Students Are Spreading Covid-19 Off Campus. Here’s How Colleges Can Stop It.

As the University of Washington worked on plans to keep students masked-up and six feet apart this fall, ominous signs emerged blocks from the Seattle campus. Dozens of students living in fraternity houses over the summer tested positive for Covid-19, a number that swelled to more than 130 early this month.

Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, a spike in Covid-19 cases was traced to off-campus parties and fraternity houses, prompting administrators to warn students that a return to campus was looking unlikely. This week, they announced that the beginning of the semester will be fully remote.

In recent weeks, Covid-19 cases have exploded among people in their 20s and 30s. Public-health officials say that’s partly because of so-called superspreader events, including gatherings of college students in off-campus houses, fraternities, and bars. Confronted with social-media posts showing crowds of students dancing and drinking together in defiance of local orders, colleges have been forced to zero in on what’s happening just outside their borders.

But there are limits to what colleges can do. Administrators can, in theory, punish students for hosting large gatherings if such events cross their radar. They can’t, however, show up at private fraternity houses and enforce mask-wearing and physical distancing in common areas.

A month ago, colleges were mostly focused on plans for enforcing rules in classrooms. Now, officials are focusing more on how to respond to off-campus problems, especially large gatherings that defy local laws, said Martha Compton, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration.

Some colleges that hadn’t planned to update their conduct codes with Covid-19 restrictions have changed their minds, said Compton, who’s also dean of students at Concordia University Texas. She’s also seeing more colleges issue behavioral compacts that students are required, or at least encouraged, to sign. In extreme cases, students could be suspended or expelled.

Dartmouth College is among the institutions that have threatened serious consequences for students who violate public-health laws. After complaints about partying at privately owned fraternities and local bars in April, a Dartmouth dean warned undergraduates that punishment, which could include suspension, will be “swift and severe.”

Tulane University’s dean of students also took a clear stance on illicit off-campus gatherings this month in an email to the student body. In bold and all-caps, Erica Woodley wrote: “Do not host parties or gatherings with more than 15 people, including the host. If you do, you will face suspension or expulsion from the university.”

To follow through, Tulane officials will face the challenge of keeping a close watch on students who often spread out across New Orleans, mingling with friends from other nearby universities and going to restaurants and bars.

That’s how dozens of Michigan State University students and recent graduates contracted the virus in June — they visited a bar just off campus. Dan Olsen, a spokesman for Michigan State, said university officials are in touch with local leaders, the health department, restaurants, and landlords “on a weekly basis” for the purpose of “mitigating risk.” Governor’s orders in both Michigan and Louisiana have since shuttered most bars for indoor service.

Just because students misbehave off campus doesn’t mean colleges can wipe their hands clean and say it’s not their responsibility, said Daniel J. Hurley, chief executive of the Michigan Association of State Universities: “There is so much at stake.”

Greek Life

At the University of Washington, where at least 136 students living in fraternity houses tested positive for Covid-19, administrators have been working with the Interfraternity Council, a student-led fraternity governing board, and local public-health officials to encourage mask-wearing, hand-washing and social-distancing.

“The outbreaks that happened a few weeks ago were a wake-up call for the university and the Greek system,” said Geoffrey S. Gottlieb, an infectious-disease specialist and professor of medicine who chairs the UW Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases.

Students living in communal housing may have gotten confusing messages from public-health officials about whether they need to wear masks and stay socially distant, said Denzil J. Suite, Washington’s vice president for student life. Those measures are usually relaxed for members of the same household. A fraternity that has one kitchen, one living room, and one front door might be structured like a single-family home, but when 10 students congregate to watch a movie, the risks are much greater.

Fraternity members at Washington have been “incredibly receptive” to efforts to keep members safe, Suite said. Since an outbreak can hurt recruiting, as well as the house’s image, “No one is hurt more by an outbreak in the house than the house itself.”

Still, no one denies that as thousands of students converge on the campus in September (Washington is planning a hybrid approach of mostly virtual classes), students pent up over the summer will be tempted to party, and precautions could fly out the window.

Gottlieb and Suite said they wanted to avoid a punitive approach and were counting on students to act responsibly. But they acknowledged that there could be repercussions for university-sanctioned groups that ignore warnings against large social gatherings.

Colleges could threaten to revoke recognition of groups that ignore public-health rules, said W. Scott Lewis, a lawyer and partner with TNG Consulting. Being in good standing with the college gives student groups privileges like the ability to sponsor events on campus and to use the university’s name in recruiting and advertising.

At the University of Mississippi, after fraternity rush parties were blamed for most of the institution’s 162 confirmed Covid-19 cases, the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life warned frats that they’d face social probation — a lesser sanction that bars organizations from hosting events — if they were caught throwing parties. This fall, fraternities aren’t allowed to host social events with alcohol in chapter facilities.

But those directives are difficult to enforce, as colleges have found when they’ve tried to crack down on fraternity hazing or underage drinking. “You would have to find out about it, who organized it, who was there. And that’s for the organized parties,” Lewis said. “What if it’s just 10 guys who just wanted to watch a movie and set up a screen in the backyard?

“I hate to be Dr. Doom,” Lewis added, “but if we were really doing this nationally the way we should, we’d be 100-percent virtual for fall.”

Even though UC-Berkeley has moved all fall classes online, some students will still reside in Greek houses. Janet Gilmore, a university spokeswoman, said UC-Berkeley has jurisdiction to enforce public-health orders only on campus, while the city of Berkeley deals with off-campus issues. “The university has very limited authority to discipline students for off-campus behavior,” Gilmore wrote in an email.

Since the outbreak connected to Berkeley’s fraternities, administrators have been in closer contact with Greek student leaders on safety and risk assessment, and with the housing corporations that operate the houses, Gilmore said.

