Dear Commons Community,

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, and Allison Sweet Grant, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times,  that reminds readers that even online the critical approach for teachers is to try to instill curiosity and a love for learning.  To quote: 

“Whether students are in kindergarten or college, knowledge is always attainable. Teachers can and will catch kids up on their multiplication tables and periodic tables. But in school and in life, success depends less on how much we know than on how much we want to learn. One of the highest aims of education is to cultivate and sustain the intrinsic motivation to learn…

… there are ways for teachers to nurture interest in learning — and they’re especially important in online classes. Three key principles are mystery, exploration and meaning…

… The purpose of school is not just to impart knowledge; it’s to instill a love of learning. In online schools and hybrid classrooms, that love doesn’t have to be lost.”

There are a number of insights in this op-ed (see the entire piece below).  Parents and teachers will find it a good read especially now that schools and colleges are reopening around the country.

Tony

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New York Times

Op-Ed:  Kids Can Learn to Love Learning, Even Over Zoom

by Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant

September 8, 2020

“Can independently mute and unmute himself when requested to do so.” That’s praise we never expected to see a year ago on our son’s kindergarten report card. We’re so proud.

As the new school year begins, many students are learning virtually, either by personal choice or requirement — and many parents and teachers are concerned that students will fall behind in their knowledge. But a greater risk to our students may be that they lose their curiosity.

Whether students are in kindergarten or college, knowledge is always attainable. Teachers can and will catch kids up on their multiplication tables and periodic tables. But in school and in life, success depends less on how much we know than on how much we want to learn. One of the highest aims of education is to cultivate and sustain the intrinsic motivation to learn.

A classic study found that world-class artists, athletes, musicians and scientists typically had an early coach or teacher who made learning fun and motivated them to hone their skills. An analysis of 125 studies of nearly 200,000 students found that the more the students enjoyed learning, the better they performed from elementary school all the way to college. Students with high levels of intellectual curiosity get better grades than their peers, even after controlling for their IQ and work ethic.

Unfortunately, remote learning can stifle curiosity. For students, it’s easy to zone out. Staring at a screen all day can be exhausting. For teachers, transmitting excitement into a webcam is not a simple task: it can feel like talking into a black hole. Technical difficulties mean that key points get lost and even brief communication delays can make students seem disengaged, crushing rapport and killing timing.

Still, there are ways for teachers to nurture interest in learning — and they’re especially important in online classes. Three key principles are mystery, exploration and meaning.

Curiosity begins with a mystery: a gap between what we understand and what we want to find out. Behavioral economists argue that an information gap is like an itch. We can’t resist the temptation to scratch it. Information gaps can motivate us to tear through a whodunit novel, sit glued to the TV during a quiz show or stare at a crossword puzzle for hours. Great teachers approach their classes the same way: They open with a mystery and turn their students into detectives, sending them off to gather clues.

For example, if you’ve ever watched dolphins closely, you might have noticed that they’re awake for remarkable stretches of time. A typical dolphin can stay alert and active 24 hours a day for 15 days straight. How do they do it?

Given all the challenges of going online, it’s natural for teachers to focus on just getting through the material. But remote learning is perfectly suited to mystery — teachers need to find the right puzzles for students to solve.

If gaps in knowledge are the seeds of curiosity, exploration is the sunlight. Hundreds of studies with thousands of students have shown that when science, technology and math courses include active learning, students are less likely to fail and more likely to excel. A key feature of active learning is interaction. But too many online classes have students listening to one-way monologues instead of having two-way dialogues. Too many students are sitting in front of a screen when they could be exploring out in the world.

Leaving a desk isn’t just fun; it can promote a lasting desire to learn. In one experiment, researchers randomly assigned thousands of students to take a museum field trip. Three weeks later, when the students wrote essays analyzing pieces of art, those who had visited the museum scored higher in critical thinking than those who did not make the trip. The museum-goers made richer observations and more creative associations. They were also more curious about views that differed from their own. And the benefits were even more pronounced for students from rural areas and high-poverty schools.

When field trips aren’t possible, teachers can still take students on virtual tours and send them off to do hands-on learning projects. In the past few months, our kids have been lucky to learn from social studies teachers who challenged them to survey people about their stereotypes of the elderly, computer science teachers who invited them to design their own amusement parks, and drama teachers who had them film their own documentaries.

