San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FACULTY QUESTION SDSU’S VIRUS RESPONSE
Some professors say president’s judgment poor
It was a one-two punch many people saw coming. But it still shook San Diego State University.
Barely 10 days into the fall semester, SDSU pushed its face-to-face classes online due to a budding COVID-19 outbreak. A short time later, the school’s dorm students were told to go into quarantine during a heat wave.
President Adela de la
Torre saw this as a way to protect students. Some of her faculty described it as an avoidable situation caused by poor leadership. And, in a rarity for SDSU, faculty are publicly and sharply questioning de la Torre’s ability to guide the university through a crisis in which 1,043 of its students have tested positive for COVID-19.
That’s the highest of any college or university in California, says a New York Times survey.
“What was the purpose of putting 2,600 students in dorms? Was it just so they could take a 1-unit lab course?” said philosophy professor Peter Atterton.
“Obviously, they weren’t going to be getting the full ‘freshman experience’ during a time of pandemic. Was this just about bringing in money then? That would be scandalous.”
Faculty from across the university also said that de la Torre — who became SDSU’S first permanently appointed woman and Latino president in 2018 — has not been living up to her promise to be open, visible and accountable, and to deeply involve them in running one of the state’s largest and oldest universities.
“There’s no transparency here. It’s pathetic,” said Scott Kelley, a biology professor.
De la Torre told the Union-tribune that she has tirelessly worked with
faculty to do everything from staunch the outbreak to shape plans for a $3 billion satellite campus in Mission Valley.
“One of the things I think we’ve done is actively try to communicate in a transparent manner,” said de la Torre.
She also dismisses a charge by faculty that she suppresses public dissension, saying, “I have always been an advocate of free speech and academic freedom.”
De la Torre noted that her decision to quarantine dorm students for about 10 days, and to expand virus testing, enabled SDSU to bring the outbreak under control. The school is now considering resuming its small slate of face-to-face classes.
The uproar isn’t unique. University presidents all over the country are being scrutinized for their handling of the pandemic. The animus has been especially strong at the University of Michigan, where faculty expressed a vote of no confidence in President Mark Schlissel partly because of his decisions involving COVID.
Such a vote is not being considered at SDSU. Most faculty are more focused on simply surviving the fall semester.
But the tension is real. And it has been heightened by fears among the faculty that de la Torre will shift large sums of money away from academics to help develop a satellite campus whose centerpiece will be a sports stadium.
Virulent enemy
De la Torre and SDSU began the year with a lot of excitement and success.
A record number of prospective students were hoping to be accepted at SDSU, one of the most popular campuses in the California State University system. The men’s basketball team was on an undefeated streak that was getting national headlines.
And de la Torre was getting praise, in some quarters, for generating support for a satellite campus in Mission Valley that could eventually enable SDSU to greatly expand its enrollment.
But then the coronavirus pandemic hit.
By late March, SDSU, like most universities, was shifting its classes online and moving most students out of dorms. The only ones allowed to stay were deemed to have a special need for housing.
The job of figuring out how to resurrect things in the fall fell to de la Torre, an economist and administrator who had been recruited from UC Davis.
She decided to open about one-third of SDSU’S dorm space, and to offer about 200 classes face to face. The rest would be online. UC San Diego was developing a similar model.
De la Torre says her thinking was influenced by Forest Rohwer, a prominent SDSU virologist who stressed the importance of wearing masks to fight the virus.
She told the U-T on Thursday, “I don’t think anyone anticipated” a big outbreak.
But an outbreak might have been inevitable by the time classes began on Aug. 24.
Unlike many universities, SDSU did not require that students get tested for COVID-19 when they moved into dorms. The school had yet to obtain permission from the CSU to make the tests compulsory — something SDSU did not not make clear to the general public.
SDSU also failed to heavily pressure students to wear masks and practice social distancing as they left campus for College Area, a party neighborhood across the street where other students live.
During the first two weeks of the fall semester, the Union-tribune observed hundreds of students on and off campus milling around, not wearing masks or practicing social distancing. On Pontiac Street, 30 to 35 students jammed up against each other at a house party. Virtually no one wore masks.
Before long, an outbreak was taking place. Shortly before Labor Day, de la Torre ordered a “pause” on faceto-face classes. Then she quarantined dorm students.
