Dear Clemson Faculty and Staff,
Today is the third installment of weekly fall 2020 semester updates. Please continue to check the University COVID-19 page for updates – including health, wellness and stress management resources.
Also, see the latest communication from President Clements here, which provided an overview of our preparations for the fall.
Purpose of this communication:
- One of the goals of these weekly emails is to answer the call from Faculty asking for more communication on topics related to Fall Planning. Please note these communications presented in these weekly updates are the result of meetings that are occurring throughout the week with focused discussions on testing and tracking, course planning, teaching support, academic calendar, residence halls, and non-pharmaceutical intervention plans.
- Members of the faculty senate including John Whitcomb, Betty Baldwin, Brian Powell, Thompson Mefford, and Mary Beth Kurz are attending these meetings to represent the faculty. This form of communication is a way to bring it all together and ensure the information is correct and faculty concerns are heard and or addressed. While there are still many unanswered questions additional details will be provided as soon as they are available.
- Since staff are critical to successfully opening campus in fall, another goal of these updates is to ramp up the frequency of communicating with Clemson staff so that they too are aware of ongoing fall planning. This broadening of the message recognizes the importance of working together and reflects the wishes of the Staff Senate and the central administration.
- Finally, these communications reflect and align with those from President Clements that he sends to the larger Clemson community within and beyond the walls of our campuses.
Planning Progress
This past Wednesday, senior leadership received a third briefing from our medical advisory team led by Dr. Chris Colenda. We have continued to refine evidence-based risk mitigation strategies and we are now preparing to share plans with the Board of Trustees this week. Below we update last week’s message. In future weeks, we will reduce the length of this communication to focus on just new developments.
Testing and Tracking
- The self-assessment screening tool programmed by CCIT to catch potential cases is now live and will become a critical part of our overall testing and tracking strategies.
- This week we studied whether to test all or just a sample of employees and students just before fall semester starts. There are pros and cons for either approach. We will ultimately choose the one that best manages risks of infection. Once people have arrived on campus, periodic statistically valid testing of random samples (not the whole population) will be used. These will be critically important data.
- We have made some progress on choosing the kinds of tests to use (e.g., nasal swaps, saliva samples, blood samples, genetic, antibody, antigen, etc.) but our strategy may change through time as new testing technologies come on line.
- Another set of wastewater samples to estimate the prevalence of viral particles on the main Clemson campus has been taken and we now have the first sample from the City of Clemson. Campus levels were still essentially clear of COVID-19 particles; while the test of the City of Clemson’s wastewater revealed a prevalence of the virus.
Non-pharmaceutical Prevention
- New data came out this past week reinforcing the importance of face coverings and social distancing to mitigate risks. This has strengthened our view that both will be important for our success, particularly inside buildings. Face coverings are going to be important wherever people are unable to practice social distancing, even outdoors.
- The plan for 6-foot distancing between students in classrooms is now our guiding assumption in classroom planning, and will be factored into the number of students allowed in a given classroom. We are now developing strategies to remove or mark seats in classrooms to facilitate spacing during class.
- Cleaning strategies – another critical prevention strategy – are still under development.
- A substantial communication plan is being developed for launch once we have briefed the Board of Trustees and the President has rendered key final decisions. Advocating for a strong sense of shared responsibility among our entire community related to health-protecting practices (on campus and beyond) will be a key to success.
- Strategies to trace contacts in a way that helps uncover infections, and yet protects privacy, have developed further and will be ready to launch once final decisions on several aspects of the plan are approved. Work flows are being developed to handle actions following the discovery of a positive case or potential exposure to an infected person.
Residence Halls and Quarantine
- At this point, we remain focused on normal or close to normal densities in residence halls so long as appropriate cleaning strategies (especially for bathrooms) can be worked out.
- Quarantine spaces on campus for students who are infected are being identified.
Academic Calendar
- We will ask all instructors to be able to pivot to entirely online learning at any moment of the semester – especially from Nov. 24 through the end of the semester – just in case infections spike upward later in the fall.
- We are looking carefully at campus events that involve large numbers of people and finding ways to delay or de-densify as appropriate. We are contemplating a delay in August commencement to allow us to focus on student move-in. A decision will be announced shortly.
Teaching Support
- As of yesterday, new cameras and microphones have been installed in, or already existed in 215 university classrooms. We are on track to have all classrooms completed and tested before fall semester starts.
- IMPORTANT: For those of you who have not yet engaged with OTEI or Clemson Online to prepare for blended course delivery, we strongly urge you to contact Taimi Olsen (taimio@clemson.edu) and/or Anne Marie Rogers (anner@clemson.edu) to explore training options for instructional design and course delivery. Opportunities to engage with CO and OTEI are posted at https://www.clemson.edu/online/events.html.
Planning Courses
- This week we providing chairs and directors with surveys to start planning teaching modalities for the courses taught within their department or school. Simultaneously, we started some theoretical allocations of classes to rooms. These exercises aim to fulfill our goal of in-person experiences for as many classes as possible while observing social distancing requirements. All classes with in-person components will also be blended with online components.
- Once again, we emphasize that this planning is fluid with opportunities to discuss and change teaching modalities and classroom assignments over the summer.
Finally, we continue to monitor fall enrollments and the number of students that are participating in new-student orientation. Both remain on track at this time, giving us hope that we will meet our enrollment target for the upcoming year.
Thanks, as always, for all the work each of you continues to do in support of our students. These are challenging times, but we are making good progress on plans for the fall semester.
Respectfully,
John Whitcomb
President, Faculty Senate
Sue Whorton
President, Staff Senate
Tony Wagner
Executive Vice President for Finance and Operations
Bob Jones
Executive Vice President and Provost