Meaning is the final piece of the motivation puzzle. Not every lesson will be riveting; not every class discussion will be electrifying. However, when students see the real-world consequences of what they are studying, they’re more likely to stay engaged.

Psychologists find that when college students have a purpose for learning beyond the self, they spend more time on tedious math problems and less time playing video games and watching viral videos. And high schoolers get better grades in STEM courses after being randomly assigned to reflect on how the material would help them help others. That’s a question every teacher can ask and answer, even over Zoom: Why does this content matter? When the answer to this question is clear, students are less likely to doze through class with one eye open.

Or, in the case of dolphins, with one side of their brains open. They can put one hemisphere of their brains to sleep and leave the other alert. That’s how they stay active for two weeks straight.

The purpose of school is not just to impart knowledge; it’s to instill a love of learning. In online schools and hybrid classrooms, that love doesn’t have to be lost.

One good thing about virtual school is that children are building skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. Although learning how to mute and unmute himself is not something we ever thought our kindergartner would need to know, it’s one of many new skills from online classes that will continue to come in handy. And for those adults who are still having trouble with that particular skill (you know who you are), he’s available for online instruction.

Dear Commons Community,

The book, Our Bathtub Wasn’t in the Kitchen Anymore, won a best book award in the category of urban fiction.  As one reviewer has commented, Gerade DeMichele has crafted a highly immersive and heartfelt novel that clearly comes from a true place deep in the author’s heart.  See the full review below.

If you are at all interested in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, Our Bathtub Wasn’t in the Kitchen Anymore will surely bring it to life for you.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) President Irene Mulvey has a Labor Day message for all her members offering hope and direction during these difficult times.  Her entire message is below.

Tony

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Dear Anthony,

We are heading into a new academic year in turbulent times. The coronavirus global pandemic has drastically altered our lives, our jobs, and the lives of our students and our staff colleagues, with no end in sight. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, and now Jacob Blake fighting for his life in Wisconsin, have put systemic institutionalized racism in the United States into stark relief.

In the past few weeks, we have seen a number of colleges and universities move ahead with reopening in person for the fall semester. Rather than relying on scientific expertise regarding the pandemic and the likelihood of transmission in a residential campus environment and its surrounding community, administrations and boards of trustees have engaged in magical thinking. Few institutions appear to be doing enough testing, and, somehow, they expect all students to follow strict rules at all times. Reopening decisions are being driven by the bottom line instead of the health and safety of students, faculty, staff, and all campus workers.

The outcomes from these decisions and the lack of planning behind these decisions was predictable: a spike in cases on campus; the difficulty in feeding and housing students who must quarantine; the deficiency in mitigating risks for others due to a lack of testing and robust contact tracing; and a hasty retreat to remote learning, sending potentially infected students back to their families and communities. For most administrations and boards, the top priority is the bottom line. They continue to embrace the corporate model and to further a decades-long assault on higher education as a common good.

Disturbing instances of blatant police violence against and harassment of Black people, including on our campuses, continues. Just within the last few weeks, a Black faculty member at Santa Clara University reported that campus police knocked on her door and demanded proof that she lives in her own house, after harassing her brother as he worked on a laptop outside.

The problems we face are serious and will not be easily resolved. Some good news is that faculty are mobilizing across ranks and with other academic workers and students to forward antiracist activism and to ensure that hastily implemented austerity measures do not become the new normal. Here are just a few examples of faculty activism that are making me optimistic this Labor Day:

• After a long, intensive campaign by a broad coalition of faculty, students, staff, and alumni at Portland State University, the administration has agreed to disarm campus police.
• The national AAUP has convened a working group to draft a report on the role of police on campus, including whether it is appropriate for institutions of higher education to have their own police forces; how systemic racism affects campus policing; changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples, especially Black, indigenous and other peoples of color; and how AAUP chapters and members can best work in solidarity with student groups, community social justice organizations, and unions on this issue.
• Our faculty union at Rutgers University has been working closely with a coalition of other campus unions to center racial justice and to ensure health and safety and to negotiate with the administration on proposed cuts. “This is not something that naturally occurred,” one chapter leader told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It’s a big investment and big strategic change to decide to build power together.”
• The George Mason University AAUP chapter brought to light the fact that several Virginia universities entered into no-bid contracts with a company to provide students with COVID-19 tests that are not approved for that use.
• New memberships in the AAUP are up this summer, signaling a new wave of campus activism. At our August meeting, the AAUP Council authorized charters for twenty-five new or reactivated AAUP chapters.

