After two weeks of classes, Duke University appears to have its campus reopening under control.
Just 12 miles away at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it’s been a different story, where rapid outbreaks of COVID-19 led to a campus shutdown.
So far at Duke, where freshmen, sophomores and a few upperclassmen have been allowed back, cases have been low. The university mandated entry testing of all students returning to the Durham area and will continue testing of students and faculty throughout the semester. The school has administered 17,040 tests since August 2, with only 46 total positive cases, according to information released by Duke officials Monday.
Classes, held mostly online, began August 17, with a limited on-campus population. Just a few weeks earlier, on July 26, President Vincent Price announced that only first-year students and sophomores would be allowed to live on campus for the fall semester, leaving many students to rush to find housing off campus in the Durham area. Most seniors, having completed Duke’s three-year campus residency requirement, had already planned to live off campus, but the changes left underclassmen scrambling.
The change was intended to encourage juniors and seniors to stay at home for the fall, according to Mary Pat McMahon, Duke’s vice provost and vice president for student affairs. McMahon recognized that the sudden nature of the announcement, as well as student expectations, may not have produced the intended effect.
“Students were counting on a return to normalcy in the fall,” McMahon told the Duke Chronicle on August 24. “This shift is an acknowledgement that we’re not there yet.”
Reopening hasn’t been completely smooth sailing – in an email to undergraduates on August 18, McMahon and Gary Bennett, vice provost for undergraduate education, wrote that over 100 violations of COVID-19 guidelines had been reported to the Office of Student Conduct. In order to participate in classes or work on campus this semester, Duke students, faculty, and staff were asked to sign the Duke Compact, which includes behavioral expectations and requires participation in testing and mask-wearing.
McMahon and Bennett wrote that two dozen students were referred for “formal education intervention” and seven instances of “more flagrant misconduct and persistent non-compliance” from individuals and groups were under investigation. Possible consequences include disciplinary probation, suspension or removal from campus, or permanent dismissal from Duke. While the Office of Student Conduct cannot release information about individual cases due to privacy laws, students expressed concern after pictures of first-year students hosting outdoor parties on campus, some without masks on, spread on social media.
Despite the abrupt changes to the structure of campus life, Duke’s reopening has gone without the sharp uptick in new cases seen at nearby schools. Both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University have seen massive outbreaks force the closure of their campuses just a few weeks after the beginning of classes. U.N.C.’s positivity rate jumped from 2.8 percent to 13.6 percent in one week, after several clusters (groups of five or more cases) appeared in several residence halls and Greek-affiliated housing. U.N.C. has faced criticism for both its reopening plan, which was deemed “high-risk” by the Centers for Disease Control, as well as its handling of the campus shutdown, which sent students home without mass testing beforehand.
Similar chaos followed campus reopening at N.C. State University in Raleigh, after outbreaks rapidly spread through off-campus apartments and Greek housing. The university moved classes online beginning August 24 after an initial surge in cases and announced that it would gradually close residence halls starting last Wednesday. N.C. State currently has 871 positive cases among students and employees and over 1,000 students in quarantine or isolation off campus. The school’s positivity rate for tests administered the week of August 20 was 10.47 percent.
Duke’s widespread testing and contact tracing, as well as its smaller campus population, have proved to be effective measures against the spread of the virus so far. How ever, if cases begin to increase and resources become strained, as they did at U.N.C. and N.C. State, outbreaks could force the closure of campus.
Editor’s note: Mary Steurer, a senior at the University of Notre Dame, and Ann Gehan, a senior at Duke University, were interns at the Concord Monitor this summer. Each wrote an article for the “Monitor” about the return to campus life at their respective schools in the COVID era.