Big bland on campus
No parties, no sports, lots of rules. Colleges struggle to offer a social life along with an education.
On a recent afternoon, Marc Albanese approached two students sitting slightly closer together than 6 feet on one side of a table in the DeSales University Center, and politely asked them to separate a little.
“Don’t worry, you’re fine,” he said, assuring them they weren’t in trouble. It was the first day of class, and he’d had to remind more than a couple other students the same.
As DeSales’ vice president for campus environment, Albanese is in charge of retrofitting the campus against COVID-19 following the school’s decision to invite all students back for the fall. But he can’t catch every violation himself, so inevitably he must rely on an honor system among students — reinforced by free “Salesian Solidarity” wristbands given away in goodie bags.
The Lehigh Valley’s colleges are fairly split on how to approach the fall semester. Moravian College,
Kutztown University, Cedar Crest College and Penn State Lehigh Valley have joined DeSales in going full-throttle, while Muhlenberg College and Lehigh University are only bringing back a select cadre of students, primarily freshmen. East Stroudsburg and Lafayette are going entirely online.
DeSales has invested $1.3 million in its endeavor: equipping classrooms for hybrid learning, replacing every couch on campus with chairs, buying outdoor tents with heat and WiFi, cutting miles of acrylic for podiums and dining tables, stocking sanitization stations in every building, and designating a coronavirus testing suite in the health center with a new, dedicated staff member.
Albanese designed the acrylic partitions bisecting the tables where senior Tristan SzymborskiPratt and junior Gwen Polles sat chatting in the relatively empty dining hall. They’re similar to spit guards, so students can sit across from one another without violating social distancing rules.
For them and other students venturing to campuses this fall, the college experience will have many new norms, scaled back social experiences and far stricter visita
tion policies. And the occasional coronavirus test, depending on the campus.
The experience is, as Polles put it, “a little odd.”
What about the social life?
By the numbers, DeSales is at capacity: Out of 1,725 undergraduate students, only 50 requested to stay home and attend entirely online, Executive Vice President Gerard Joyce said.
But classes have about half the normal number of students in person, while a smart camera follows the professor around for the benefit of students Zooming in, which a portion do on a rotating basis. They are asked to wear a mask both inside and outside, regardless of their social distance, aided outside by Adirondack chairs set at a perfect distance.
The first day Monday entailed learning the oddities: new traffic patterns in buildings, the length of time it takes to get food orders from a la carte stations through a mobile app, answering questions correctly on a new health screening app, which students must do every day or they’ll hear from the administration. They have to book visits to the health center or the fitness center; at the gym, they’ll hear the ding of a bell when their 50-minute time slot is up.
It’s not all that difficult, Szymborski-Pratt said. The bigger problem is the enormity of what will be missing this semester: sports, off-campus parties and the traditional social experience.
“Yeah you can hang out with your friends, but it’s curtailed to a gigantic extent,” he said. “Adults sometimes downplay the social side of college.”
Try as they might to come up with creative programming like inflatable outdoor movies and Zoom-able concerts, there are just some parts of the experience that can’t be replicated: homecoming celebrations, festivals, opening ceremonies, and of course, sports.
At most colleges, students sign some type of COVID-19 health and safety contract, often making local health guidelines such as gathering restrictions part of the official student conduct code, and thus, punishable by the college.
That means parties, at least those resembling the raucous romps of “Animal House,” are strictly forbidden.
At Muhlenberg, for example, on-campus gatherings of any kind are limited to 25 people who must wear masks and social distance; off-campus gatherings, 20 people. Violators could face suspension, or removal from on-campus housing or access to on-campus services. If a student group is responsible, the group could face anywhere from probation to suspension to termination.
This happened already at Penn State’s main campus, where the Pennsylvania Lambda chapter of Phi Kappa Psi was suspended after pictures on social media showed it hosted a party with more than 15 people inside, maskless.
Resident students caught at large parties at DeSales will be kicked out of their dorms and have to finish the semester online, Joyce said. Off-campus students are more difficult to monitor, but, he said, “any student is at risk of disciplinary action if they blatantly disregard state and university guidelines and risk the health and safety of the campus community.”
Kutztown administrators are collaborating with borough officials to crack down on offcampus gatherings. They signed a joint message to students saying the borough is crafting an ordinance barring any residence from having a gathering of 10 people or more, indoor and outdoor combined. Violators could get a $300 fine from the borough and disciplinary action from the college.