This Labor Day, I ask you to join me and other AAUP members in recommitting to doing the hard work of ensuring that higher education is a public good available to all in this country. You can share our Labor Day graphic to help spread the message that solidarity will see us through.

In solidarity,

Irene Mulvey
AAUP President

Dear Commons Community,

Labor Day 2020 is definitely an ironic moment: The federal government is having a holiday to celebrate working Americans at a time when record numbers of people are unemployed. Be that as it may, working Americans still deserve a day of praise now more than ever. They’re the ones whose contributions are helping us get through this terrible coronavirus pandemic and who will put the economy back on the road to recovery.

We salute and thank them all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Biden (see video above) condemned Donald Trump for comments made about American war dead being “losers” and “suckers.”  He states Trump is “not fit to be commander-in-chief.” 

Many American are agreeing with Biden.  We all should!

Tony

Credit Ben Wiseman

Dear Commons Communiyt,

This morning, New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, looks at the affects of the coronavirus on college admissions.  His conclusion is that many of the rules such as taking SAT exams will come into question.  Furthermore:

“For epidemiological and economic reasons, students will forgo all the campus tours and all the assessments of how comfy the dormitories seem, how tasty the food is, how high the spires rise and how lushly the trees grow. They’ll perhaps look more closely at the course catalog, the roster of professors.

Jeffrey Selingo noted that many colleges based a big part of their sales pitch on their physical setting and even on lifestyle and social perks that are less relevant than ever, given pandemic-related restrictions. “That’s forcing parents and students to ask, ‘What are we really paying for?,’” he said.

The answer is, or should be, an education, and students may come to realize that excellent ones can be obtained at colleges that are less expensive than others in their sights and closer to home. The lure of going far away to college may diminish.

What I suspect will happen, at least in the short term, is that students’ thinking about colleges will be less emotional and more practical. The pandemic has soured the romance.”

I agree with Bruni and Selingo.  Students and parents will be re-evaluating whether they want to spend “big bucks” for the on-campus, residential four-year experience.

Below is the entire column.

Tony

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The Coronavirus May Change College Admissions Forever

A pandemic returns the focus to what matters: education.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 5, 2020

In the context of a pandemic that has killed about 190,000 Americans and economically devastated many millions more, getting into the college of your dreams is a boutique concern. But for many teenagers who have organized their school years around that goal, it’s everything.

And it’s going to be different this admission season. It may well be different forevermore.

That was what I concluded after a recent series of conversations with Jeffrey Selingo, whose widely anticipated new book, “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” will be published on Sept. 15.

Selingo was given extraordinary access to the selection process and the selectors at Emory University, Davidson College and the University of Washington. He uses it in his book to present one of the most nuanced, coolheaded examinations of the admission process that I’ve read. He explodes certain myths — for example, that SAT and ACT scores are absolutely pivotal — and confirms other suspicions, such as the ridiculous advantage conferred on middling students who play arcane sports.

But his knowledge and insights also put him in an excellent position to speculate on matters beyond the book’s bounds: specifically, the little, big, temporary and permanent ways in which the coronavirus pandemic, which dawned after his research was done, will change the way colleges evaluate students and vice versa.

“College admissions is never going to be the same,” he told me.

He was focusing on selective schools, which educate a small minority of Americans in college but loom monstrously large in the psyches of many high school students, who intricately game out how to breach these exclusive sanctums. Well, the rules of that game just changed.

Frank Bruni’s Newsletter: Get a more personal take on politics, newsmakers and more with Frank’s exclusive commentary every week.

Selingo predicts that many schools that allow “early decision” applications, with which a student sets his or her sights on one preferred institution and commits to attending it if accepted, will fill more of their slots that way than ever, meaning that these applications will have better odds of success than ones submitted later. Schools leaned extra hard on early decision in the shadow of the Great Recession, he said, and now face the same economic anxiety, the same motivation to figure out as soon as possible which new students will be arriving and how much financial aid they’ll need.

But a more broadly consequential change involves standardized tests. Because the pandemic prevented students last spring from gathering to take the SAT and ACT exams, many selective schools are not requiring them for the time being. That will force them to focus more than ever on the toughness of the high school courses that students took and the grades they got.

