In 2020 campus life is masked, distant, and strictly monitored

BOSTON — It was the fourth day of her freshman year at Northeastern University, and Maddie Harrington still hadn’t met anyone living in her dorm.

Harrington, 18, said people weren’t making much of an effort to say hello in the hallways since COVID-19 safety protocols restrict freshmen from entering anyone’s dorm room but their own. Worse, she knew that if she found herself caught up in camaraderie and decided to visit someone else’s room, she could be dismissed from school and sent home just as eleven other freshmen were after being found in a hotel-turned-dorm-room on Sept. 4. In a show of force, the university kept the students’ over $36,000 fall tuition — before they had even completed their first week of college.

Harrington, from Gloucester, Massachusetts, said the traditional ways to meet people on campus, like dining halls and libraries, have disappeared. Now, to make a friend, freshmen must approach peers standing next to them in a line to pick up a cafeteria meal. But Harrington said it’s difficult to put herself out there, given that such introductions now involve weighing potential health risks.

Maddie Harrington, 18, is a freshman getting used to campus life under strict COVID-19 safety guidelines. (Ben Kesslen / NBC News)
Maddie Harrington, 18, is a freshman getting used to campus life under strict COVID-19 safety guidelines. (Ben Kesslen / NBC News)

Students at hundreds of colleges around the country who returned to campus in August and September are grappling with a new normal. College life, 2020 style, is theoretically devoid of roaming free, party-hopping and congregating in the dining hall. At Northeastern, home to around 20,000 undergraduates, the administration is gambling on staying open during the pandemic by implementing a complicated hybrid remote and in-person plan, strict social distancing and masking rules, and mandatory testing guidelines that require students to be tested every three days. In other words, student life as we once knew it has been sacrificed to the hope of keeping the campus, and the school’s bank accounts, alive.

At Northeastern, classes are offered both in person and online, depending on density restrictions, and students get to choose week-to-week whether they want to be in class or virtual. Nearby Boston University has cobbled together a similarly convoluted hybrid model paired with a testing regimen. At Harvard all instruction this fall is remote, whether students are on campus or off. In July, Berklee College of Music threw up its hands and announced the school would be fully remote for the fall. The only consensus was that there was no perfect solution.

When Boston locked down in mid-March and campus closed, then-freshman Masako Donahue, 19, went home to Tokyo. She continued to take class online, but waking up at 3, 4 or 5 a.m. for classes because of the time difference quickly made those classes untenable. “There was no doubt I wanted to go back to campus.”

Donahue called the new campus safety measures, like a bi-weekly testing requirement and steep consequences for breaking the school’s COVID-19 pledge, “a bit extreme” but understands why they exist. She feels bad for the 11 dismissed students, who were all supposed to be studying abroad their first semester but instead found themselves housed in a Boston Westin Hotel far from the main campus.

“I think the school suspended them to show others they aren’t being lenient,” she said. It worked. “It scared us for sure.”

The guidelines meant to keep students on campus, however, are also taking away campus culture, Donahue said. “Our freshman year, we went to frat parties. Yesterday, we had to go to a field.”

Maya Osman, another sophomore at Northeastern and a friend of Donahue’s, decided to opt-out of dorm life this year altogether.

“I was supposed to be in a single, which would not be good for my mental health,” she said. “My parents live 20 minutes away and I’m saving $17,000 by living at home.”

Decisions like Osman’s, to save money and stay home, are in part why schools like Northeastern have invested so much in reopening. It’s a simple calculation: Without students on campus, the university loses money. The pandemic and subsequent economic turmoil have destabilized higher education budgets, especially when private universities like Northeastern are able to charge each student thousands in residency requirements. And the decision affects more than just students, since local economies suffer without students and campus staff discover their jobs are in jeopardy.

Gerald Cotten helps his daughter Briana Cotten, who is an RA and studies biology, load a moving bin to move into East Village on the campus of Northeastern on Aug. 19, 2020. (Matthew Modoono / Northeaster University)
Gerald Cotten helps his daughter Briana Cotten, who is an RA and studies biology, load a moving bin to move into East Village on the campus of Northeastern on Aug. 19, 2020. (Matthew Modoono / Northeaster University)

Despite saving money on housing costs, Osman still wonders why she is paying more than $55,000 in tuition and fees when all of her classes happen to be online, and she has to make an appointment to use the library.

