Collegiate conduct key to curbing COVID on campus
UIUC, Loyola lead confab on preparations for fall semester
The University of Illinois Alma Mater is prepared to welcome students back this fall, even as homecoming might be altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Facebook/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
By Ted Cox
Some of the top universities across the Midwest joined Wednesday in looking ahead to the fall semester, with one administrator saying, “Some of it’s going to be familiar, and some of it’s going to be very different” in the midst of the persistent COVID-19 pandemic, but with all insisting they expect to have students on campus.
Leading administrators with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Loyola University Chicago, Michigan State University, and the University of Wisconsin took part Wednesday in a webinar on the topic “What Will College Look Like in the Fall?” organized by the Union League Club of Chicago, the Lincoln Forum, and Politico Illinois. The main emphasis was on the return to campus life, stressing the need for students to take responsibility for curbing the coronavirus, aided in part by a “hybrid” mix of online education and classroom instruction.
“We believe that the residential experience is an absolutely critical component of the education mission of land-grant universities like Illinois,” said UIUC Chancellor Robert Jones. “And we plan to offer as much in-person instruction as we possibly can.”
According to Jones, Illinois is “redefining how the whole university needs to operate,” with space restrictions for health and safety across the campus. He said the university was implementing saliva-based testing capable of processing 10,000 a day, with an accompanying phone app that should help with targeted testing.
Others agreed, while maintaining that campus life will change as students and faculty also have to deal with the demands for social distancing and other measures to mitigate possible transmission of COVID-19. MSU President Samuel Stanley, who began his academic career as a professor of infectious diseases, emphasized the “personal responsibility for helping take care of others,” in wearing masks and observing social distancing, saying, “We have to make sure that every member of our campus community buys into this.” He pointed to South Korea and Singapore as countries that had managed to contain the pandemic, even with concentrated populations.
“We all need to take care of each other if we’re going to be safe on campus,” he said.
“Our advice for the hallways is keep moving, keep distance, and wear a mask,” said Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She added, “Some of it’s going to be familiar, and some of it’s going to be very different.”
Jones said changes were being made to the Illinois Student Conduct Code on “the kind of behavior we expect out of our students” and “the kind of environment we are trying to build in keeping people safe.” He warned of “consequences” for violations.
But Blank urged that threats of punishment were doomed to fail and that positive reinforcement of a “proactive and positive message” would be a better approach, something Jones and Stanley endorsed with an emphasis on students policing themselves to enforce social distancing and the wearing of masks.
“I think we are all are operating from the principle that, if our students make the decision to return to campus, there’s a certain type of behavior that we are going to be expecting of each and every one of them,” Jones said. “They’re not returning to the same kind of university environment that they left in March. And with that comes the responsibility for the social distancing, for wearing masks and getting tests. Those are going to be the absolute requirements.
“I think we are all are operating from the principle that, if our students make the decision to return to campus, there’s a certain type of behavior that we are going to be expecting of each and every one of them”
“We all have to cover each other,” he added. “We have to be responsible for the safety of ourself, but perhaps more importantly for the safety of the other.”
Loyola President Jo Ann Rooney said the university’s Chicago residence halls would all go to single occupancy. Like Jones, she said the university was set on observing all the requirements of the Restore Illinois plan, but she also acknowledged that a city campus presents its own challenges and the additional need to stem outbreaks. “We are also part of our neighborhood and part of Chicago,” Rooney said.
On that note, the university had a new challenge added recently when Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposed a 14-day quarantine for anyone coming to the city from states seeing a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases, such as the Sun Belt states ranging from the Carolinas and Florida to Texas, Arizona, and California. “This is a dynamic situation,” Rooney said, and could well change before students arrive in the fall, but for now Loyola is advising students from those states to observe the quarantine by arriving early. Rooney said Loyola was balancing what’s “legally allowable but medically advisable.”
That could be eased, however, by Loyola’s policy for hybrid instruction, opening classrooms but “always preserving the ability for students to access that online,” she said. That emphasis on personal preference would allow a student arriving with the start of classes to monitor them online for at least the first two weeks.
All were rattled just this week by the Trump administration’s abrupt shift in policy disallowing international students to take online classes, to be enforced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents potentially deporting offenders. “We’re all very much concerned about this,” Jones said, UIUC most of all as it has had the largest population of Chinese students in the country for years. But he added that the hybrid classes offering both classroom and online instruction “should allow us to continue to enroll international students,” while a lawsuit filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could delay implementation of President Trump’s latest xenophobic policy shift. He warned, though, that it already threatened to have a chilling effect on foreign enrollment.
Yet all insisted enrollment for the fall thus far remained strong, with Jones saying Illinois could match its record high from last year topping 50,000 or even surpass it.
Stanley discouraged students from taking a “gap year,” saying, “Maintaining your momentum in your education is incredibly important.”
“Maintaining your momentum in your education is incredibly important.”
The college experience will be altered, however. Blank said travel away from campus and visitors to Madison are being discouraged, and that even family members helping students move in are being limited. “Mom and Dad, don’t plan to visit this semester,” she said.
Which raises the issue of football weekends. With three of the colleges involved in the webinar also members of the Big Ten athletic conference, Jones said one of the prime uncertainties is whether sports will go off as scheduled.
“One of the biggest issues for us is whether there’ll be football in the fall and basketball subsequent to that,” Jones said.
“It’s very fluid,” Stanley agreed, but he emphasized that the Big Ten is “a conference that really cares about student athletes,” and that scholarships would be honored regardless of whether a student decides to play or not in the pandemic.
The Big Ten schools could, however, confront significant lost revenue if big-time sporting events are canceled, as the basketball season was earlier this year. “The costs have already been tremendous,” Jones said, “and we’re just going to have to wait and see how it plays out in the fall.” He added that Illinois had already sustained an $80 million loss overall from last year.
Rooney, meanwhile, said the shift to single occupancy was expected to cost Loyola “tens of millions of dollars.”
“The financial impact has been significant,” Stanley agreed.
Even so, all insisted that the quality of education was sustained with remote education, especially as faculty members have been “raising the skill level on online learning,” as Blanks stated.
Stanley waved off calls for schools to cut tuition with online learning. “Teaching online does not save us money in any way,” he said. “It’s actually a cost” with the need for training and additional computers and other equipment.
All said they expect a hybrid form of learning, mixing classrooms with online instruction, to last beyond the pandemic. Jones pointed out UIUC had been moving classes online for years, which helped the school make a “fairly seamless” transition to remote learning in the spring. He said the hybrid mix is “going to be the norm” for decades.
Blank said it would serve to cast the value of face-to-face instruction in relief, and that recognition of the preciousness of classroom teaching would be “one of the long-term benefits of what is really not a very beneficial situation right now.”
Rooney suggested it was computerized instruction for an increasingly computerized world. “Actually, this gives us the opportunity to prepare them, as we all do, for the world that they’re stepping into,” she said. “We can be nimble and we can be innovative and we be leading a new wave forward.”
Jones stressed the expertise of the faculty, undiminished by the shift to online learning, adding that the issue is “how we leverage our faculty to create innovation,” as with the RapidVent ventilators developed at UIUC earlier this year to deal with COVID-19 patients potentially overrunning hospitals. He said it could lead to “an appreciation” of state universities, especially among the taxpayers and legislators who provide much of their funding.