Which students will benefit from that? It’s complicated. On one hand, affluent students who are coached for these exams and usually take them repeatedly won’t get to flaunt their high scores. On the other hand, less privileged students from high schools whose academic rigor is a question mark in screeners’ minds won’t have impressive scores to prove their mettle.

While these exams have been blamed for perpetuating inequality, they in some cases play the opposite role. In fact, a special committee of educators in the University of California system produced an exhaustively detailed report this year that determined that the use of SAT’s in admissions had not lessened diversity and that SAT scores were useful predictors of college success. (University leaders elected to switch to test-optional admissions for a few years anyway.)

The SAT’s downgrade won’t be fleeting, Selingo said. “We’re going to have a whole admissions year with scores of places going test-optional,” he said. “Once their world doesn’t come crashing down and they still recruit a class, those colleges are not going to flock back to the test. I think it’s been knocked off the pedestal permanently.”

He makes the same guess about what he calls “application bloat,” referring to the flamboyant multiplicity of clubs, causes, hobbies and other materials that applicants assemble and showcase. The pandemic put many of those activities on hold, creating a pause in which he believes that some schools and some students will recognize the lunacy of this overkill.

“It’s going to be difficult for students to fill in 10 spaces for extracurricular activities, flag down teachers for recommendations or take six A.P. courses and exams,” he said. “Admissions officers are going to have to focus on what matters. That means in the future they can pare back the application and reduce our collective anxiety about what it takes to get into college.”

Apart from the increased early-decision emphasis, which can favor in-the-know kids from in-clover families, the changes that Selingo predicts represent a back-to-basics streamlining of the process. It may have been born of terrible circumstances, but it’s also sensible and overdue.

That streamlining extends to how students will choose schools during the coming admission cycle. For epidemiological and economic reasons, many of them will forgo all the campus tours and all the assessments of how comfy the dormitories seem, how tasty the food is, how high the spires rise and how lushly the trees grow. They’ll perhaps look more closely at the course catalog, the roster of professors.

Selingo noted that many colleges based a big part of their sales pitch on their physical setting and even on lifestyle and social perks that are less relevant than ever, given pandemic-related restrictions. “That’s forcing parents and students to ask, ‘What are we really paying for?,’” he said.

The answer is, or should be, an education, and students may come to realize that excellent ones can be obtained at colleges that are less expensive than others in their sights and closer to home. The lure of going far away to college may diminish.

What I suspect will happen, at least in the short term, is that students’ thinking about colleges will be less emotional and more practical. The pandemic has soured the romance.

Colleges had previously presented themselves to students as nurturing homes away from home, then had to send those students packing when the virus spread. Colleges were endless parties, then the partying stopped. They touted the intimacies of classroom instruction, then had to defend the tuition-worthy effectiveness of remote learning. How can students not feel some skepticism in the wake of all that?

“This morning I listened to a Planet Money podcast called ‘The Old Rules Were Dumb Anyway,’” Selingo said. “It talked about the rules that went out the window because of the pandemic and which changes might be here to stay: alcohol takeout from restaurants, telemedicine, using nursing credentials across state lines.”

“It got me to thinking about the old rules that were dumb in admissions,” he added. And it got him to wondering how many were gone for good.

Jessica Krug

Dear Commons Community,

George Washington University is investigating the case of a history professor who allegedly admitted to fraudulently pretending to be a Black woman for her entire career, and said yesterday that she will not be teaching her classes this semester.  As reported by the Associated Press.

In a blog post that has gained international attention, a writer claiming to be Jessica Krug, a GW associate professor of history, writes that she is in fact a white Jewish woman from suburban Kansas City. The writer claims she has lived most of her adult life “under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”

In a statement released Friday night, University Provost Brian Blake and Dean Paul Wahlbeck wrote: “Dr. Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester. We are working on developing a number of options for students in those classes, which will be communicated to affected students as soon as possible.”

The blog post attributed to Klug expresses deep remorse, calling the deception “the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation.”

The writer blames “unaddressed mental health demons” dating back to childhood and says she frequently thought of confessing the deception, “but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.”

Krug’s biography on the GW website lists imperialism and colonialism and African-American history among her areas of expertise. Her writings center heavily on issues of African culture and diaspora.

The post caused an immediate furor on social media, with Black academics, writers and activists recalling their interactions with Krug.