But administrators say they can’t get stuck on the losses this semester. Students have committed to paying for some type of experience.
“We don’t want to just sit here desolate,” Joyce said.
Reimagining orientation
In Bethlehem, Liz Yates, associate dean of students at Moravian College, has been reimagining the fall semester with her team since May.
Move-in day for freshmen is typically a loud, energetic affair akin to movie stereotypes, with a DJ and sports teams volunteering to haul up the belongings of 300 students in one four-hour period.
“Clearly we cannot do that this year,” Yates said.
Instead, spanning three days this week, first-years get a threehour time slot with only their parents allowed to help them carry their things. And there’s not much time to linger.
Most colleges are keeping as full a slate as possible of orientation events, but with attendance limits and livestreaming for everyone else.
Some orientation traditions can be amended. This weekend, instead of leading the entire incoming class down the “Moravian Mile” on historic Main Street, President Bryon Grigsby will greet groups of 20 at a time as they arrive at the south campus. At DeSales, instead of taking one big freshman class picture at the welcome sign, orientation leaders took small group pictures and edited them together.
Others have no replacement. At Muhlenberg, freshmen traditionally get to sign their names in the “matriculation ledger,” a book that’s as old as the college.
“You can’t replace that with a virtual signature,” said Allison Gulati, dean of students.
Freshmen will simply have to experience specific traditions like that later on, she said. They have four years.
Other large-group experiences throughout the semester, such as trivia nights, they’ll replicate virtually. Some group activities, such as discussion series or exercise classes, can still be done in person — outside, with masks, socially distanced, likely using one of three large tents the college purchased. The college will encourage more emphasis on small-group mentorship opportunities, she said.
In the dorms, students coming back to Muhlenberg are not allowed a roommate. They will share a bathroom with two to three other students, and lounge spaces are off limits.
Students at Moravian had the option to live by themselves or with a roommate, and a large majority chose roommates, Yates said. But there, too, dorm common areas are off limits, at least to start.
“I’m still trying to get used to that,” she said. “How do you say to college students, ‘Don’t build community’?”
She’s hoping they can by bringing as much as possible outside. Tents continue to pop up around Moravian’s campuses for outdoor dining, student programming and some classes. can call a COVID hotline and take a 45-minute rapidresponse test in the COVID suite, using a machine donated to the college by St. Luke’s University Health Network.
All students returning to Lehigh’s campus are required to get a negative COVID-19 test at home, and another one shortly after they arrive to campus. If they’re coming from a “hot spot” state as designated by the commonwealth, they must also quarantine for 14 days before arriving.
Testing capabilities vary at colleges, which in part explains their varied approaches to reopening, but they all have warned their students that restriction levels may change in response to community health circumstances. Most of them have some sort of health screening app where students must answer a set of symptom questions daily.
Some would rather colleges not risk it. At Kutztown, more than 1,500 faculty, staff, students and alumni signed an open letter to the administration asking that a set of concerns be addressed before the semester begins — and that because of these concerns, going fully online is the best option.
“But we are not an online university,” President Kenneth
Hawkinson had said in a message that prompted the open letter, citing a 10% increase in Kutztown’s freshman class as an indication that students want to come back for a college experience.
Kutztown has since updated its fall plan with plans for contact tracing, testing and isolating, addressing some of the letter’s 14 concerns. The letter states that if all the concerns aren’t addressed by Monday, it will become a basis for a Vote of No Confidence.
At colleges choosing to bring all students back, faculty have been given preference on how they want to conduct their courses. At both Kutztown and Moravian, for example, about 40% of classes will be entirely remote.
Even students have mixed feelings: They’re paying for a college experience, but they’re also living in a once-in-a-lifetime set of health circumstances. Moravian junior Dominic Trabosci describes a tension in the air among his friends.
“The virus hasn’t ended, yet we’re coming back like it has,” he said. “I don’t know how to feel about it.”
He’s confident his peers will abide by mask-wearing rules, better than his customers at Wawa anyway. He’s just not sure how long these measures can keep the virus at bay.
“I guarantee like we’re going to be a week into classes and someone gets the virus, and before you know it, we’re in lockdown again,” he said.
Morning Call reporter Kayla Dwyer can be reached at 610-820-6554 or at kdwyer@mcall.com.