January 13, 2021 at 8:43 pm by Alice Zhang
Following UC Santa Barbaraâs decision to provide housing in a limited capacity for Winter Quarter 2020, 1,000 undergraduate students are moving into university-owned apartment buildings in Isla Vista beginning this Friday. All undergraduate residence halls remain closed.
Unlike in years past, only 10 to 20 students will move in per hour to adhere to COVID-19 social distancing guidelines.
Max Abrams / Daily Nexus
Students with housing contracts â on top of the 1,400 undergraduate and graduate students with special circumstances who have been living on campus since Fall Quarter 2020 â will be moving into undergraduate apartments between Jan. 15-18, according to Jill Hurd, director of UCSB Residential & Community Living.Â
Concerns about a lack of transparency and the University budget sparked debate during the January Faculty Senate meeting.
Faculty Senate President Therese McGuire delivered the Executive Committee’s response to the NU-AAUP report, which criticized several of the University’s academic decisions.
“We concur that there is room for improvement on the part of the administration, in terms of transparency consultation with the faculty in decision-making,” McGuire said. “However, we have a more tempered view of the situation than the authors of the report.”
McGuire cited both the difficulty of decision making during a pandemic and the existing routes of communication between the administration and the faculty as reasons for the committee’s more moderate response.
The University has implemented a new testing system with the company Color in order to accommodate the influx of returning sophomores and new freshmen on campus. While some students have found it to be a relatively seamless process, others found some faults compared to Fall Quarter testing procedures.
Last quarter, NU provided testing to undergraduate students with partner company Tempus. Tempus utilizes RT-PCR techniques to amplify targeted genetic material, whereas Color’s testing uses RT-LAMP technology. RT-LAMP techniques maintain the same accuracy as RT-PCR procedures, but require fewer sophisticated instruments, increasing testing capacity. It can also generate amplified strands in less than an hour, showing to be faster and cheaper than its traditional PCR counterparts.
As of last week, Medill freshman Jimmy He had never set foot on campus. Aside from one small New Jersey meetup, he’d never met any of his classmates in-person.
But after months of waiting, He finally moved into his dorm on Jan. 4. He met his roommate, who he’d been video-chatting every week since August, in-person for the first time.
“It felt pretty surreal,” He said.
Students moved into on-campus housing Jan. 4 – 8, with precautions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The move-in was emotional for many students like He, who were disappointed by the University’s decision in the fall to bar most first- and second-year students from living on campus.
On the day President Schapiro announced that first- and second year students wouldn’t be allowed on campus for fall quarter, Illinois reported 2,454 new coronavirus cases (with a 7-day average of 1,992). On the day before winter quarter move-in started, the state reported 4,428 new cases with a 7-day average of 6,062. Provost Kathleen Hagerty.