POLITICO NIGHTLY: Four colleges on the fall semester

BY RENUKA RAYASAM AND MYAH WARD

Presented by

PANDEMIC ORIENTATION — The American four-year college experience has always been more than learning the classics, or surviving organic chemistry, or being versed in existential philosophy, or acquiring job skills. Most students who attend college — whether at a big state school or a small liberal arts college — will meet lifelong friends. Some will find their partner. Others will begin their careers. All of them will create cringe-worthy memories they will later try to scrub from social media.

The pandemic is testing whether any of that will happen this fall.

College administrators are scrambling to figure out how to provide their students not just an education but the experience they’ve marketed for years as worth an exorbitant sticker price. Some students are weighing whether to take a gap year.

The Nightly spoke with four college and university leaders from around the country to learn how they are preparing for the pandemic’s first fall semester. At Colby College, students will return to campus in Waterville, Maine, at the end of August where students, faculty and staff will be tested three times in the opening weeks of the semester and twice a week after that. At Rice University in Houston, Texas, students will be tested as soon as they arrive and throughout the semester. They’ll also have smaller classes: In-person classes will be capped at 25 students.

Students at Texas A&M University in College Station will move into their dorms over 10 days starting Aug. 8. More than 50 percent of the university’s classes will be held in person. College football is also restarting in late September, with the Aggies playing a conference only schedule to a half empty stadium. That’s still 55,000 students and fans. Washington University in St. Louis pushed back its start date by a month and is reducing the overall number of students in dorms — everyone will have a single room.

Read our edited conversations below.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Relieved social media wasn’t yet a thing when I was in college. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from AARP:

More than 59,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. With cases continuing to spike across the country, desperate families are demanding Congress take immediate action. More lives can be saved if Congress makes sure necessary precautions are put in place. Take action

TALKING TO THE EXPERTS

Colby College president David Greene:

What is your plan for a student, staff or faculty member testing positive?

We expect that we will have individuals who will test positive. So we’ve begun testing our faculty and staff already. If we have a person who tests positive, they will be immediately brought to the isolation space that we have. We have rented out an entire hotel so that everybody can have their own room and a bathroom if they are in isolation or quarantine. We will have medical care for them. We will immediately do contact tracing. We are hiring a full-time contact tracer on campus to make sure that we’re able to identify other people who might be at risk.

The CDC isn’t recommending widespread testing for school reopenings, but your college is placing a lot of emphasis on this. Why?

I wouldn't be able to reopen the college if we couldn’t do the level of testing that we're doing. It is an essential component. You need to fill out an app every morning that’s going to answer five questions about your health. That’s going to go to a central database. If you don’t have all green, you’re not coming to class, you're not going to work.

The ability to understand the level of the virus on campus is absolutely critical. The ability to identify individuals who are infected before they’re contagious and before they’re symptomatic is absolutely essential to all of this. And that's why the frequency of this testing is so critical. It wouldn’t work if we were doing this once a week, if we were doing this every other week, if we’re only testing people who are symptomatic. I live on campus, and I'll be tested, just like everybody else.

Do you think that some colleges won't survive the pandemic? How do you avoid becoming one of those?

Colby is very strong and is not struggling. In a normal year, we would have 2,000 students on campus. We have 2,100 students now who have indicated that they’re going to be here this fall. We’re putting $10 million into a combination of testing and other mitigating strategies to protect the community.

Rice University president David Leebron:

How are you going to enforce mask requirements and social distancing, and are you concerned that college students might be irresponsible and gather anyway?

Of course, we’re concerned. I don’t 100 percent buy this description. We don’t have fraternities or sororities at Rice. And we do have a strong, what we call, culture of care.

And we’re going to have serious enforcement. What I said in my letter to the campus was that people found in serious or belligerent or repeated violation of the rules will be separated from the university. We're going to be serious about this, and it can’t be perfect, and you can’t please folks 100 percent of the time, and some of the rules are going to be violated around the edges. This is not about perfection at the end of the day. It is about avoiding widespread bad behaviors.

Are you planning on having some classes outside?

We’re constructing a number of tents and special facilities. In the end, those may be more used for gatherings other than classes. My own thing now is if somebody does want to meet with me in person, then let’s go sit eight feet apart outside on a bench or something.

Texas A&M University president Michael K. Young:

Why was it important to resume college football?

