to that. But teletherapy options are more sophisticated and plentiful than ever, and if Covid-19 leads to greater use and acceptance of them, she says, that is “a win for everybody.”
Laura Horne experienced the trauma of displacement herself as an undergraduate at Loyola University New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, in 2005. Her family lived in the city’s suburbs, and she couldn’t go home. She transferred to Louisiana Tech University for a quarter, and though she tried her best to keep up with friends through Facebook, email, and phone calls, “a lot of students relocated to other schools and never came back,” she says.
“I had to somewhat mourn and be OK with letting that go for a time,” she says, “and engage with the new environment.” Many students this spring might also “go through a period of mourning, and that’s normal,” says Horne, now the chief program officer for Active Minds, which supports mental-health awareness and education for students.
She offers coping tips for students on the Active Minds website, but “if what you are feeling seems like more than just a bad day,” she writes, “seek help from a professional. … If you need it, contact the Crisis Text Line by texting ‘BRAVE’ to 741-741.”
‘Uncharted Territory’
Active Minds chapter leaders across the country, like Stephanie Cahill, a senior studying psychology at Arizona State University, have a front-row view of their peers’ anxieties. Even before the university announced, late Wednesday, that it was moving classes online, Cahill says, a lot of students were “nervous and scared” and just not showing up.
Active Minds meetings on campus saw a surge in attendance — to groups of roughly 25 — and visits by administrators like ASU’s associate vice president for counseling and health services helped ease students’ worries, Cahill says.
Information is key, but colleges “have to acknowledge that we’re in uncharted territory here,” says Kevin Krueger, president of Naspa, an association of student-affairs administrators. “We don’t have a playbook.”
But they’re writing one quickly as they go along. Seventeen hundred participants signed up for a Naspa webinar on Wednesday, and they’re sorting through best practices on housing and food for low-income students, provision of mental-health services, and, in the longer term, engaging students in the online environment — not just academically, but in critical services like academic advising, orientation, career services and job fairs, and campus culture and Greek life.
As a new normal slowly forms for students, Krueger says, it’s also important to recognize that fatigue is setting in among administrators, staff, and faculty: “There’s a toll that comes from being in a crisis mode in these situations.”