That’s never stopped CCers from debating anything. In fact, it’s a challenge!
Purdue is signaling back on campus in the Fall with lots of changes:
TO THE PEOPLE OF PURDUE:
The global pandemic which has altered every previous reality of daily life has, of course, inflicted great harm on the nation’s colleges and universities. American higher education, often criticized for its antiquated ways and its slowness to change them, has improvised and responded with admirable, even amazing alacrity to enable students to finish this semester with the progress they anticipated.
The central question now, assuming governmental authorities permit reopening of our schools by the customary August start dates, is should schools do so, and with what new rules and practices. Purdue University, for its part, intends to accept students on campus in typical numbers this fall, sober about the certain problems that the COVID-19 virus represents, but determined not to surrender helplessly to those difficulties but to tackle and manage them aggressively and creatively.
Institutions committed to the on-campus educational experience face special difficulties in returning our operations to anything like their previous arrangements. At Purdue, we have pursued a conscious policy that promotes density of our population. Our campus master plan aims at bringing people more closely together. Our housing policies, with significant success, have been designed to encourage on-campus living. And there are far more of us; we have grown our entering classes, both undergraduate and graduate, by some 25%, while investing heavily in programs like learning communities that foster higher retention and graduation.
There were sound reasons for these steps. Serving more students is our most worthy social mission. Making the campus more convenient and walkable likewise has obvious merits. Most important, all the evidence reveals that students who live and spend more of their time on campus succeed academically at higher rates. The learning experience is enhanced not only by being closer to faculty, labs, and classrooms, but also by being closer to other students, especially those from different backgrounds.
Now, sadly and ironically, the very density we have consciously fostered is, at least for the moment, our enemy. Distance between people, that is, less density, is now the overriding societal imperative. It could be argued that a college campus will be among the most difficult places to reopen for previously regular activities.
But in other respects, a place like Purdue may be in better position to resume its mission. Our campus community, a “city” of 50,000+ people, is highly unusual in its makeup. At least 80% of our population is made up of young people, say, 35 and under. All data to date tell us that the COVID-19 virus, while it transmits rapidly in this age group, poses close to zero lethal threat to them.
Meanwhile, the virus has proven to be a serious danger to other, older demographic groups, especially those with underlying health problems. The roughly 20% of our Purdue community who are over 35 years old contains a significant number of people with diabetes, asthma, hypertension, and other ailments which together comprise a very high percentage of the fatal and most severe COVID-19 cases.
We will consider new policies and practices that keep these groups separate, or minimize contact between them. Literally, our students pose a far greater danger to others than the virus poses to them. We all have a role, and a responsibility, in ensuring the health of the Purdue community.
The approaches below are preliminary, meant to be illustrative of the objectives we will pursue. View them as examples, likely to be replaced by better ideas as we identify and validate them.
They could include spreading out classes across days and times to reduce their size, more use of online instruction for on-campus students, virtualizing laboratory work, and similar steps.
We will look to protect the more vulnerable members of our community by allowing (or requiring, if necessary) them to work remotely. Like the rest of society, we are learning a lot right now about which jobs are most amenable to remote work, and about new and better ways to do such work.
We intend to know as much as possible about the viral health status of our community. This could include pre-testing of students and staff before arrival in August, for both infection and post-infection immunity through antibodies. It will include a robust testing system during the school year, using Purdue’s own BSL-2 level laboratory for fast results. Anyone showing symptoms will be tested promptly, and quarantined if positive, in space we will set aside for that purpose.
We expect to be able to trace proximate and/or frequent contacts of those who test positive. Contacts in the vulnerable categories will be asked to self-quarantine for the recommended period, currently 14 days. Those in the young, least vulnerable group will be tested, quarantined if positive, or checked regularly for symptoms if negative for both antibodies and the virus.
Again, these concepts are preliminary, intended mainly to illustrate an overall, data-driven and research-based strategy, and to invite suggestions for their modification or exclusion in favor of better actions. They will be augmented by a host of other changes, such as an indefinite prohibition on gatherings above a specified size, continued limitations on visitors to and travel away from campus, required use of face coverings and other protective equipment, frequent if not daily deep cleaning of facilities, and so forth.
Whatever its eventual components, a return-to-operations strategy is undergirded by a fundamental conviction that even a phenomenon as menacing as COVID-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life. Like most sudden and alarming developments, its dangers are graphic, expressed in tragic individual cases, and immediate; the costs of addressing it are less visible, more diffuse, and longer-term. It is a huge and daunting problem, but the Purdue way has always been to tackle problems, not hide from them.
