Students Voice Concerns About A Hybrid Winter Quarter
Admin discusses why the university is bringing students back to campus
Associated Student Government (ASG) hosted Airtime with Admin on Nov. 17 where students asked administrators any questions they had about the upcoming hybrid winter quarter.
The administrators in attendance were Kevin O’Brien, S.J., Dean Emerita Lisa Kloppenberg, and Vice Provost and Dean of Students Jeanne Rosenberger. ASG President Ciara Moezidis and Vice President Ann Codiga moderated the discussion by calling on students to ask their questions and read out any questions posted to the chat.
Moezidis started off the session with a warm up question. She asked what the biggest challenge has been for each of the administrators or the university during the pandemic.
“Seeing an empty campus...is probably the toughest part because campuses are supposed to be full and so there is sort of an emptiness that reminds us of the losses that are experienced in the midst of the pandemic,” O’Brien said.
After the warm up question, Moezidis started calling on people who used the “raise hand” button on Zoom to indicate they had a question. Junior Diego Ardila asked if it is in the best health interest of the university to reopen when Santa Clara County just entered the purple tier, the county’s strictest tier to help reduce coronavirus cases.
Rosenberger responded with the plan faculty has set in place for the hybrid courses. They will not start until the third week of the quarter, so students who decide to live on campus will go through testing and quarantine protocol in order to ensure the safest campus environment for in-person classes.
Senior Isaac Addai asked a question for a student who was not able to attend the session. This student also had some concerns about the reopening of campus.
“With...cases being projected to rise over the holidays and throughout winter, why are we even inviting students back in the first place,” Addai said. “Some students do not even have access to adequate healthcare on top of being immunocompromised...It is a gross measure of judgement to think that by the time we start winter quarter, cases will not get worse. It is also naive to think that students will follow every precautionary measure you enforce. We cannot even get the rest of the nation to follow guidelines.”
Junior Kish Rai, a Santa Clara resident, similarly asked how the university is going to prevent students from spreading cases to the Santa Clara community and if there are reparations for students who go to off campus parties.
“The university takes action every time they are notified specifically of an address or an individual student that has violated any laws,” Dean Rosenberger said. “[O]ff campus living will go and meet with the residents or reach out in this case to the residents and address if we can identify or tie the individual behavior to a person as opposed to a group.”
Moezidis read out a privately messaged question, which asked if the university was going to consider students’ mental health and allow pass no pass grading for this and the upcoming quarters.
“We decided to go back to normal and I know that is hard, but...there has been plenty of notice, so we are sticking with the normal course of business,” Kloppenberg said. “We have asked our faculty to be very flexible and compassionate [and] we are hearing a lot of areas in which the faculty have really responded with a lot of compassion in that regard.”
Moezidis quickly read out a few more questions from the chat, so most of the students would get the answers to their questions before the session ended.
President O’Brien mentioned that if any students had any more questions, they could send them to covid19@scu.edu.