Nationally, there are reports of more than 500 cases at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, nearly 160 at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and dozens at the University of Southern California. Joseph’s and Villanova universities – all in the Philadelphia region – all reported double-digit cases, as did Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh. “These are interesting times,” he said, in an understatement.Īccording to published reports, universities in Pennsylvania that decided to re-open their campuses to non-remote teaching schedules have begun to show significant numbers of positive coronaviruses in the week or two since the first day of classes. “It is amazing to realize that over 17,500 students are engaged in education at this place, but because we are doing it remotely, they are not on campus in large numbers. He took his smartphone from his pocket and panned around in a circle. WCU President Christopher Fiorentino said in an interview Friday that on the first day of classes, he left his office in the school’s Phillips Memorial Hall to the nearby Academic Quad in the early afternoon, a time when the space would have otherwise been crowded with students, professors, and staff going about their day. Only a few courses are being taught in a hybrid format, with both in-person and remote instruction, mostly involving those students with clinical placements, student teaching, performance obligations, or internship sites.īut that decision, while grounded in the safety of students and their ability to continue their education, has meant for eerie and odd moments of silence and void. In July, the university made the difficult, but seemingly prescient, decision to conduct all but a few classes remotely. 24 marked the first day of the first week of the 2020-2021 school year at WCU, it dawned without the presence of the vast majority of the 17,500 undergraduate students enrolled in classes. Absent as well were groups of freshmen walking the streets of West Chester, exploring their first “home away from home” as they begin their college careers.Īlthough Aug. Gone, too, were the lines of students crossing Rosedale Avenue on their way from classes or their dormitory rooms to Sykes Student Union. WEST CHESTER-There were no food trucks lined up along South Church Street on the West Chester University campus last week.

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