WEST LAFAYETTE – As Purdue gets ready to welcome students back on campus for the fall 2020 semester, university officials have insisted to faculty and staff – skeptical and still feeling unsafe about the prospect – that a big component of the Protect Purdue Plan includes working to keep off-campus as safe as possible as a coronavirus pandemic lingers, too.
Last week, Greater Lafayette’s mayors and health officials said that’s been true.
Dr. Jeremy Adler, Tippecanoe County’s health officer and point person during the pandemic, said he’d read the Protect Purdue Plan, which lays out dozens of changes coming for residence halls, classrooms and expectations for the overall culture on the West Lafayette campus.
“I think it’s a good plan,” Adler said. “It’s well thought out. It does a good job of laying down processes to protect faculty, students and staff on campus, in classrooms, in laboratories, in dormitories and in dining halls.”
West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis has been saying for weeks, since Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced that the university would do everything it could to reopen campus safely for the fall semester, that the university hadn’t been working in some sort of a bubble. Dennis said this week that city hall and Purdue were “in constant communication, obviously.”
Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski said that Purdue has been in touch throughout the process, too. He said that in the past week, Purdue officials asked to meet with a team from the city “to discuss how they could help keep Lafayette safe,” given that so many people who work or go to school there live on the east side of the Wabash River.
More: More than half Purdue faculty, staff feel unsafe returning to campus this fall, survey says
“We’re getting a lot of concern on the part of our citizenry as to how we’re going to handle 45,000 students between the ages of 18 and 26 – how that’s going to impact our (coronavirus) numbers that are obviously going in the right direction – what steps are being taken by Purdue and what steps are being taken by the city,” Dennis said.
“Granted, we’re going to have a lot of people in that experimental age bracket,” Dennis said. “But that doesn’t mean that we should let our guard down. We still need to go out every day with the understanding that the virus is active.”
Adler said Purdue’s plan involves some faith. And, he said, it would include work off-campus, including with Greater Lafayette property owners and managers.
More: Coronavirus: 7th death, 500th case in Tippecanoe; health officer calls for masks, warns against complacency
“Of course, the one factor that can’t be controlled, completely, is the behavior of students and other Purdue personnel outside those campus buildings,” Adler said. “That’s the X factor – the human factor – in this. That’s the part of the Purdue plan that we have to have faith that the Protect Purdue Pledge will be taken seriously and that everyone at Purdue – students and staff, alike – will take that pledge seriously and continue with those behaviors and processes to protect the community even when they’re off campus.”
Up to the Protect Purdue Pledge
The Protect Purdue Pledge has been central to the university’s reopening strategy, cutting its way through the testing, the rearranged dorm rooms, the grab-and-go reconfiguration of dining halls, the required flu shots, the hybrid classrooms, the mandatory masks in campus buildings and other physical adjustments.
More: How will Purdue reopen in the fall? Here’s the Protect Purdue Plan
The Protect Purdue Pledge calls on everyone on campus to protect themselves with proper hygiene and protect others by staying home if they feel sick and keeping a proper social distance from others at all times.
Daniels recently told a U.S. Senate committee, looking at questions about campus reopening plans, that he considered Purdue students as exceptional – ones who understood that the return to campus they desired would come with expectations.
“Frankly,” Daniels told U.S. senators in early June, “I’m going to tell them, there’s a lot of cynics out there who don’t believe you’ll do this. They think you’re too selfish and self-indulgent. So, let’s go show them how much you do care about your fellow human beings, both young and old.”
More: Mitch Daniels delivers ‘Protect Purdue Pledge’ to senators who ask: Can colleges reopen safely?
Doubts that students would actually live by the Protect Purdue Pledge were marbled through more than 7,000 responses from faculty, staff and graduate students in a University Senate survey.
In a survey that showed 52 percent of those who responded felt unsafe about a return to campus, 92.3 percent said they were not confident students would “socially distance appropriately outside the classroom,” including on weekends, at bars and at parties. Slightly more than two-thirds – 67.4 percent – said they weren’t confident that “the Purdue Pledge will work to change student behavior.”
“We already saw what happened at Harry’s,” Deb Nichols, chair of the faculty-led University Senate, said during a virtual town hall last week, where the survey results were revealed.
That was a reference to the scene outside Harry’s Chocolate Shop, an iconic campus bar a block from Purdue, on May 11, a day when Indiana first lifted restrictions for table service at restaurants. Students still on campus ahead of graduation week crowded outside the entire day to get in. The bar corrected things, but the scene remained a symbol for what a fall semester could look like.
More: Coronavirus: The scene outside Harry’s and what it means for Purdue’s plans to reopen this fall
“Other gatherings,” Nichols said, “those seem to be super-spreader events. What is the plan, if there is any, that we can do for those situations?”
In Tippecanoe County, even with most students away since March, the largest sector for confirmed cases comes among those in their 20s. The 20-29 age range accounted for 22.8 percent of the cases, as of Saturday. All of the county's seven deaths have been patients older than 60, according to county health department reports. Statewide, half of the deaths have been those 80 and older.
More: No furloughs, layoffs, but restructured jobs likely as Purdue firms up budget, reopening plan
The 12-page Protect Purdue Plan, released June 12, includes a section on how Purdue will “partner across the Greater Lafayette community to collectively advance safety efforts, particularly for students living and engaging in activities off-campus.”
Landlords will be asked to help
Beth McCuskey, vice provost for student life, said that would include a meeting at the end of June with big property owner in Greater Lafayette. The meeting would include Daniels, Dennis and Adler.
“We’re going to share, certainly, the Pledge, the seriousness Purdue is taking this, as well as how we’re managing on campus and some strategies they can be considering in terms of how they manage their individual housing units,” McCuskey said.
Brent Gutwein is CEO of Granite Student Living, a property management company that takes care of leasing for roughly 4,000 beds in the Purdue market. He said Granite was keeping up with guidelines on cleaning common areas – hallways, stairwells, clubhouses, laundry rooms and the like. He said he wasn’t sure what else Purdue and the city would ask.
“Obviously, we want safety for residents,” Gutwein said. “That’s been on the front of our mind. And we’ll do everything that reasonable and viable. But we can only control so much. It’s hard to control students’ actions. What we can control, we’ll do the best we can on that.”
John Basham, owner of Basham Rentals, with 1,000 beds near Purdue, said he wasn’t sure what the expectations would be for him.
“I don’t necessarily think there’s a profound implication for me,” Basham said. “Residence halls over there are a completely different animal, where you can control a lot of things. When I give you a key, it’s clean and it’s up to where it needs to be. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be beyond that – give them gloves every time they walk in? … I guess we’ll see what Purdue wants.”
FOR MORE: To read the Protect Purdue Plan, go to jconline.com and click on the link to this story.
Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
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