Hari Ziyad, editor of the online publication RaceBatr, which had published Krug’s writings, wrote on Twitter that Krug had confirmed the details of the blog post to him in a phone call Thursday morning. He described Krug as “someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here.”

Ziyad wrote that Krug claimed to be Afro-Caribbean from the Bronx. He said he had defended Krug in the past against suspicious colleagues. In retrospect, he recalls clues to the deception including her “clearly inexpert salsa dancing” and “awful New York accent.”

Krug’s public persona comes across in a video testimony to a New York City Council hearing on gentrification from June. Referring to herself as Jess La Bombalera, Krug refers to “my Black and brown siblings” in the anti-gentrification movement and criticizes “all these white New Yorkers” who “did not yield their time to Black and brown indigenous New Yorkers.”

In their letter Friday night, addressed to the “GW Community,” Blake and Wahlbeck said: “We want to acknowledge the pain this situation has caused for many in our community and recognize that many students, faculty, staff and alumni are hurting. … Please know that we are taking this situation seriously and are here to support our community.”

Tony

Jordan, now 14, at his father’s grave site.

Dear Commons Community,

Dana Canedy, a former New York Times journalist and the author of A Journal for Jordan, has an op-ed today responding to Donald Trump’s comments referring to World War I American casualties as “losers and suckers’ that appeared in The Atlantic  on Thursday.  She says that “her son, Jordan, lost his father in Iraq. He knows his father was a warrior and a patriot. But the words hurt nevertheless.”

Below is the entire op-ed.

Read it and remember that the person who spoke of our war dead as “losers and suckers” is in the White House and is running for re-election.

Tony

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New York Times

My Son Knows His Father Wasn’t a ‘Loser’ or a ‘Sucker’

By Dana Canedy

September 5, 2020

I struggled for the words to comfort Jordan, my 14-year-old son.

He had come into my room and heard a snippet of a news report that President Trump had called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers” — soldiers like Jordan’s father and my fiancé, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King. He was killed in Iraq in October 2006, when Jordan was 6 months old.

“Mom, is he talking about my dad?” Jordan asked, his eyes searching and his forehead furrowed in confusion.

My son reads me well, and so it took every ounce of my strength not to physically react. “What do we care what anyone thinks,” I said and made a swatting gesture. “We know the truth about your dad’s heroism.”

I have spent Jordan’s childhood filling in the blanks, making sure that he knew his father, as a soldier and as a man. But I had never expected that I would need to remind my son of his dad’s honor and sacrifice.

I had tried to shield Jordan from this news, which broke in The Atlantic on Thursday, while working through my own anger and pain — sensations so palpable that I became nauseated and short of breath. I thought, too, about all the other Gold Star families who must be confused and hurt by even the possibility that the president had made those insulting and incendiary remarks.

Still, I tried hard to ignore the emotions stirring so viscerally within me, telling myself that President Trump knew nothing of my brave, sweet, humble soldier.

“Don’t lean in to this latest loop on the Trump roller coaster,” I told myself. “It never stops.”

But then my son had popped into my room before I could grab the remote control and turn off the television. By the next morning, when Jordan brought up Trump again, it became clear how distressed he was.

“He shouldn’t say that,” Jordan said. “My dad was a hero.”

Jordan, now 14, at his father’s grave site.

The statement almost sounded like a question, and my anger boiled over. Even so, I told Jordan that the president had denied making the remarks. He looked at me like I was trying to sell him a bag of air.

Jordan never knew his dad, but in many ways, he knows his father better than many children whose dads are living. That is because Charles took a journal with him to Iraq and wrote to our son, even before he was born.

He filled that journal with 200 pages of wisdom and expressions of love for us. He wrote that he hoped to make us proud with his service to our country. On the last page, he told Jordan that he had written all he could think of — favorite Bible verses, how to choose a wife, lessons in how to be a man — in case he did not make it home.

He had one month left on his tour of duty when he was killed by a roadside bomb. I collapsed onto the hardwood floor when I received the news.

Since then, I have worked hard to create a happy, full life for Jordan and me, and fill in any holes that the journal left. Over the years, when Jordan needed to hear his father’s voice, we pulled out the journal and read from it together. I told him stories about the honor, dignity and leadership of his highly decorated dad’s 19-year career of military service.

