Forced ten-day quarantines for students with Covid, bans on indoor eating and drinking, and shutting down the gym seem more for spite than for health.
Forced ten-day quarantines for students with Covid, bans on indoor eating and drinking, and shutting down the gym seem more for spite than for health.
A s a junior at Georgetown, I have seen the full range of the university’s response to Covid-19. This includes over a year of virtual learning, aborted study-abroad plans, and the cancellation of several high-profile speaker visits to campus. Georgetown faculty and students were willing to put up with many sidelined plans and vacated opportunities in order to facilitate the quickest possible return to normal campus life. By any reasonable account, the Georgetown community has taken the necessary precautions to allow a transition back to as normal of a college experience as D.C. restrictions will allow. Georgetown students and faculty have a 98 percent vaccination rate, and Georgetown students are required to have a vaccine booster by January 21.
On December 29, the university announced in an email that the semester would begin with virtual classes until at least January 30. While the email claimed that the measures were for health and safety reasons, the university told students that they would be on the hook for housing expenses in the spring semester regardless of whether they returned to live on campus. Apparently, the university thought that it was an acceptable risk to have students live together in person but not to learn together in person. Washington’s mayor — one of the country’s most cautious — had no such qualms; she had public schools return to in-person learning by January 5.
Since the resumption of virtual classes last week, Georgetown has implemented for students living on campus a variety of regulations that disregard one of the major tenets of Georgetown education: cura personalis, or care of the whole person. Georgetown defines this term as being “committed not just to your academic achievement, but also your mental and physical health, your spiritual growth, and your development as a citizen of the world. All of our faculty, staff, coaches and other representatives you meet will consider you as a whole person, which we believe fosters a healthy and vibrant university community.”
Under the new regulations, however, Georgetown’s community is anything but vibrant. Students are forbidden to eat or drink in communal spaces, including Georgetown’s library, which has many lounges and study rooms as well as a coffeehouse. The university has taken to forcing students to put their water bottles on a table at the entrance of the library lest they be tempted to take a sip inside, even though Georgetown students are required to sit at least six feet apart from one another inside the library. The university has designated a group of employees, nicknamed “blueshirts” by students, to roam the library to make sure students are wearing their masks even though they are socially distanced.
Georgetown has also shut down all in-person dining and the Healey Family Student Center, which was designed to be “a new ‘living room’ on campus for students to be able to collaborate, socialize, and reflect.” The university has encouraged students to eat in their dorms instead — presumably alone — or to “eat outside in the tents on campus.” Georgetown has also shut down the university gym, despite still charging all students a fee for its hypothetical use. The university recently announced that it would reopen “in a limited capacity” on January 21.
I know of at least one ROTC student who was essentially forced to buy a D.C. gym membership, so that he could do his necessary training. The university has also shut down all in-person Masses during the period of virtual classes.
These restrictions have come amid some questionable choices by administrators. Students were angered but not surprised when the university’s chief public-health officer tweeted (and later deleted) a picture of herself at the Kennedy Center, with the caption “living dangerously,” only four days after shutting down all indoor activities on campus. Georgetown has also refused to offer a partial tuition discount for the three weeks of virtual classes, despite giving a 10 percent discount for virtual classes last year.
If students on campus get Covid, they are forced by the university to isolate for ten days (based on Washington’s Covid guidelines) in the university hotel, where they are not allowed to leave their hallway. This is longer than the five days that the CDC recommends for isolation, and students are not given an opportunity to test during that time to see if they can safely reenter society before their ten days are up.
To begin to remedy the situation, the administration should uphold its moral obligations by providing a partial tuition refund for the time students lacked access to in-person classes and facilities. I hope that, when D.C. lifts its mask mandate, the university follows suit. I used to think that, with the rollout of the vaccines, Georgetown could begin to return to normal. Now anyone who wants a vaccine can have one, and we are still as far from normal as we have ever been.