Joseph E. Aoun, the President of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. said this week in the Washington Post that “consulting with epidemiologists, biologists and network scientists on our faculty…. convinced us that bringing students back to the university would be crucial — not because the covid-19 virus isn’t a serious, highly transmissible threat, but because it is.”
My friend Bob Comeau went to Northeastern and graduated in time to be in the Peace Corps with me in 1965. It’s the first I’d heard of a college built on experiential, “coop” learning—all students worked half-time in jobs related to their academic majors. Bob commuted, worked, and played baseball. The home campus is now primarily residential and has become a full-on research university, but President Aoun still emphasizes experiential education and relations with the home campus neighborhood.
Aoun and his university are not thinking in terms of getting through the fall semester and having things return to some kind of normal. They think that the Covid-19 is not going away quietly—or soon. It's at least a four-to-five-year problem, and “Universities need to take control of the virus— and show our communities how to do the same.”
Aoun marshals his arguments: 1. Even if a vaccine emerges in the next months, it will take time to produce and distribute it. 2. Only 62% of the population now says they will take the vaccine, and 70% is what science says is needed to grow the “herd immunity.” 3. Low income students were already in a pickle spring term taking online classes, often in bad living conditions without technology. 4. Students are returning to campuses across the country even when classes are online, and many are living in ill-monitored off-campus housing.
Northeastern is now overhauling its campus, improving airflow systems, instituting a continuous cleaning and sanitizing regimen, reducing density in dorms and classrooms, developing strategies for fighting the virus.
The decision to open is “high stakes,” Aoun admits, but Northeastern is a research university, capable of frequent testing of students and faculty, monitoring and tracking disease outbreaks, continuing research on the virus itself. Agree or not—it looks like his student body and their parents are mostly onboard—Aoun and his school are looking for ways to live with and “take control of” Covid-19 way beyond this fall term.
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