It’s part of the university experience for some of our students. It’s a very critical part of their educational opportunity and experience. Sports presents opportunities for students to develop camaraderie and learn how to support each other.

What happens if there’s an increase in cases?

There's going to be a spike. We are cautiously optimistic if all of our plans stay in place in terms of masks and social distancing and hand sanitation and no large gatherings, it will even out. If we were to start football at the same time that the students are moving in and starting classes, that just kind of doubles the risk. When football occurs, you may have a gathering of sufficient size that again that would be a little bit of an increase. Two increases, if they happen simultaneously, would probably be debilitating and may require us close to the campus down and go entirely online.

Are you worried about students attending parties and letting their guard down?

I don’t know when the bars will be open, but we’re really sort of hoping they won’t be. But here’s where I think the kids learn pretty quickly: When you read the newspaper you see that athletes who came back to campus early, hadn’t seen each other all summer, really excited, get together, have a party. When they came in, six tested positive and the following Monday morning 35 tested positive. Kids will learn from that.

What will you do if a student tests positive for Covid?

We’re not going to test every student. We’re going to have a very robust random testing process, and then a testing process for anybody who feels they’ve been exposed or is symptomatic. We're leaving a fair number of rooms unoccupied so we will be able to isolate students who live on campus. We're also working with local hotels where they have agreed that they release an entire floor to us if we need to isolate.

Washington University in St. Louis provost Beverly Wendland and interim vice chancellor for student affairs Rob Wild:

What do you think students will miss out on most this fall?

Rob Wild: We are a high-touch undergraduate residential experience. Most of our students live in university-owned housing. We have a great Division III athletic tradition. We have many signature events throughout the semester. We’re really good at doing things together and in person. They are going to miss, like we are, the ability to do that.

How are you rethinking the admissions process?

Beverly Wendland: Our admissions office, starting in the spring, took on some very creative and effective mechanisms for virtual visits for students: small group sessions with our dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and other people involved with admissions and academics to help students meet one another, meet our leadership. We’re further honing and refining some of that programming. Because of the difficulty in being able to sit for some of these exams, we have gone test optional for this coming year, but we haven’t determined yet what it will be for the following years.

If more students decide to gap year this year, what does that mean for the high school graduating class of 2021?

Rob Wild: I have one of those class of 2021 high school graduates living in my home, so I’ve been thinking about that on a personal level. We’re heavily recruiting already the class that would enroll next fall, and we will continue to do that.

Muslims pray today in the parking lot of Boomers Stadium in Schaumburg, Ill., to mark the start of Eid al-Adha. | Joshua Lott/Getty Images

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

THE NEXT CORONA SHORTAGE — First it was toilet paper. Then it was cleaning supplies. Now, a new coronavirus-era shortage is threatening the November election: Poll workers.

Recruiting volunteers to check in voters, supply ballots and deal with issues has never been easy for election administrators, Zach Montellaro writes. But in interviews and public statements, more than a dozen election administrators and voting advocates warned that slow poll worker recruitment could be a major vulnerability for the 2020 election.

Election officials across the country are seeing early shortages and scrambling to recruit a new generation of poll workers for Election Day, looking to maintain a volunteer force that has relied heavily on senior citizens in the past — the cohort most vulnerable to the coronavirus. Poll workers are responsible for everything from making sure voters get the right ballots to helping people with issues as they vote, and shortages could add confusion, long lines and delays to an Election Day process that has already been upended by the pandemic.

“We need 39,870 people for Election Day and early voting, and we don’t have anywhere near that. We have 13,021 vacant positions, [about] 32 percent statewide,” said David Garreis, the president of the Maryland Association of Election Officials. “The hardest thing that we have to do in any election is to recruit election judges. And in this year, it's impossible.”

FROM THE HEALTH DESK

MYTHBUSTING — Anthony Fauci repeatedly pushed back on Trump administration claims about the virus during his testimony today before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, health care reporters Alice Miranda Ollstein and David Lim email us. Among Fauci’s fact-checks:

There’s no evidence that protests are causing virus spikes. President Trump has said that protests in Portland and other cities are driving a spike in cases. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) made the same argument today, claiming that Fauci had previously said protests led to increased spread of the virus.

“I didn’t say that, you’re putting words in my month,” Fauci said, adding that crowds of any kind, be they at a concert, bar or protest, are risky for transmission.

