POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Consider the following items:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday that it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

The shift signaled enormous challenges ahead for those in higher education who are pushing for professors and students to be able to meet on campus. Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university.

They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, they said.

The remote-teaching order for undergraduate classes will take effect Wednesday, and the university will take steps to allow students to leave campus housing without financial penalty. The actions are likely to reverberate in North Carolina and beyond, including other major public universities that have hopes of playing college football in the fall. UNC-Chapel Hill’s Tar Heels teams play in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

[Anderson, Nick. “UNC-Chapel Hill Pivots to Remote Teaching after Coronavirus Spreads among Students during First Week of Class.” Washington Post 17 Aug. 2020.]

 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is being rocked by a series of COVID-19 infection clusters  just one week after the start of classes. Four such clusters — defined by the state Department of Health and Human Services as five or more infections in a related area — have been identified in student housing since Friday.

But no one looking at the school’s COVID-19 dashboard Monday afternoon would know any of that.

When the school launched the dashboard it gave daily updates, just as the DHHS dashboard continues to do. But last month the university switched to weekly updates, saying it was concerned even anonymized, numbers-only reports about on-campus infections could compromise student privacy. That claim was challenged by faculty, students and government transparency advocates, but the school held to the decision as students returned to dorms and classrooms.

The result: Students, their families and the surrounding community can’t determine the precise number of infections on campus, even as the university issued several Alert Carolina updates on infection clusters throughout the weekend. The school has also declined to provide numbers for the infections in each cluster.

The problem is hardly unique to Chapel Hill. Although more sparse and infrequently updated, the school’s dashboard is among the more comprehensive in the UNC system.

COVID-19 dashboards are not even operational at some of the system’s 17 campuses. Where they do exist, updates are not uniform and the detail given by each school varies wildly. Some of the schools’ infection numbers appear to only count those diagnoses through on-campus tests; others count students, faculty, staff and subcontractors on campus wherever they are tested.

[Killian, Joe. “As COVID Clusters Mount, University Dashboards Provide Incomplete and Outdated Information.”  NC Policy Watch 17 Aug. 2020.]

 

In the newsroom of the Daily Tar Heel — the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — seniors Anna Pogarcic and Paige Masten were among about half-dozen student editors gathered Sunday evening to put together the next day’s newspaper, which included an editorial excoriating the university for how it has handled the return of in-person classes.

When Masten, the paper’s opinion editor, went to lay out the piece, the online headline she’d written wouldn’t fit. But there was a pointed message she wanted to convey.

She called out to Pogarcic, the paper’s editor in chief: “Anna, can I use ‘clusterf‐‐–’ in a headline?”

The headline was fitting, in part because of the wordplay, Pogarcic told The Washington Post. Clusters of coronavirus cases had popped up on campus since UNC started in-person classes last week, becoming one of the largest schools in the nation to bring students back to campus.

But the headline on the editorial also worked because, Pogarcic said, “It is a mess. And I said, ‘You know what? Go for it. Print news, raise hell.’”

“I felt like I had a responsibility to use it, almost,” Masten said.

Images of the Daily Tar Heel’s profane headline were shared widely online, many lauding the student journalists for not mincing words. The online version of the editorial included a definition for the noun they printed on the page: “Complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation.” 

[Firozi, Paulina. “UNC-Chapel Hill’s Student Newspaper Sums Up School’s Coronavirus Policy with an F-Bomb.” Washington Post 18 Aug. 2020]

 

 

If any administrator at UNC attempts to make an issue out of that headline, he or she will replace the administrator who approved the announcement of the following policy change at Boston University as this month’s winner of the “Too Stupid to Lead” award:

Boston University responded to criticism it received on social media on Wednesday after announcing it would award posthumous degrees to students who die.

In a move that even faculty are calling tone-deaf, the college announced on June 12 that effective this fall, students who die before completing their degree program will receive their degrees posthumously.

The announcement comes as the university prepares to reopen this fall amid the coronavirus pandemic. According to the Daily Free Press, BU’s student newspaper, the university did not formally announce the new policy, nor did it notify the community.

“This policy is not a result of the pandemic and we sincerely apologize for the insensitive timing of the announcement,” Colin Riley, a university spokesman, told the Boston Globe.

Boston University has issued posthumous degrees in the past, but it had no official policy prior to the announcement, the Daily Free Press reports.

Merry White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University who attended a rally on

Thursday about the college’s decision to reopen in the fall, said the college has been “kind of tone-deaf.”

“They have been sort of digging themselves into a hole on this matter,” White said, referring to the administration’s response to the health crisis, including its plans for reopening.

[Stening, Tanner. “Boston University Apologizes for ‘Insensitive Timing’ of Policy Awarding Posthumous Degrees to Students Who Die before Graduating.” MassDaily 14 Aug. 2020.]