Closing down our entire society, including our university, was a correct and necessary step. It has had invaluable results. But like any action so drastic, it has come at extraordinary costs, as much human as economic, and at some point, clearly before next fall, those will begin to vastly outweigh the benefits of its continuance. Interrupting and postponing the education of tomorrow’s leaders for another entire semester or year, is one of many such costs. So is permanently damaging the careers and lives of those who have made teaching and research their life’s work, and those who support them in that endeavor.
The COVID-19 virus will remain a fact of life this autumn. Natural immunity, which has been slowed by the shutdown, will not yet have fully developed. No vaccine can be counted on until 2021 at the soonest. It is unclear what course other schools will choose, but Purdue will employ every measure we can adopt or devise to manage this challenge with maximum safety for every member of the Boilermaker family, while proceeding with the noble and essential mission for which our institution stands.
Sincerely,
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.
President
That’s a good letter ^^
Faculty in many subjects did not have good non-faculty job prospects in their field to begin with.
Google “purdue overcrowding”.
Telling someone to just change career is hard, especially during 20% + unemployment. But i do not see academia has a harder time doing so than the rest. They are all smart and educated, they should have the same or better chance of switching as any other 40+, I think.
My husband’s research labs are in Princeton and in the Bay Area. He said they usually get “rejects” from academia (PhD graduates), especially “rejects” from top 10/20 universities. But now a couple of them are willing to commit and actively asking for a permanent spot. Before the crisis, those 2 weren’t committing when given an unofficial offer. Unfortunately his labs also have a hiring freeze.
It’s a very fluid and situational process. College presidents are going to be in between a rock and a hard place. Every location is unique. Size and facilities are individual as well. It won’t be one size fits all.
Make the decision to go back and it doesn’t go well. Job on the line.
Make the decision to stay in a remote learning environment, the economic consequences could be staggering. Job on the line.
No one seems to want to be first into the breech and all are waiting for more data.
Side question. Does anyone have any insight as to major cities and public transportation. I hear that subways are still crowded in nyc due to reduced schedules. This daily volume of people forced into close quarters on a bus, subway or trolly seem more problematic to me than some loosening seen in other places.
Interesting letter from UPenn. I expect many of the internationals admitted there will consider their options in other countries with open universities before considering a gap year.
Tenured faculty won’t be out of a job unless their entire department is eliminated by the college’s administration. That did happen at some colleges in 2008. But they certainly aren’t going to volunteer to quit so this year’s high school seniors can have a full, on campus experience as college freshmen, so whether or not they’re employable outside of academia and how employable they may or may not be doesn’t really matter.
I wonder why Purdue decided to make a statement when most other schools have said they are going to wait a little longer. Most have said that the timeline to decide (or even, really, to comment any further) looks more like updates coming in June.
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I have to be honest, if antibodies do actually provide some immunity, cities like NY that completely mismanaged this process in the early stages, and still have citizens packed into trains and buses, may be the only places open if we get a second wave of the virus.
Our son does not want to do a semester that ends up online. He is doing online high school now and doesn’t want that for college. If it looks like that’s what will be happening, he wants a gap year. He isn’t scared of the virus. I have a healthy respect for the damage it can cause a person as I have immune deficiency and personally have to err on the side of caution for myself because of that. I don’t want him to have to take a gap year but I also am not psyched with the idea of him on campus with the virus springing up like it did this spring and is doing now. I would like to see robust testing, antibody testing, contact tracing, etc in place in the region of the country where we live and where he will go to school so that I can imagine a way the virus can be semi-controlled while he goes to college. I don’t see us there yet. I am waiting to see how things go but we will be asking about deferral and DS at this time wants to defer at least until January if not a year.
And I hope we can get the antibody test because I think there is a fair chance we all had it already and if so, that would likely change how we felt (assuming that confers immunity that will last for some time not be rapidly transient).
Boiler up! Very impressive! I like their leadership and outlook.
Will all these gap years and deferrals essentially bankrupt schools? I’m still struggling to come up with practical things a student can do during a gap year if people are worried about contamination/infection situations.
It will be interesting to see how schools manage requests for gap years. It may be the case that not all gap years could be approved (assuming a much larger number of requests).
Well Cal State Fullerton is first to announce fall online
@airway1 It was mentioned either on this thread or another that CS Fullerton is mostly a commuter school so I don’t think their announcing online fall will mean much for residential colleges.
In the San Francisco bay area, BART ridership is down 93% or so. Weekday service has been cut in half, and they want people to wear masks while riding.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225 (has daily percentage drops compared to normal)
BART claims that the most crowded cars in the morning commute have only 20 people in them (each car has 56-60 seats, and 200 person crush loads were common in pre-virus times).
Public transport is wide open in SoCal, but then it is most days. To many people driving their Teslas with biohazard filters. 