CHAPEL HILL – It certainly doesn’t hurt to have the former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as president of your university during a global pandemic.

In a series of Zoom interview segments from his home, Interim UNC System President William Roper discusses his optimism about students returning to campus in the fall, a sense of shared responsibility they will have to bring with them, and the steps the 17 campuses will take to keep students safe.

“We’re optimistic about returning to on-campus operations in the fall term, in August and September,” Roper says.

“But,” he adds, “we put upper-most in our mind … health and safety of students, faculty, staff and the community as a really high priority.”

Roper, who headed the CDC from 1990-93, says UNC schools are preparing for a range of possible scenarios with COVID-19 once classes resume:

• Testing – both at the beginning and throughout the fall term – will be important.
• If students, faculty or staff test positive, contact tracing will follow to try to determine the source.
• Students who are infected but don’t show symptoms will be housed in dorms reserved for quarantine.
• Those who become sick, but not sick enough to be hospitalized, will be isolated in another dorm.
• If necessary, sick students will be sent to local hospitals.

THOUGH THE RISK to young people is low, Roper emphasizes a sense of shared responsibility.

“We are going to be putting in place a community expectation that people are gonna do the right thing,” he says. 

Some might think that’s unrealistic for college students. 

“But that’s not gonna get it,”Roper says. “We are going to treat these young adults for what they are – young adults that are able to do responsible behavior in the midst of a global pandemic so as not to harm their health or the health of those with whom they come in contact.”

Roper says he is optimistic that the vast majority of students will be responsible. “Can I guarantee that 100% will be? Of course not,” he says. “But we will be doing our best to set an adult, sober, responsible tone that …says, ‘Come on – this is a serious matter.’”

Students in masks 

Part of that will involve students wearing masks when they come into contact with others, Roper says.

Students will not be expected to wear masks in their dorm rooms, he says, but it makes sense to wear one when in contact with other people: “Do the responsible things to minimize transmission of the virus.”

Faculty worries

Roper recognizes there are faculty for whom, due to their age or underlying health conditions, “it’s a scary notion to be inserted back into a group setting.”

Some might continue to teach online; others might need different arrangements, he says. Each faculty member’s supervisor will make the initial decision, but universities will also have an appeal process.

“Nobody – surely not I – nobody wants faculty members to endanger their health,” Roper says.

“We’re a big organization. We treat our people well. … We are in the process of constructing an administrative process at each of the universities where people who are uncomfortable can raise their hand and say, ‘I think I need an accommodation for this.’…

“They want to do excellent teaching. We want them to do excellent teaching. But I return to the point I made earlier – we want them to be safe. We want the people they come in contact with to be safe and healthy. And we’re gonna do it that way.”

A variety of campus approaches

Roper gave university chancellors flexibility to decide how and when their campus would resume classes. He discusses a variety of approaches, citing several examples across the UNC System: 

• UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State will start earlier than originally planned, on Aug. 10. They will have no fall break, and final exams will end before Thanksgiving. Roper says this will avoid students leaving campus, “get exposed, bring infection back to campus and have a constant refreshment of the opportunities for viral spread.” It also avoids a key time for a possible second peak in late fall/early winter during the traditional flu season. “The idea here is to finish the term in mid-late November, send people home and not have them there in December and the first part of January.”

• UNC Charlotte will start classes in mid-September to avoid large crowds that could happen in late August with the Republican National Convention tentatively scheduled for Charlotte.

• East Carolina University has adopted a block schedule breaking the semester into two 8-week block schedule. That way a student can take two to three classes in the first block and claim the course credits in case a second wave of coronavirus occurs later in the semester.

”Obviously this is a big experiment – we’re going to learn a lot. We’ll learn from each other,” Roper says. “As we begin planning the spring term, we’ll be able to put those lessons to work.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The video feed for this segment suffered several interruptions during recording. We apologize for the poor video quality.]

What if there’s an outbreak?

Roper discusses how universities will contend with any on-campus outbreaks.

“An outbreak doesn’t begin as an outbreak – it begins with one person who is sick,” he says.

A student will be tested; if he or she is positive, the university will conduct contact tracing of suite mates or people on same dorm floor. If students test positive but show no symptoms, they will be housed in a dorm reserved for quarantine. If they are ill, but not sick enough to go to a hospital, they will be housed in a dorm reserved for isolation.

Roper notes that most universities have many residence halls.

“We are cities – complex organizations,” he says.

“It’s highly unlikely that on day one or day two or three of an outbreak, that we’re going to shut down university operations. We’ll manage this in the thoughtful and careful way that people expect us to do it.

“But we are not going to be guided by hope and say, ‘Well I hope this goes away’ or ‘I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a problem.’ If one person is infected, we’ve got a problem, and we will deal with it.”