“I remember receiving the email while I was in the middle of packing up to move in the following morning,” senior Douglas Nester said about the decision administration made to delay move-in for two weeks.
On Aug. 19 at 5:04 p. m., part of the student body received an email from the Residence Life Director Jonathan Swartz, communicating that move-in would be delayed for two weeks. This was a difficult piece of news for those who were ready to move-in or travel the coming day. The reason given was “an abundance of caution.”
Of course, by 8 p. m. President Susan Shultz Huxman clarified that this caution had to do with four student leaders testing positive for COVID-19. She stated that “we simply cannot in good faith open our residence halls with this many staff and student leaders impacted.”
Many students expressed frustration with the way that EMU handled the situation. Junior transfer student Faith Manickam stated that she “would have assumed there was a plan in place for the very real possibility that one or more of [the student leaders] would test positive.” The response EMU gave was last-minute, sent out the evening before some students would be moving back on campus.
Manickam didn’t delay her trek from Kansas to Harrisonburg since her mother had already taken time off work and it would have been last minute to change her plans. A stressor for her was finding places to stay around Harrisonburg and “moving multiple times before coming on campus.”
While Manickam had a long trek from Kansas to make it to EMU, Nester was only a few blocks away. Nester said, “I was pretty lucky… I had a room in a house with my friends I was able to stay in until the end of the month.” He felt that since it was “right next to campus it didn’t disrupt [his] life too much.”
The question some have now is whether campus will stay open for the remainder of the semester. With JMU closing its doors to residential students and a variety of colleges and universities across the country choosing to switch to online classes, many are beginning to speculate that EMU could be next.
Manickam feels that EMU staying open depends on “how strict people are about following [the regulations put in place here at EMU]… Hopefully things will be a little better without as many JMU students around.”
As a concerned student, Nester said, “I strongly urge all students to practice utmost caution and isolate as much as possible. If we can do this, I believe EMU can be safe.”
Nester also voiced concerns about the hypothetical possibility of an outbreak at EMU. He’s worried that the “EMU administration will send students home if an outbreak happens to take the liability off of EMU.” While this may happen, his greater concern is that students don’t go home and “spread [the virus] to the smaller communities that many … students would go home to.” This is just one of the many issues administration will have to juggle this semester.
