[Uosenate] Monitoring the re-opening

[Senate President]

Hello Senators,

As you might imagine, VP Gildea and I have been closely monitoring UO’s reopening plans with the safety of our students, faculty, and staff foremost in our minds, and finding ways to maintain the safety of the campus community while also remaining committed to our mission to educate our students, generate knowledge through research and scholarship, and serve the state of Oregon. We’re in regular communication with the senior leadership, who have been receptive to our input and helpful in answering the many questions we’ve been asking. If you or your constituent have questions or concerns about our re-opening plans, please let us know so we can bring them to the administrative leadership.

One recent meeting we had was with Roger Thompson, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Services. We  were seeking information about freshman enrollment and how UO is communicating to committed and prospective first year students. Roger’s team wanted to share with the senate some samples of the messages that are going out to students and families so far that highlight UO’s commitment to safety. Below is only a selection of some of what has being going out to students:

  *   Housing video: https://youtu.be/LzH5KUtLN8c
  *   Podcast episodes: https://flocktalk.uoregon.edu/
     *   Episode 3: What we Know Now about Fall Instruction (Provost Phillips)
     *   Episode 8, COVID Research Contact Tracing and Testing (Cass Mosley)
     *   Episode 10, Philosophy of Policing a college campus (Chief Carmichael)
     *   Episode 16, Preparing for Fall (Roger)
  *   Presidents email last week: https://president.uoregon.edu/preparing-fall-term
  *   Enrollment Town Hall Event: https://youtu.be/jpZpRltJ3oI

Enrollment Management has surveyed several hundred committed incoming students about their preferences for the fall term. The results of that survey will be available shortly, and we will share the results with you when they are available.

Also, given the lack of precedent for re-opening under these conditions, Enrollment Management has been closely monitoring a number of other schools that re-opened this week or will be re-opening in the next two weeks. I’m pasting below a note from Roger with some of the data gathered by his team.

I appreciate all the thoughtful questions and comments that I’ve been receiving from Senators, and I know that the President and Provost do as well. Keep ‘em coming! Have a nice weekend,

- Ell

Elliot Berkman
Senate President
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology & Center for Translational Neuroscience
he/him/his


Note from Roger Thompson, Aug 14:

Colleagues,

Good afternoon.

As you may know, we have a team tracking some of the “Power-Five” semester schools that opened on August 10, 17 and we will soon start tracking some of the semester schools starting courses on August 24.  While our team continues to analyze re-entry plans across the country, the team did share some interesting data with me.

Private institutions:

The University of Miami, which begins classes on Monday, August 17 has early reports on the results of the re-entry testing program that began this week.  The U of Miami reported a positive test rate to date is <0.5%. That includes results for 6,845 students, about 40% of total enrollment. The testing requirement applies only to students choosing to return to campus for in-person classes, so it is difficult to know how many total tests to expect as our team does not know how many students they expect for on campus instruction.
(story here: https://messages.miami.edu/messages/2020/08/08-14-20-students-move-in-and-classes-begin-monday.html )

This week Duke University began the move-in process for the start of fall semester instruction.    Duke has reported a positive test rate of 0.13% positive or 4 positive tests out of a total tested of 3,116. (see story here: https://today.duke.edu/2020/08/update-covid-19-testing-duke-students )

Earlier I had shared the publicity campaign for the University of Notre Dame, which I thought was quite good.  It featured the Provost demonstrating how to utilize the “drive-through” testing option.  In any event, Notre Dame started well, with a re-entry to campus test rate of 0.28% with 33 positive tests from a base of 11,836 students.  However, this week Notre Dame has experienced an increase with 29 confirmed positive cases out of 348 tests for a positive rate of 8.3%.  (see ND dashboard here: https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/ )

Public Institutions:

Iowa State University started re-entry on August 3 in preparation for the first day of instruction on Monday, August 17.   As Andre reported in an earlier meeting, the move-in testing involved 3,037, with 66 positive cases for a 2.2% positive testing rate.  Additional information about testing results was not readily identifiable.
(see ISU COVID response site here: https://web.iastate.edu/safety/updates/covid19/ )

The University of Kentucky began re-entry to campus with residence hall move-in on August 8 in preparation for the first day of instruction, August 17.  Currently U of Kentucky has conducted 12,681 tests, with 98 positive results for a positivity rate of 0.8%.  This data includes tests through August 11 as the university states there will be a 72 hour delay in reporting of test results.
(see UK dashboard here: https://www.uky.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-testing-results )

Lastly a note on two other institutions we are monitoring.  The University of Virginia recently announced they were moving back the re-entry plan including move-in and the beginning of in person instruction.  The university made this decision in early August and the news-brief can be found here:
(https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-delays-person-instruction-move-undergraduates-two-weeks?utm_source=VirginiaFeatured&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=news )

The other public institution worth noting at this time is North Carolina State University.  This institution has no re-entry testing program (which would not be recommended) but instead is testing students who appear at Student Health Services as well as surveillance testing programs.  This is a very different approach than our plan.  This week NC State tested 554 students and found 4 positives for a positive testing rate of 0.87%.  Again, I want to emphasize this is not an approach we should utilize, but instead an interesting manner to approach testing and worth monitoring.

Lastly, as I stated earlier in the message our team is monitoring activity at 20 semester schools starting instruction on August 10 or August 17.  The aforementioned schools are simply a small sample of the total institutions we are monitoring.  Our team is tracking institutional messages, central institutional COVID websites, student newspaper coverage, local newspaper coverage, testing policies, strategic changes, and social media activity.  We will soon identify the additional August 24 semester schools we will add to our daily monitoring.

I want to commend our talented team for their efforts and I hope you find this information as interesting and helpful as I do.

Have a terrific weekend!

Roger
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