MIT president says many undergraduate students won’t return to campus this fall
"Unfortunately, campus life will feel very different."
Potentially up to several thousand MIT students won’t be back on campus for in-person classes this fall, according to the Cambridge university’s president, L. Rafael Reif.
In a letter to the MIT community Wednesday evening, Reif announced that MIT will only bring back a yet-to-be determined percentage of the school’s undergraduate population for the upcoming semester, due to distancing concerns in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We aim to give as many students as possible the opportunity to return safely this year,” Reif wrote. “However, because we judge that physical distancing requires using doubles and triples as single-occupancy rooms, our undergraduate residential population in the fall will be much less than our normal capacity — conceivably as high as 60 percent, but likely much lower.”
According to MIT’s website, the school enrolled a total of 4,530 undergraduate students last year. Those who do live on campus this fall will have their own single dorm room, Reif said.
The university also had nearly 7,000 students pursuing master’s, doctorates, and other postgraduate degrees last year. Reif said those graduate students, who generally depend on lab access for their research and “whose apartment-style campus housing allows for physical distancing,” will be given higher priority to return to campus.
Reif said that MIT will maintain the basic two-semester structure. However, they might shift the fall schedule to start a week early around Sept. 1 and finish the term remotely after Thanksgiving — mirroring what many other colleges across the country are planning for the upcoming semester.
On campus, MIT plans to implement a slate of preventative safety measures. Large gatherings and lectures will be prohibited, and in-person classes will be limited to small groups with a “particular focus on classes that require access to labs, workshops and performance spaces,” according to Reif.
“Everything that can be taught effectively online will be taught online,” he said.
Reif said face coverings will be “mandatory” and access to buildings will be limited to those with a school ID. MIT will require students be tested for COVID-19 before they return to campus and “regularly thereafter.”
“We all treasure the feel of MIT’s open campus,” he said. “Unfortunately, campus life will feel very different this fall.”
Reif stressed that, with the coronavirus, the details are still not all set in stone.
“We cannot control the trajectory of the pandemic this fall, either here in Massachusetts or in the places around the world our students call home,” the university president wrote. “We also have no control over the government response. We must accept these as unknowns and be ready to adapt.”
The school plans to develop its own testing and contact tracing abilities to “spot an outbreak quickly and limit its spread.” According to Reif, officials are reviewing their “assumptions about what we can successfully manage in any given period, based on what we know today.”
“This will give us the data to decide how many students and staff we can responsibly welcome back on campus,” he wrote. “A next step then will be to establish a set of threshold conditions that would require us to scale back or suspend operations.”
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