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Nate Palmer for NPR
NPR
Can Military Academies Serve As A Road Map For Reopening Colleges?
Sequoia Carrillo
August 13, 2020
In Annapolis, Md., young men and women in crisp white uniforms and
white masks are doing what students here have been doing for 175 years
— taking their first steps to becoming officers in the U.S. Navy.
These exercises are a part of the traditional "plebe summer," an
intensive crash course that prepares first-year students for the
transition to military life. They learn how to salute and march as a
unit, along with lots of new lingo: floors are called "decks," toilets
are "heads," and the students are "midshipmen."
Unlike civilian colleges, the U.S. military academies have a mandate —
they owe about 1,000 young officers to the armed forces every spring.
When the academies were forced to send students home in March, they
immediately began planning to bring students back.
"The attitude is 'We do not have a choice. We must make this work,' "
explained Andrew Phillips, academic dean of the United States Naval
Academy.
Classes officially begin next week in an online format. Phillips says
they'll build their way back to in-person classes as quickly as
possible.
And it's not just Annapolis. At the Army's West Point campus in New
York state, and the Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs,
educators and students are, for the most part, settling back in to
their daily routines.
A group of scientists and mathematicians at the Air Force Academy helped make it happen. They're called the Pandemic Math Team.
"We were sitting around one day in March like 'we can do this,' " says
Maj. Erin Almand, an assistant professor of biology at the academy.
"It's not a technically hard thing to screen people for this virus."
So Almand and her colleagues on the team shared their findings and
recommendations with the other service academies. Their crowning
achievement? The "fizzle equation."
The "fizzle equation" says that in a closed population — like the
service academies — you have to do a certain amount of weekly testing
to catch an outbreak in time for it to "fizzle out." For the Air Force
Academy, its calculations determined that means testing 15% of military
staff and students weekly — or about 750 tests a week.
"Our situation is admittedly easier than a lot of universities because
we can do the testing in a matter of hours, rather than having to send
results off and wait for a couple of days," says Col. Doug Wickert, a
professor of aeronautics who also heads the Pandemic Math Team.
The school can have test results back so quickly because they're
running them in-house. Air Force Academy professors volunteer their
time each week to run the tests. The other academies are processing
tests at nearby military hospitals with similar turnaround times.
(The other two U.S. service academies, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in
New London, Conn., and the Merchant Marine Academy in Nassau County,
N.Y., have much smaller enrollments but are also conducting
surveillance testing on military staff and students.)
The Air Force Academy is using a method called pool testing to decrease
the number of actual tests that must be run each week. Even though the
academy will swab 750 people, it will run only about 90 tests. Each
test will be a group of eight swabs. If one comes back positive then
the academy will retest all the swabs individually.
And that's just the weekly surveillance testing. Students have been
returning to the Colorado Springs campus all summer in waves. Each
wave, or cohort, underwent a two-week quarantine period in their dorm
rooms. Over the course of quarantine they were tested on days 0, 7, 10
and 14.
The Air Force Academy was the first service academy to have all of its
students back, and so far, officials say there has been no community
spread.
At West Point, located 60 miles up the Hudson River from New York City,
cadets have also been arriving all summer. Their arrivals were
choreographed from the moment they stepped back on campus:
"We had arrival times planned, so when they showed up to get dropped
off they were entering their quarantine group," explained West Point's
Commandant, Brig. Gen. Curtis A. Buzzard. Virtually every step was
mapped out in those first two weeks: "Groups had assigned stairwells,
hallways and bathrooms."
On top of the precision and military discipline, West Point is in many
ways made for quarantine. There's a grocery store, an elementary school
and full neighborhoods for teachers and faculty inside its gates.
Cadet Evan Walker says that with all the restrictions, she feels much
safer back on campus than she did while she was home in Houston. "When
I was at home, people were just acting like there was nothing wrong,"
she said. "People refused to wear masks or stay at home, which was kind
of frustrating to me, honestly. So being here — I appreciate it."
In Annapolis, the returning midshipmen are still trickling in — all
students should be out of quarantine by next week. Since the campus is
smaller and more centrally located than West Point's, the restrictions
during quarantine were severe.
"Asking somebody to stay confined to a room for two weeks and not go to
their friends' rooms or go around the campus to see people they haven't
seen in months," says senior Corwin Stites, "is a very difficult thing
to do."
Stites, who's originally from Fayetteville, Ark., is a rising senior at
the Naval Academy. He returned to campus in early July to start his
quarantine period.
He said coming back was a little nerve-wracking, knowing how many
restrictions would be placed on the students. "It seemed to me and a
lot of my classmates that if we came back the chances we would be
allowed to leave again were ... low to none."
But Stites, and other students I spoke with in Annapolis and at West Point, said they knew what they signed up for.
Senior Cameron Kinley is class president and a member of the Navy
football team. He said being back for the long haul isn't so bad
because he had extra time at home with family.
"I'm thankful that we had that time to be home during the quarantine
because that was actually the longest I've been home since I came to
the academy."
Officials at the service academies are hopeful that all the discipline,
all the testing, all the restrictions will get them through the year
safely.
Most faculty interviewed were optimistic that their reopening strategy
could transition to civilian universities, but the students — Stites,
Walker and Kinley — aren't so sure.
They said the advantages of the academies: discipline, lack of
individualism, gated campuses — were huge factors in the success so
far. But when thinking about their peers at civilian universities, they
struggle to see it working.
"My little brother is in college, so I understand the procedures that
they're taking," Kinley explained, "but they're nowhere near the
precautions that we're taking at the Naval Academy."
And even then, with all these rules in Annapolis, you can see students
sitting 3 feet away from each other, rather than 6. Students running
without masks stopping briefly to chat. Even retirees walking their
dogs through the open-air campus without masks.
Even with military precision, there are things you can't control.
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