Michigan Will Have "Public Health-Informed" Fall Semester On Campus
In an important step towards both a return to normalcy and the possibility of sports happening in some form, University president Dr. Mark Schlissel announced this morning the school will open campus back up for a "public health-informed in-residence semester" in the fall.
The university will offer a "mixture" of in-person and remote classes and give students the option of returning to campus or learning from home. Larger classes will be held online. There are many, many more details in Schlissel's full press release.
For our purposes, the altered academic calendar is of the most interest:
For the Ann Arbor campus, classes will begin Aug. 31, 2020, as previously scheduled, but fall break will be eliminated. The last day of in-person classes for the semester will be Friday, Nov. 20. After a nine-day-long Thanksgiving break, classes will resume remotely on Monday, Nov. 30 and continue until Dec. 8., with finals running Dec. 10-18. Our professional schools and colleges may have different calendars based on their programs’ requirements.
We will not hold a December Commencement ceremony this year, and graduates will be invited to participate in spring ceremonies as they normally are.
For the winter term, our plan is for classes to begin on Jan. 19, 2021, immediately after U-M’s traditional Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Symposium on Jan. 18. The later January start will give time for implementing any needed public health protocols before students return to campus, and we’ll eliminate spring break. Finals will run April 22-29.
These new semester calendars are designed to reduce the amount of back-and-forth travel for our students. Many of our peer institutions have taken similar steps with their calendars.
That in-person break from November 20th to January 19th covers the tail end of football season and about half of basketball season. That shouldn't matter much for in-game attendance since we're not expecting sporting events to be anywhere close to full capacity for a while. It does mean athletes are likely to be the only students on campus for a while if we're having sports—that may increase the likelihood of them being able to play since it'll be difficult to come into contact with other students.
Schlissel notes that, as we knew, athletes have started returning to Ann Arbor. No decision has been made about sports yet:
Many student-athletes have already returned to campus for voluntary conditioning activities under strict public health guidelines. Michigan Athletics is working with our public health experts and consulting with the Big Ten and NCAA on determining whether our student-athletes can safely return to competition this fall. An announcement will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead.
Stay tuned.
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Never knew what Schlissel looked like.
My first thought was, "That's what the scientist-turned-archvillain of a live-action comic book movie looks like before whatever industrial accident gives him superpowers, annihilates his empathy, and leaves him permanently disfigured"
Neat.
Neat.
So those finals are either going to be incredibly difficult or an absolute joke
Eh. Finals are overrated as is; they'll likely be weighted less, have a larger writing component, randomized, timed online portions, etc.
Universities have been dealing with things like this for a while now. A decade ago I was allowed "open Internet" on computer science exams.
They'll figure it out.
My son finished last semester in Ross with online classes & exams. The classes & work were no joke! He worked harder over a month than I did during any semester of college. Although removing the social aspect of college is a shame, it allows for more focus on academics.
Sounds reasonable; I'll be interested to see what happens those first couple of weeks when students are back on campus because there will undoubtedly be some readjustment.
Going forward, this is my expectation for the rest of the year:
Schooling in the fall is going to be utter chaos. It feels to me that the restrictions imposed upon students in K-12 and even university learning this upcoming year are going to "consume the purpose" of returning to in-person instruction at all. At least with some of the proposals that are being thrown out there for K-12 learning in Michigan, a lot of parents may start the year rolling with the proposals but will likely switch to full remote learning for kids age like 10+ and some form of alternative schooling/child care for younger kids. The K-12 plans that I have seen are the kind of thing that "look OK on paper" but are simply not remotely feasible in practice.
As for this plan... I guess it makes a little sense? Maybe? But I thought the working theory is that this virus is simply not impacted by weather, so why is OK to attend classes in August but not in late November? And announcing no winter commencement now? That is six months away, in a state that had a total of 3 covid-19 deaths yesterday.
We are in entirely different waters than "flatten the curve" now. If asked the reason, specifically, aside from generically like "safety first" I am not sure anybody could really articulate how these modifications make spread of the virus any more or less likely. This looks more just like making changes just to say that you did - thing have to be different because they just do.
Closing down for the winter I'm sure serves three main purposes. Avoids the deepest part of flu season. Allows for any CDC recommended cleaning. Keeps higher risk populations that work on campus away from students.