I showed him pictures of his dad wearing a chest full of medals, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Even as I have tried to make Charles a real presence, Jordan has had to reprocess our loss every time he hits a major developmental milestone. Because we have pictures of the two of them together from the only time they met — when Charles finally took a two-week leave to meet his son — Jordan had always insisted that he had memories of his dad. Then one day about a year ago, he stopped at our front door as he was heading to school when he froze and suddenly started sobbing.

“Mom, I don’t remember him.”

I knew that day was coming. He stayed home from school, and I took the day off from work. Jordan snuggled in bed wearing his father’s dog tags, while I made homemade soup. We talked about his dad.

It is hard enough for Gold Star children to heal from the wound of losing a parent. Never should they have to endure the pain of anyone picking at the scar that eventually forms over it. I can only speak for my boy and myself, and certainly not for other military families, but here is what I would advise President Trump:

Go on television immediately, from the Oval Office, and speak directly to these Gold Star children. If you want, deny that you said those awful things. But tell them you are sorry anyway. Say that no child should ever think that the commander in chief would utter such hurtful lies. Tell them that their mom or dad — or anyone who has made the ultimate sacrifice — is more of a hero than you will ever be. Humble yourself.

If Mr. Trump had it in his heart to extend his empathy to all the Gold Star adults who are suffering as well, that would be great. But he must speak to our children.

As for Jordan, I have used this moment to repeat some of his favorite stories about his dad. He knows that his father broke his big toe in combat during the first gulf war and that, despite the pain, he shoved his foot back in his boot and kept marching.

Jordan knows that when I asked his father about what his duties were in Iraq, he responded, “Everything from making sure my soldiers get their mail to recovering their bodies.” It did not matter whether they were from a blue or a red state.

Jordan knows that his dad missed his birth, because Charles wouldn’t leave Iraq until every soldier he led into combat could come home first. Jordan also knows that this determination ignited one of the biggest fights I ever had with his father, but that now, so many years later, I am proud of him for it — and for our shared sacrifice on behalf of our country.

After I reminded Jordan of all of this, I asked him who he thought had shown more patriotism for the country we love — his father or the man who may well consider him a loser.

“My dad,” he said, and proudly smiled.

Dear Commons Community,

As colleges across the US try to mitigate outbreaks of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci has some advice: Don’t send students home.

“It’s the worst thing you could do,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Wednesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “When you send them home, particularly when you’re dealing with a university where people come from multiple different locations, you could be seeding the different places with infection.”

Fauci’s warning came as colleges are faced with a series of difficult decisions regarding the fall semester. Many schools, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame, have opted to suspend or delay in-person classes, with UNC asking students to cancel their housing contracts.

Other institutions, like the University of Alabama and the University of Iowa, have allowed students to remain on campus and continued to offer some in-person instruction despite massive increases in cases.

In a news conference over the weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, issued a similar warning to college students considering returning home to quarantine.

“Please isolate at your college,” Birx said, per ABC News. “Do not return home if you’re positive and spread the virus to your family, your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents.”

Especially with Labor Day weekend coming up, she said students returning to their households could “dramatically” increase the spread of the virus. 

In a call on Tuesday, Birx reiterated the message to governors. She instructed them to check in with university presidents about their plans to test, isolate, and care for students in the case of an outbreak, ABC News reported.

When UNC Chapel Hill began plans to de-densify their campus community after experiencing at least 135 new cases of COVID-19 during the first week of class, they asked everyone except for international students, student athletes, and “residents who have hardships” to cancel their fall housing contracts by August 25.

“Since August 18 and throughout the move-out process, the University has been using email, social media and other communication methods to recommend students complete a 14-day, self-imposed quarantine — even if asymptomatic — upon departing campus,” UNC Media Relations wrote in an email to Insider.

However, the terms of the quarantine were largely left up to the students, putting the responsibility on them to figure out where to go and how to pay for accommodations after leaving campus.

At Illinois State University, where there have been more than 750 positive test results in the past week, the administration has asked students living in residence halls to return home to quarantine if they test positive for COVID-19, rather than living in quarters with other students, said media relations director Eric Jome.

However, the majority of Illinois State students live off campus, Jome said, and, as such, will be allowed to quarantine in their residences if they test positive. Additionally, the school is reserving some on-campus housing for students who need to isolate but cannot return home.

We need to listen to Dr. Fauci.  He is one of the few people in Washington D.C. you an trust to tell the truth about the pandemic.

Tony