CJU/PSU: Urgent action needed to protect the health and safety of Penn State family

For members of the Penn State community, the first full weeks of “Back to State” were hardly routine.

Despite Zoom outages, transitions to new modes of teaching and learning, and the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, students, faculty and staff engaged authentically and productively, diving into first classes and a “new normal.” Unfortunately, that “new normal” also consists of rising positive cases at University Park, as well as gaps in information related to tests and cases both at UP and at the Commonwealth Campuses.

The disorganization, lack of transparent and sufficient testing practices, and failure to heed cautions from both the Penn State community and the examples of other institutions of higher education lead us, as members of the Coalition for a Just University, to call for urgent action to protect the health and safety of the Penn State family.

In comparison to many other major research institutions, Penn State’s testing plan is wholly inadequate. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an R1 research institution and fellow member of the Big 10, is requiring twice-weekly mandatory testing of all students, faculty, and staff, with tests processed in on-campus labs. As a member of the CJU Science Team noted, “it is hard to understand how a peer university like the University of Illinois has tested more than 160,000 people in 10 days, compared to the little more than 4,000 tests at PSU.”

In response to both these inadequacies and a subsequent increase in positive COVID cases at University Park, CJU is calling for a four-part joint response from administration. This response includes:

1. The implementation of a two-week “pause” on in-person instruction at the University Park campus, as well as at any campuses currently located in COVID hotspots. Classes with in-person components (either hybrid or traditional face-to-face deliveries) should pivot to remote instruction beginning Monday.

2. The concurrent closure of indoor dining and alcohol service in bars and restaurants in State College. While this demand does not directly fall under the jurisdiction of the University, the Penn State administration has a responsibility to work with local government to ensure the safety of both students and Borough residents.

3. An increase in test capacity to allow testing of 10% of the undergraduate population per day. Additionally, Penn State must maintain this testing capacity through the remainder of the Fall semester and in preparation for the Spring. Further, given the notoriously high incidence of false negatives produced by the Abbot ID NOW test, all symptomatic negative cases should be retested with a more sensitive test.

4. Daily (as opposed to biweekly) Dashboard updates, with testing information provided for all campuses.

CJU’s demand for both a pause to in-person instruction and indoor dining align with actions taken by several other major universities and their surrounding communities in response to increases in positive COVID cases on campus. Most recently, Temple university initially moved all in-person courses online for two weeks, before additional positive test results prompted the university to place most courses online for the rest of the fall semester.

This story was originally published September 6, 2020 at 9:00 AM.