Fall semester is upon us. For roughly one quarter to one third of American higher education their students, faculty, and staff are heading to campus, even as COVID-19 infections and deaths keep rising.
As a result, some number of people spending time at those colleges and universities are getting sick.
What follows is a list of such events. It’s not exhaustive. It’s also a snapshot in time, what I’ve found by the night of August 18, 2020. Tomorrow will doubtless add more.
- Bethel College: 50 people have been infected, “including 43 students and seven faculty members.” 22 are athletes. That’s almost 10% of the student body.
- Boston University: 8 positive cases over the past three weeks. Well, 12 now.
- East Carolina University: 108 positive tests.
- Emerson College: 1 person tested positive.
- North Carolina State University admitted to some number of infections, either 8, 42, or 50, among fraternity and sorority houses.
- Northeast Mississippi Community College: “‘around 300′” students are currently in quarantine… [T]he university has six or seven positive cases since school started last week and that ’25 to 28 employees’ are also under quarantine.” That CNN article adds: “Northeast Mississippi Community College has around 3,200 students, which means around 10% of the student body is being quarantined.”
- Oklahoma State University: 23 infections at a sorority.
- University of Kentucky: 189 infections.
- The University of Tennessee at Knoxville: an infection cluster created by “an off-campus party” yielded numbers something like “at least five connected cases or 20 people in self-isolation.”
- University of Wyoming: 38 cases “among… students and employees.”
- Western Kentucky University: 19 infections for student and staff.
This is unsurprising, given events like this and this and this.
Live from Stillwater, Oklahoma tonight ladies and gentleman.
This is how #OkState students are complying to off campus social distancing guidelines. pic.twitter.com/zKQu1PyMP1
— Ryan Novozinsky (@ryannovo62) August 16, 2020
Villanova University:
These two videos have been circulating on IG and group chats and have been confirmed to be from Villanova University. This is the class of 2024 on their second day of orientation. What do we expect from the rest of the school year? (2nd video below) pic.twitter.com/jXfMQq6hqZ
— Isc (@Is_SanchezC) August 13, 2020
First night back at University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. 😳😳 pic.twitter.com/VAmZ2TLvuz
— Everything Georgia (@GAFollowers) August 16, 2020
Why? We are desperately trying to protect @tuscaloosacity – We are trying to have college football season. We have been running details for 3 straight nights. @TuscaloosaPD is stretched thin between COVID-19 and these details. We will be requesting daytime help from #UAPD. https://t.co/ZHCR2XAk8F
— Walt Maddox (@WaltMaddox) August 16, 2020
(Before I get jumped on, I’m not sharing those stories to blame students nor to exculpate administrators, residence life, municipal authorities, parents, society, or anyone else. That’s not the purpose of this post. Instead I’m trying to understand what’s happening right now, and to use that understanding to better model what comes next. Blame isn’t the theme here.)
This Washington Post article has a good roundup of such stories, as does the Chronicle. This CNN piece is actually the most informative.
Another, related post to come tomorrow as time permits.
(thanks to Rob Gibson, Eric Stoller, Futurexhighered, Lisa Durff, Jan Potvin, and others for links)
I’m worried sick about this …. these data trends are all heading in the wrong direction.
And, with due respect, this is not about “toggling” or “not toggling.”
It is about the transformation of the education sector and how it functions in society.
College sports is — well — gone now, right? Immense financial losses there.
And then, lo and behold, standardized testing (that first and foremost served the needs of the schools for one-hundred years) is going away now, too.
What other institutionalized practices are next? What will the end result look like? Will we even recognize it when it appears?
I apologize if my hermeneutic is overly apocalyptic, but no one saw this coming. They still don’t. Considered as a fitness landscape, even the higher education peaks will be transformed if the entire sector metamorphoses. Covid is a brutal arbiter about whose outcomes we know nothing.
https://hechingerreport.org/how-higher-educations-own-choices-left-it-vulnerable-to-the-pandemic-crisis/
What other processes are next? What other aspects of higher ed will be suspended or fall?
I wonder about libraries and museums. Each has made some shift online, from licensing digital resources to digitizing their own to providing remote services. But if their usage, foot traffic, drops, it’ll be hard not to cut their budgets when the axes swing widely.
Residence life: how will colleges and universities maintain that staff and those offices in last year’s numbers?
Commuters: how’s the parking situation?
My former university students were often sick with the contagious flu virus for at least a week… not many students get the regular flu shot, and then I recently read this chilling article from Clinical Infectious Diseases published 16 years ago.
I’m curious to know how many higher ed institutions had plans in place back then?
“The possibility of release of an aerosolized and/or bioengineered virus must be anticipated and planned for.” 2004.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/39/11/1668/465225
I’ve heard of few, Roxann. I think some involved smaller outbreaks.
I got a lot from this 2004 journal article. It could have been written a couple of months ago, or today. Thanks!
Especially chillling: the immune status of our younger population (i.e., those aged <37 years), with regard to smallpox, probably resembles the status of the Aztec, Inca, and 17th Century American Indian populations, rather than that of a vaccinated people. It is possible, therefore, that each index case would give rise to considerably more than just the 3 secondary cases in the outbreaks that occurred after World War II. As is reported in a consensus statement by smallpox authorities, “A clandestine release of smallpox, even if it infected only 50–100 persons to produce the first generation of cases, would spread rapidly in a now highly susceptible population, expanding by a factor or 10–20 times or more with each generation of cases” [22, p. 2132]. This pattern of spread likely occurred in the population of central Mexico, which, according to Aztec tribute rolls taken before their exposure to smallpox in the early 1500s, was 25 million. The Spanish, in 1620, estimated that the population was 1.6 million, but other factors, including measles, also probably played a role in the decline [37]. Bozzette et al. [35] ascribe a mortality rate of 22.5% to the unimmunized population. However, there are data showing a mortality rate of 52% in an unvaccinated population [38].
Reading this article from 2004 makes me think about the nature of successful policy changes, especially deep-core changes that operate at the level of our cultural myths (i.e., the institutional myths in which we are unable to discern underlying contradictions and absurdities due to our participation in them).
Marginal or peripheral groups (for ex., the epidemiological scientific research community for this 2004 article) lack resources and political leverage to initiate policy changes on the scale necessitated by Covid-19.
Two questions seem to naturally follow from this observation: will these groups reach a threshold of influence necessary to monitor and prevent another similar out break? Will it be in my lifetime? Hopefully, we will answer ‘yes’ to the last question.
But a second question worries me more: Will we like the brave new world, one made safe from Covid? This is the unintended consequences aspect of policy and change, which cannot be anticipated, and where the cure may very well end up being worse than the disease that it was meant to cure.
I entirely agree with your two questions plus. I’m now thinking about the relationship on intergenerational ethics!
Thank you for your awesome comments!
So, judging from these videos, students go to college to party and hook-up. How sad!
Partying on this scale in the middle of an epidemic is not sustainable, nor in anyone’s best interest. Clearly, there must be a better way to transition youth across the fiery gorge on a rope bridge than this!
“I’m not sharing those stories to blame students nor to exculpate administrators, residence life, municipal authorities, parents, society, or anyone else.” If not, then why not? Let me repeat: Partying on this scale in the middle of an epidemic is not sustainable, nor in anyone’s best interest. Clearly, there must be a better way to transition youth across the fiery gorge on a rope bridge than this!
Glen, in that post I was trying to share information about events, rather than judging them. I was hoping to elicit more information from readers.
Assessing what is to be done – that’s another post.