High U.S. case counts are not the result of more testing. During the hearing, Trump tweeted the false claim that cases are higher in the U.S. than in Europe because “we do MUCH MORE testing than any other country in the World.” Asked to respond to the tweet, Fauci disagreed, arguing that Europe shut down much more thoroughly earlier this year and waited until cases came way down before reopening. In the U.S., he said, “We really, functionally, shut down only about 50 percent in the sense of the totality of the country” and moved to reopen after “we plateaued at about 20,000 cases a day.” On deciding when and how carefully to reopen, he added, “There were some states that did it very well, and there were some states that did not.”

Kids are not “almost immune” to Covid. As part of his push for schools to reopen in the fall, the president said this week that children are “almost immune” to the virus. Asked to comment on this claim, Fauci said: “When you say a person is immune, that means they’re protected from getting infected. Children can get infected. We know that. Therefore, they are not immune.”

Hydroxychloroquine does not effectively treat Covid. When asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) if hydroxychloroquine could potentially be beneficial given a recent Henry Ford Health System study, Fauci called it a “flawed study” that was “confounded by a number of issues.” Many people in the trial also received steroids, which have been shown to reduce mortality among patients with severe disease. No gold standard trial has shown hydroxychloroquine to be an effective treatment, Fauci said. If a randomized placebo controlled study in the future does show a benefit, Fauci said he would “be the first one to admit it and promote it.”

AROUND THE NATION

SECOND WAVE CRASHING ON JERSEY SHORE — New Jersey was a shining example of how states can flatten the Covid-19 curve. Now, it's on the brink of rolling back its economic reopening, New Jersey health care reporter Sam Sutton writes.

More than four months after coronavirus forced Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy to shut down the state’s retail economy and direct residents to remain at home, swelling case totals in the Garden State have triggered fresh alarm bells.

“We are standing in a very dangerous place," said Murphy during his press briefing today, shortly after announcing that almost 700 people had tested positive for the virus in the previous 24 hours.

House parties in Long Beach Island, Middletown and Stone Harbor were catalysts for sizable outbreaks. The Rutgers University football team has been quarantined after more than a dozen players contracted the virus at an off-campus shindig.

The rate of transmission, a measure of how many people will likely be infected by each new patient, slipped above 1.0 this week and stayed there — which means the virus is now spreading faster than it’s being contained. Today it was 1.35.

 

PUNCHLINES

THE WEEK THAT WAS — Late-night hosts and political cartoonists give their takes on Trump’s proposed postponement of the presidential election, Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony and the future of TikTok, in the latest episode of Punchlines.

ON THE ECONOMY

SHATTERED — Chief economic correspondent Ben White, asked to pick one song to describe where the economy is now, says on the latest episode of POLITICO Dispatch : “I would pick ‘Shattered’ by the Rolling Stones. It’s a real mess.” When will it get better? White offers a few insights about where it could go next.

20200731 Politico Dispatch audio marker

ASK THE AUDIENCE

Nightly asked you: Have you taken up a new hobby or activity because of the pandemic? Here are some of the pictures you sent us.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

260 The number of children and staff who contracted Covid-19 in June after spending four days at a sleep-away camp in Georgia.

PARTING WORDS

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES — One thing is perfectly clear about President Trump’s intensifying calls to postpone the November elections: He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to make it happen.

One thing is less clear, but just as important: Why would Trump even suggest putting off the vote? Unless he plans to occupy the White House illegally, a postponed election wouldn’t keep him in office. In fact, it could well usher in an unelected President Joe Biden, writes Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

That sounds strange, but it’s where the rules would take us if there were no election—if those rules were followed, which is a significant “if.” Here’s how it would work.

A message from AARP:

SENIORS DEMAND ACTION

It is an outrage that more than 59,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. Cases are continuing to spike across the country and Congress must act now to help save lives in these facilities.

Protect nursing home residents with AARP’s five-point plan calling for:
1. Regular, ongoing testing and adequate personal protective equipment (PPE)
2. Transparency focused on daily, public reporting of cases and deaths in facilities; communication with families about discharges and transfers; and, funding accountability.
3. Access to facilitated virtual visitation.
4. Better care for residents through adequate staffing, oversight, and access to in-person formal advocates (called long-term care ombudsmen)
5. No blanket immunity to long-term care facilities related to COVID-19.

Tell Congress to act now to protect the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Take action

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Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam

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