And why wouldn't they announced no commencement now? The campus is going to be closed. Why open it for a one day event that requires massive planning and a huge outlay of money to make happen when they can instead just roll it forward to next year?
Because I am not sure what they think is going to be different the next year, I guess.
More information on the spread of this virus for one thing. It will give us a better idea about what could or should be done. There could be a vaccine. There could be better treatments.
It seems pretty self evident (and logical) that diseases spread more when people move around. At Thanksgiving, thousands of Students will go home. Some portion of them will be asymptomatic carriers of Covid. They will bring an influx to wherever they live. At home, students will then associate with a whole new group of people. Some of them will be asymptomatic carriers. If they go back to school, they will then spread it to more students who will be returning home again in about three weeks for winter break creating another opportunity for significant spread.
This seems like a smart compromise that allows much learning to happen on campus while minimizing the number of times students come and go from campus en masses. Michigan’s strategy is similar to almost every other school that I am aware has announced a strategy. If this is your strategy, why would you bring back students for commencement?
Will be really interesting to see what enrollment looks like in the fall. If I was an incoming, in state freshman, I’d definitely be thinking about a year of community college then entering as a sophomore in 2021. If I’d been offered scholarship money, I’d be thinking about deferring (the downside of deferring is that they won’t let you take classes elsewhere during your year of deferment).
Once again, I don't know what will be different in 2021. This plan is being announced with Michigan having basically stepped on the curve's face and posed and flexed over it afterward. I don't know how many cases of Covid deaths there will be in Michigan on a given day in June 2021, but I am guessing more than 3?
You really aren't expecting any progress in treatments or vaccines for COVID-19 over the course of the next 12-18 months when basically every epidemiologist and biologist is working on it throughout the world? Please share why you have so little confidence. It's still early, but this thing didn't exist 6-8 months ago and look at how much we've already learned. It may not be gone in 12 months, but I fully expect fatality & infection rates to go down.
And in related news, Sparty Prez Samuel L. Stanley Jr, announced the only home games will be played during the regular B1G football season.
How much you wanna bet Schlissel wasn't wearing pants for that video?
Random note but Korean universities generally start the school year at the beginning of March, end in late June, start at the beginning of September, end in mid-December. I definitely like it more, especially for travel purposes.
Fingers are crossed this approach works ... something tells me there are details missing, like test/trace/quarantine protocols for the dorms, etc.
Plus, if I was a parent I would be requiring a test prior to returning home for that Nov-Jan break. That is the biggest risk to the greater community ... bunch of asymptomatic college students re-spreading the virus to the more vulnerable populations back home.
I agree, but I wonder what schools can do if a kid tested as asymptomatic at the end of the school year. If the campus closes there really isn't a place for the student to go (if she/he lives in a dorm), and that doesn't even get into what happens when these students get back on planes or other forms of mass transportation to get back home.
Parts of the country have definitely survived a "first wave" of the disease but as a country the US is stuck in a bit more of a plateau, and I assume that when schools open back up we'll see an uptick. But at the same time, the handling of the virus has been so bungled and uneven that it feels like this is the new reality.
Kansas State had zero positives of all student athletes when they arrived. They just "pause" all athletics due to an outbreak. Now get 50,000 students on campus, wait two weeks and let's see the adjustments...
I live in Midland and our community suffered from massive flooding. Thousands of us come together and worked closely .... without masks. The weather was too hot and the work was hard - you needed to be able to get in all the oxygen you could. Personally was around at least 50 different people in my cleanup efforts. We were not thinking COVID, we were focused on remediation. No spike my friends. (If you forgot, Google when this happened. We are well past incubation time.). Currently MidMichigan Health, the entire system, has fewer than 5 positive patients hospitalized. There’s a real world anecdote for you.
Schlissel could have been an authentic Lord of the Rings Dwarf character with zero make up.
Fabulous nose.
I tried to restrain myself. . . but . . . I just had to . . . click . . . the . . . READ MORE . . . button!!!
As noted in the comments, there's a whole lot of unknowns involving the next few months, but I have to think that it's mighty nice that the guy making this statement is an immunologist by training.
(And when they make "Hail To The Victors: The Movie" he'll be played by Elias Koteas.)
Speaking of health, I can tell that there are many products that you can find online, and they will have a great impact on your well-being. I was lucky to find out about Morning Complete, and I drink it every day. It's healthy and its apple-cinnamon taste is delicious, so you really have to try it yourself!
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