Shifting the classes online provided a bit of relief; the biology staff didn’t have all the safety equipment it needed. And they were about to hold lab classes in a poorly ventilated building that Professor Anca Segall and her colleagues called a potential “COVID incubator.”
Still, faculty weren’t appeased. They were worried that the outbreak could spread more deeply on campus, and that de la Torre wasn’t telling them about the situation in a clear, timely, useful way. They also felt they were dealing with a problem that could have been avoided.
The need to make all classes virtual “was absolutely foreseeable” chemistry Professor Chris Harrison said in a Sept. 3 email to the University Senate.
“All of us teaching courses with face-to-face components knew that at some point campus would be shut down, and that we would have to, or should have already, planned for contingencies.
“Would it be one positive COVID case in a lab? Would it be a case of community transmission in the dorms? Would it be exceeding a threshold of positive tests in the student body? ...
“We as a campus community, faculty, staff, and students, need to know how the decisions are being made to open and close campus for face-to-face instruction.”
The editor of the Daily Aztec, the campus newspaper, also has been feeling frustrated about how administrators have been communicating.
“The important information is there — I’ll give SDSU that much credit — it’s just buried under technical jargon and public relations fluff making it hard for students to have a clear understanding of the situation at SDSU and in the College Area,” said Brenden Tuccinardi.
More than 36 percent of the 1,043 students who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 live on campus. But de la Torre said the outbreak was largely the fault of students who lived off campus, notably in College Area. SDSU doesn’t have a legal right to require those students to get tested for COVID-19, and the school has never found a way to tame the party zone.
Jose Reynoso, a liaison for the College Area and its nearly 24,000 residents, came to de la Torre’s defense.
“Even with stringent precautions on campus, some members of the SDSU student body living off campus are simply choosing to exercise their individual rights and liberties over individual responsibility,” said Reynoso. “That’s the reason for the surge.”
Peter Herman, a SDSU literature professor, disagrees. He says de la Torre’s finger pointing is “a way of pushing the blame for the outbreak onto the students.”
“Clearly, they are responsible for their own behavior,” Herman said. “They are all over the age of consent, and are legally adults. They know the risks. But the university is at fault for encouraging students to return, either on campus or in the College Area, and for not instituting the kind of testing program required for a semblance of normalcy.”
SDSU biologist Walter Oechel said “We should have connected better with our off-campus students to get them to understand the importance of their behavior to the community, their families, and to those around them, including those at higher risk of effects from COVID-19.
“We owe this to them and to the community.”
‘Academic arrogance’
And the community — the residents, neighborhoods and businesses surrounding and not far from SDSU — wants action.
“To invite mostly 18-23year-old students back to school and expect them to conduct themselves responsibly is akin to asking a bar full of drunks to practice social distancing. I know, I am a bar owner,” John Haskett, who owns a home in Del Cerro, told the U-T by email.
“It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of their constituents (student body) or a high level academic arrogance that through policy they can manage the unmanageable.”
Stephen Malolepszy of San Diego said in an email, “No teenager or young adult is going to want to spend all day in their apartment with their roommates. They will go out and socialize with friends. The best thing the college could do is put all their classes fully online so students won’t have to be in San Diego.
“Anything less is a poor use of a public institution during a pandemic.”
Community and university leaders have taken much more direct action elsewhere.
Health officials in Boulder, Colo., issued an order Thursday that largely prohibits people from age 18 to 22 from gathering together. They were told to “go about their business individually, but not with anyone else.” The order was meant to help control a COVID-19 outbreak at the University of Colorado, a school that’s the same size as SDSU.
University of Maryland President Daryll Pines made things more personal. He showed up at an off-campus dance bar, waded into a group of students and told them to put on masks.
SDSU hasn’t gone that far. But some of its administrators have been driving the streets of College Area, looking for COVID scoff laws. Will it go any further? The situation will become clearer on Wednesday when SDSU’S University Senate holds a virtual town hall to discuss the school’s response to the pandemic. The Senate is primarily composed of faculty, and campus administrators usually attend.
De la Torre hasn’t announced whether she’ll participate, but she emphasized to the U-T that she’s been deeply involved with Senate activity for months.