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WGBH News
'They Have Lives In Their Hands': Colleges Consider Human Costs, Financial Benefits Of Reopening
By Kirk Carapezza
June 9, 2020
For the past two months, in broadcast interviews and the op-ed pages of
The New York Times, Brown University President Christina Paxson has
argued colleges must reopen in the fall or higher education will
crumble, and dozens — if not hundreds — of colleges will go under.
Testifying before a virtual U.S. Senate committee last week, Paxson
ticked off a series of steps needed to restart in-person classes and
get back on track the country’s 20 million college students.
“Testing and more testing,” the economist and public health expert
said. “Tracing, social distancing, masks and hygiene measures. We’re
changing how we use lecture and classroom spaces. We’re adjusting
living arrangements and dorms. This work is complex. It is
all-consuming. It’s very expensive.”
Whatever the cost, Paxson said, it’s worth it, because so many students
say they’d delay getting their degrees if they couldn’t return to
campus. “That would be bad for them and bad for the country,” she said.
Reopening colleges is not as simple as turning a key. College
presidents, faculty, students and their families are all weighing the
costs and benefits of returning to face-to-face instruction in the
fall, and administrators are also assessing the challenges of testing,
tracing and quarantining. Most colleges are not expected to make their
final decisions about the fall semester until early next month.
In Massachusetts and across the country, colleges are asking the
government for testing help and protection from potential lawsuits.
Some Massachusetts state universities, including UMass Amherst, are
looking at housing students in single dorm rooms and shifting the
calendar so classes start weeks early and students return home before
Thanksgiving. Others are even exploring using apps to track where
students congregate in order to monitor the spread of the virus.
At stake are public health, civil liberties and the economy, so there’s
a lot of pressure on college presidents to get this right.
“They have lives in their hands, and also they have the future of their
college in their hands,” said economist Robert Kelchen, who teaches
higher education finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
Kelchen predicts colleges will only open their most essential classes,
like COVID-related research labs and nursing programs. “And they’ll try
to get some students living on campus if they’re driven by residence
hall revenue,” he said.
While there’s some buzz about digitally tracking students and staff on
campus, Kelchen said that would raise questions about civil liberties
and the limits of technology.
“Will people be willing to turn on the apps?" he asked. "And then also
inside many college classrooms, frankly, cell phone service isn’t that
good. So can you tell where people are congregating in every case?”
Since most colleges’ reopening plans hinge on getting legal
protections, thousands of tests and millions of dollars in state and
federal aid, poorer institutions may be left to scrounge not for apps,
but for masks and disinfectant wipes.
A survey conducted in May by the American Council on Education, an
umbrella group of colleges in Washington, found the majority of college
presidents say reopening in the fall is very or at least somewhat
likely. But presidents of cash-strapped community colleges were less
likely than presidents at four-year public and private colleges to say
they “very likely” would resume in-person classes this fall. Kelchen
said that’s because community college leaders tend to be more realistic
about their risk.
“When most students live off-campus and commute, it’s hard to control
students on campus,” he said. “It’s also hard to space classes out when
there are already classes running on nights and weekends, and they
don’t have the resources to buy the miles of plexiglass and gallons of
hand sanitizer that they need.”
Circumstances are changing so fast — week-to-week, day-to-day — that
few colleges know what they’ll do next exactly. Still, nearly every
day, another college announces its intention to go in-person or stay
online, or offer a mix of both.
Last week, six graduate programs at Harvard — the divinity, education,
design, public health, government and law schools — announced they’ll
keep classes online for the entire fall semester.
“I’ve got a lot of adapting to do this summer and yet I get to stay in
sweatpants, so, you know, there’s pluses to everything,” joked former
homeland officer Juliette Kayyem, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government and is a WGBH News contributor.
Kayyem said the Kennedy School’s decision to stay online was widely expected.
“I think the general tone was that this was more likely than not,” she
said. “Now it’s just sort of ensuring that there’s a sufficient student
pool to teach and that we as a faculty are flexible enough to make
online teaching creative and interesting enough.”
There’s still no word on whether Harvard’s undergraduate college will
stay online or resume residential education in some way. Kayyem said
Harvard’s silence on undergraduate education is telling.
“At its core, despite the fact that it’s a major university, it is
ultimately a college for students, and as you see other colleges begin
to test new systems of calendaring, there’s still a question about
whether Harvard may try to not draw such lines for its undergraduates,”
she said.
“Anything anybody tells you today has to have a big qualifier of
‘depending on what happens between now and the end of August,’” said
Frederic Lawrence, CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. As a former dean
and president at George Washington University and Brandeis University,
over the years, Lawrence has spoken with thousands of alumni of
different schools.
“When I meet a new person, one of the icebreakers I always do is, ‘Just
tell me a memory from your time at the school,’” he explained. “You
know something? Those never take place in a lecture hall. Not a single
time. They take place walking on campus. They take place in a faculty
member's office. They take place in a dormitory, one of those
late-night discussions that changes your life. So those things are
being compromised now.”
During the Senate hearing on how college students can safely return
this fall, Sen. Elizabeth Warren pressed Paxson about the potential
human costs, asking her why Brown and other colleges, which are already
facing lawsuits seeking tuition refunds for the spring semester, are
now requesting new protections against being sued if a low-wage staff
member, elderly professor or young student becomes sick.
“Would it make you more comfortable or less comfortable as the parent of an incoming student?” Warren asked.
“I do not want protection from being careless,” Paxson responded. “The
fact is, though, many institutions are very nervous that even if they
play by the rules scrupulously, that they will still be subject to
class-action lawsuits.”
For now, without a vaccine, all roads back to campus this fall lead through widespread testing, tracing and social distancing.
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