On a typical Monday morning, Celia Gale fields questions from a steady flow of students congregating in one of the most popular buildings here on the University of Washington’s main campus, the Husky Union Building.
This Monday, though, as an eerie quiet descended on the partially closed main campus, the college junior spent more time sanitizing her reception counter and keyboards than greeting other students. The outbreak and rapid spread of the coronavirus in Washington State has upended this campus in the final weeks of the quarter, prompting the university to cancel in-person classes through March 20.
The university, which has three Seattle-area campuses, was the first major university in the United States to take such action. Officials announced on March 6 that the university would stay open, but that classes would move online whenever possible to support regional efforts to slow the spread of Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
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.
Stanford University made a similar announcement later the same day, and a growing list of other colleges across the country followed suit. A walk across the sparsely populated main campus in Seattle on Monday gave a glimpse of some of the challenges that other institutions would soon face.
Public-health agencies have cautioned against assembling large groups of people in close quarters. Lecture halls, where students are often crammed together within easy sneezing distance, are obvious hazards, but even small classes can’t provide the six feet of space that’s recommended between people, university officials pointed out.
“It’s pretty empty here today,” Gale said at 9 a.m. from a station flanked by bottles of Purell and boxes of Kleenex. “Every hour, we’re supposed to count the people in the building, and at last count there were 10.”
On a typical day, she said, clusters of students would be studying and chatting in the lobby and eateries, most of which were closed. Most events that had been scheduled for the union this week had also been canceled, she said.
The university’s welcome center was closed on Monday, as campus tours and information sessions that had been scheduled during a peak time for recruiting prospective students were called off through April 10. It’s a problem that’s likely to be replicated around the country as more and more campuses cease operations.
While faculty members were given the option this week of teaching out the quarter online, Gale said all her classes had been canceled. She was waiting to hear whether she’ll have finals online next week. “Honestly, I don’t feel as stressed about finals, because it’s out of my hands,” she said. “We don’t know whether they’re going to be open book, whether they’ll happen at all, or whether they’ll just say your grade is what you’ve done so far.”
Faculty members were told that they could either move their classes online this week or grade students based on the work they’ve done so far. Exams will be conducted online whenever possible.
For Lily Woodard, the coronavirus scare has injected real-life drama into a biological-anthropology course called “Plagues and People.” This week, though, has been relatively laid back. “My professor’s been doing lectures at home in his pj’s,” she said.
Masks and Gloves
Outside, in the central plaza known as Red Square, a student’s voice urging people to vote in Washington’s imminent primary election echoed over the flagstones. Woodard left the ballot-printing desk to track down students in the library or the student union. “We found 20 people,” she said. “Usually on a beautiful day like this, when the cherry blossoms are coming out, this place is packed.”
Her own residence hall is quiet because most students have gone home. “All of the employees are wearing masks and gloves, so it’s kind of unsettling to be around there,” she said.
Nigisti Hailemariam, a blue-gloved custodian working in the student union, said she had been working nonstop sterilizing every touchable surface: drinking-fountain handles, elevator buttons, individual keys on ATM machines.
Tony Colinares, who manages the resource center for student groups, said that normally it has “a manic buzz of activity,” with members of groups like the Husky Winter Sports Club or Women Who Rock making posters and planning presentations. On Monday the center was empty.
With 162 cases and 22 deaths reported as of Monday afternoon, Washington State remains the center of the disease outbreak in the United States. The country’s first case was reported in Washington in January. It involved a patient who had recently returned from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak started in December.
Some of the students interviewed at Washington on Monday seemed relatively unconcerned about coming down with the disease themselves. They pointed out that the most severe cases typically involve elderly people and those with compromised immune systems, and added that most of the initial cases in the state involved a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash.
Still, as of Monday afternoon, more than 500 cases and 19 deaths have been reported in the United States, according to the latest figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, which is tracking the spread of the virus, reported 605 cases and 22 deaths in the United States as of Monday evening.)
It feels pretty safe here. There’s no one around.
The University of Washington’s provost, Mark Richards, and the Faculty Senate chair, Joseph Janes, issued a statement on Friday instructing departments and instructors to “put student health and success first” in deciding how to finish their courses and determine grades. If they feel they can fairly grade students based on the work they’ve done so far, they can calculate and submit numeric grades. If not, instructors can submit grades of credit or no credit for the entire class. Credit grades aren’t included in students’ grade-point averages but can satisfy requirements for graduation and financial aid. Grades of incomplete should be given, they wrote, only if students would have fallen into that category before March 2.
“We ask that you provide your students with maximum flexibility as you accommodate these changes, and that decisions be based upon fairness and what is most supportive of students,” the two officials wrote. “We should seek to minimize anxieties for our students to the extent possible, especially anxieties related to how these actions might impact student progress to degree and future career prospects.”
Takae Goto, a senior who was one of the few people hanging out in the student union’s lounge with friends, has dual majors, in art and psychology. “I’m really upset that the School of Art is giving credit or no credit,” she said. “We’ve worked our butts off and won’t have any grades to show for it.” She hasn’t decided whether she’s going to take her optional psychology final.
Asked whether she was worried about contracting the coronavirus, Goto said she wasn’t. “It feels pretty safe here. There’s no one around.”
Moving Classes Online
As faculty members scrambled to try to move classes, or at least study guides, online, the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning provided tips on remote teaching, including the best ways to use the web-conferencing program Zoom for class discussion.
“Our goal is to make sure that students’ academic work is fairly recognized, and that any disruption does not present a disadvantage to their future academic progress, including admission to their preferred major in the months or years to come,” the center said.
Rich Christie, an associate professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, said he was not sure whether he’d be able to offer a final, because of the challenges some students might face in converting their handwritten equations and graphs to pdf files that can be shared online with him. “I have confidence the young generation can figure this out,” he said, “but if it’s too difficult, I’ll have to cancel the exam.”
Signs posted on the campus warned students against stigmatizing classmates on the basis of the countries they come from. Asian Americans made up a quarter of the undergraduate enrollment on the flagship campus this past fall, and Chinese students make up most of the growing international enrollment here.
A few Asian-American students interviewed on Monday said they hadn’t experienced any of the wariness or hostility that Asian Americans on other campuses have reported on social media as a result of ignorance about how the disease has spread.
“People fall into one or two camps,” Woodard observed. “They’re either losing their minds over this, or they’re completely unconcerned and think everyone’s making way too much out of it.”