Coronavirus Hits Campus

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.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Fall-Enrollment Trends in Distance Education: a Snapshot
• Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?

Recent news coverage has unfairly targeted fraternities, said Jud Horras, president of the North American Interfraternity Conference. At Berkeley, he said, the Covid-19 outbreak in frat houses began with students who were not members of Greek life and were only renting rooms for the summer. At Washington, fraternity leaders were in close contact with campus administrators and public-health officials, and “worked very quickly to get the situation under control,” Horras said.

Horras is supportive of enforcing public-health measures in off-campus fraternity houses, as long as enforcement is “fairly applied to all students.”

Beyond Fraternities

Greek houses aren’t the only places where students are congregating off campus. In expensive cities like Seattle and Boston, students often crowd into small apartments in order to afford rent. Colleges might be able to enforce a one-student-per-room policy in dorms, but they have no authority to enforce social distancing in private apartments.

How should a college respond if, say, a student living off campus is exposed to the virus and refuses to stay in? Compton, of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, expects it’ll depend on how serious the behavior is and how much risk it poses to other people.

Colleges and off-campus housing complexes do have relationships, Compton said. Some off-campus apartment managers have already been calling universities complaining about illicit student behavior. What’s even harder to regulate: off-campus houses that are privately owned, not managed by companies.

Some colleges are strengthening their partnerships with local police departments. Devin Cramer, assistant dean of students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said when law-enforcement agencies send reports about student behavior to the university, administrators will determine whether public-health rules were violated. Students found responsible for violating new Covid-19 policies added to the campus-conduct code could face “a range of consequences,” Cramer wrote in an emailed statement.

In making decisions, he said, officials will consider the “severity, intentionality, recklessness, harm caused,” and how often a student misbehaved. If an educational approach doesn’t work, Cramer said, punishments could include probation, a ban from certain areas of campus, and suspension.

But some local sheriffs have declined to enforce mask-wearing or other public-health restrictions. What’s more, the campus and local police might be particularly sensitive this fall about swooping in to break up parties or enforce mask-wearing, given antipolice protests and calls for police defunding provoked by George Floyd’s killing while in Minneapolis police custody.

The head of a national group of campus law-enforcement officers said that even without that backdrop, his staff would be focusing more on educating than issuing citations. “Even if the general unrest and protests hadn’t occurred, we wouldn’t consider this an enforcement-type issue. It’s a public-health issue,” said Eric Plummer, associate vice president for public safety and chief of police for the University of North Dakota.

His office at North Dakota will be helping students who live off campus and don’t have a safe place to isolate or quarantine move to a designated hotel and get food delivered, said Plummer, who is also chair of the domestic-preparedness committee for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.

Private universities have more leverage to take a no-tolerance approach off campus, Compton said. For public colleges, if state and local health officials haven’t enacted restrictions on gathering sizes, public colleges might find it harder to put sanctions in place, she said. Instead, institutions might have to structure their Covid-19 rules as guidelines, which don’t have teeth behind them.

Scott Schneider, a higher-education lawyer based in Texas, said he believes public colleges are within their rights to enforce public-health rules off campus, as long as they inform students of the restrictions and apply them equally to everyone. If students at an outdoor fraternity event are punished for gathering, but students at a similarly sized rally are not, that might be a problem, he said.

Schneider has seen some private colleges that are planning to punish students quickly, after a short period of gathering information, when they seriously misbehave. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, is requiring every student to sign a behavioral contract, which gives the university more flexibility to act fast when a student is putting others at risk. If a review panel of faculty and staff members decides it’s necessary, students may be temporarily barred from campus, and referred to the student-conduct office for further discipline.

Public colleges, though, must afford students more due process when they’re accused of violating rules, Schneider said. Student-conduct proceedings can take weeks.

Messaging and Enforcement

When students living off campus defy public-health warnings, “there’s only so much that can be done, in all honesty,” said Davidson H. Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at Boston University who is among the officials advising his university on reopening plans.

While its hands may be tied in enforcing behavior off campus, the university may be able to limit, to some extent, the infections students bring to campus. It could require students to attest, using an app on their phone, that they’re symptom-free, haven’t been in contact with an infected person, and have been tested recently, Hamer said. Under the system the university is working on, students would need a green light every day to enter a campus building.

All summer, Matthew Gregory, dean of students at Texas Tech University, has been troubled by reports of parties breaking out near college campuses despite all the steps colleges are taking to prevent them. “These schools had enforcement plans in place and campaigns about social distancing. They seemed to be doing all the right things,” he said. “I don’t think an enforcement strategy is the be-all-end-all way to do it.”

Students, Gregory said, are civicly conscious and are more likely to be swayed by messages from student leaders reminding them of how their actions could affect medically vulnerable peers and faculty members.

“Eliciting the active involvement and encouragement from peers is far more effective than me begging students to wear their masks,” he said. Still, if a party breaks out an off-campus house, in violation of state and local laws, the Lubbock police are likely to be the ones responding. Police officers could issue $250 citations, although “they’d prefer not to have to go that route,” he said.

The data are clear: Student gatherings off campus are contributing to the spread of Covid-19. Still, Compton cautioned against a narrative focused on hard-partying students: “Ultimately what I’m most worried about is, if campuses have to close again, that students will be blamed.”

In an Atlantic essay published on Tuesday, a psychiatrist and an epidemiologist wrote that “shaming and threatening students will only obstruct public-health efforts.”

Compton doesn’t believe colleges are asking students to do the impossible. But students who have been stuck at home for months, away from their friends, are understandably eager to see one another. And the solutions campuses often use to keep students on campus and away from parties, like concerts and movie nights, might not be possible during the pandemic, she said.

“We build up this idea of what the college experience should be,” she said. “It’s hard to walk away from that.”