In person, the lengths that Northeastern is going stay open have turned the campus into a pale shadow of what campus once was. On weekday afternoons long lines now stretch around the school’s campus as students, staff and faculty wait to enter Cabot Cage, a gymnasium turned large-scale testing facility. In addition to the mandatory student testing requirements, faculty and staff members and contract workers who visit the Boston campus more than once a week are tested twice a week. Under the new rules students can’t take even a sip of water during class. Entire floors of books have been removed from the library to make way for single-person carrols spaced apart. Masks must be kept on outdoors, even when socially distanced.

In August, the school sent letters threatening to rescind admission to 115 incoming freshmen who responded to an Instagram poll saying they would party on campus this fall. The school set up a hotline where students can report their peers for breaking social distance guidelines. On campus, students mostly walk around solo, with earbuds, visibly nervous. Indoors, they eat alone, at tables set for one and purposefully too far apart to really hold a conversation. Clubs are online.The campus center is mostly empty.

Osman described the COVID-19 protocols as “a little bit prison-esque.”

Jill Jacobson, 21, a graduate student from North Carolina who got her undergraduate degree at Northeastern, worries about the long-term sociological impact of the new guidelines.

“The university has a massive infrastructure to report rule breaking,” she said. “That sort of whistle-blowing and surveillance creates tension, hostility and distrust. We spend a year hiding, and I’m not sure it will be easy to come back from that.”

Jill Jacobson, 21, a graduate student at Northeastern University. (Ben Kesslen / NBC News)
Jill Jacobson, 21, a graduate student at Northeastern University. (Ben Kesslen / NBC News)

Jacobson’s fears are backed up by experts, who say that shaming and blaming won’t be an effective tool to get college students to stay safe, and could actually make things worse.

Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, previously told NBC News that it is “unconscionable” for administrators to blame students for the “failure of their own public health plan.”

“They’re not going to tell anyone that they attended a party, because they’ve been told they’re going to be thrown off campus,” she said, adding that colleges should instead focus on a harm-reduction model.

The university seems to be “practicing wishful thinking” in their reopening plan, Jacobson said, adding that she’s taking classes in person on campus nonetheless, because her education can’t be replicated online.

Northeastern insists that it wants to “create a culture of care” that helps the entire community stay healthy.

“We have encouraged people to call and report things. We have also encouraged people to engage someone walking down the street who is not wearing their mask properly,” said Madeleine Estabrook, the school’s senior vice chancellor of student affairs.

Estabrook said she isn’t focused on what students can’t do, but instead on helping them find new and safe ways to get to know one another and build a community, pointing to a socially distanced circle of students on their laptops, all playing cards together virtually.

As of Thursday, Northeastern said that it had only 41 positive cases in 72,819 tests, and that its seven-day average positive test rate was a low 0.06 percent.

Cabot Testing Center (Ruby Wallau / Northeastern University)
Cabot Testing Center (Ruby Wallau / Northeastern University)

Still, the school took some heat from the student body, faculty, and community for their reopening plan. In a July city council meeting, UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents hospitality workers in Boston, raised concerns that the school’s plan to house students in hotels would create additional risk for hotel staff, according to the school’s independent student newspaper, The Huntington News.

More criticism came when a now-removed webpage that appeared in August promised a forthcoming book by university President Joseph Aoun titled, “We Will Remain: A University, a Global Crisis, and Lessons of Leadership.” Students lambasted the book’s premise online, saying the school was prioritizing brand building over their own safety. In a description, the book said Aoun’s leadership “offers lessons for every organization” and framed his management of the crisis as complete and finished. MIT Press told NBC News a “data error” was responsible for publishing a proposal that has since been killed. A Northeastern spokesperson said plainly there is “no book,” but some students are still wondering whose interests are at the heart of the school’s plan.

In line to get a mandated COVID test, Damla Cehreli, a graduate student from California who uses they/they pronouns, said they have no interest in being on campus. Cehreli is skeptical of the school’s decision to offer in-person instruction, especially since, as an urban campus, it’s not in anything near a closed environment, the way some smaller, rural schools might be.

Cehreli, 23, comes to campus only to get the mandatory COVID-19 tests and then leaves immediately.

Like many Northeastern students, they feel a mix of sympathy, pity and understanding about the decision to dismiss 11 students who were trying to get to know one another.

“If the school encouraged everyone to go remote,” Cehreli said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

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