Photo courtesy of Connecticut College.
As any Camel can observe from the many emails he has sent out to the Conn community this year, Dean Arcelus has been very vocal about what is happening on campus. On April 14, I talked with Dean Arcelus about his insights when setting up the layout of this academic year in the midst of the pandemic as well as future plans for the upcoming semester.
To what extent are you involved in the planning process for the upcoming fall semester? Is there anything that is set in stone?
Arcelus: At the end of the day, a lot of the details about the fall will end up getting worked out over the course of the summer. Each campus in the state of Connecticut has a COVID coordinator and I am the COVID coordinator for Connecticut College. So we have a weekly call on Tuesdays with that whole group and then we have a weekly call on Thursdays with the Department of Public Health and all of the COVID coordinators. We are regularly asking the Department of Public Health all kinds of questions about not only the current semester but looking into the future and they are limited right now in terms of what they can predict is going to be the set of circumstances for the fall. Right now, based on the information that we and the Department of Public Health have, we think that it is likely that we will be wearing masks and that we will have some kind of testing. Again, what that means and how it will all work is largely going to depend on the variants and whether or not between now and the fall there are variants that are impacting our country and state that don’t work as effectively with the vaccine and then whether or not there is going to be a booster to the vaccines to help address whatever variants there are. So there are still some unknowns that we need greater clarity on in order to know for sure what the fall will be. As President Bergeron noted, our intent right now is to go back to a normally operating campus in terms of academic schedules, classroom spacing, athletics, activities, and things of that sort.
Is there anything you learned from the past semester that went into the planning process for this semester?
Arcelus: We looked very closely at the experiences in the fall and tried to take that information and apply it to the spring semester planning. When we started the fall semester, there was a lot that was still being determined even as we started. I think that some of the information that we shared with students about how the campus was operating, it was being shared with you all through emails even over the course of the first few weeks. An improvement that I think we did over the spring semester is that by the time that we launched the spring semester, we had a much clearer sense of how to operate the campus and in our communication much more clearly. Two of the really important pieces I think were the onboarding process and trying to bring as little COVID onto campus as possible. By laying out the process to you all and communicating not only through virtual meetings, but in writing and videos, we were able to convey just how important that process was. At the end of the day, it allowed us to launch the semester with very little COVID on our campus. The other piece that was important in our communications with students had to do with trying to stay on campus and if you were going to go off campus to be very thoughtful and careful about the masking and social distancing and protecting yourselves when you’re off campus so that you don’t bring anything onto campus. That’s what we have seen. I think that we have had very few cases this semester so far in large part because students have been very thoughtful and mindful as to how to operate on campus and off campus in limiting the spread.
What have been some successes this semester in regard to Conn’s response to COVID? Is there anything that surprised you? Is there anything you would have done differently?
Arcelus: I am pleased to see that we were able to maintain such a low level of COVID and we haven’t had a positive student in the last 20 days, and we have had only two positive student cases in the last 38 days (Note: this interview was conducted prior to the two positive student tests on April 16). So that has allowed us to stay in Green which has allowed us as a community to be more engaged with each other and to be able to do things together in person. For example, the 40 Days event that we had for seniors this past weekend, the events that are happening on the Dune, the athletic competitions, all of that is made possible because students are doing a great job of managing these circumstances this semester. However, that’s not the case for all of our peers [NESCAC schools]; some of our peers have had significant outbreaks on their campus and that is not to say that we may not have that in the next 5 weeks, we can still have an outbreak. Now, we are having more and more students being vaccinated which again presents a protective factor that will help to keep the cases low.
Has COVID added any particular challenges to your work at Conn? Have you been sending out more emails than a usual semester?
Arcelus: I usually don’t send many emails. I can probably count on one hand the number of messages I would send in a year to students as a whole community. I don’t normally send a message a week. It’s funny, I sometimes go into a week thinking that I don’t really have anything to send to the students that week and then inevitably something comes up that is important to try to convey. All the messages are archived on the Path Forward website from last semester and this semester and it is surprising to see that virtually every week there has been something, at least one or two messages, that helped to convey to you all about what is happening on the ground at the moment and what to be thinking about. Then with most of those messages, I also forward to parents, faculty and staff so that they know what we are communicating to students. My sense is that people have generally been appreciative of the information. I realize it’s a lot of information. Hopefully, it’s a way to help people understand how the college is progressing and how we are trying to open it up more and more over the course of time.
Have you volunteered to communicate more with the students, parents, and staff, or is it a part of your job description?
Arcelus: As the Dean of Students, I had a significant responsibility for the students’ health and wellbeing and when this all started out back in March [2020], I had taken a leadership role institutionally in how we were going to be responding to the pandemic and then I became the COVID coordinator which none of it is in my job description to do. Therefore, I am in regular contact with other Connecticut schools, with the department of Public Health, with Hartford Healthcare and with our NESCAC peers. My job this year, as a lot of the staff in Student Life, has been totally different than what our jobs are normally. Our job has been to continue the work that we normally do while at the same time having a heavy focus on COVID and how the whole college is operating within the pandemic.
Are you doing more COVID work than you are doing regular work in a school year?
Arcelus: Yes. Right now, I am largely focused on COVID, but I am still doing the things that I normally need to do. Student life in a sense has adjusted our focus this year to be on COVID which means that other projects and initiatives that we would normally be working on in this year, that are outside of the day to day operations, we had to put on hold. Normally, I don’t have this institutional focus on how to run a college in a pandemic, Dean Cardwell doesn’t normally have the responsibility on how to run a testing center, CC Curtis (Director for Wellbeing and Health Promotions) is not normally focused on contact tracing. In essence, each of us as examples have had to do our work very differently to be focused on how to manage the college in a pandemic. Everybody’s job across campus had to learn to change and adjust and it has been a massive team effort as an institution to make this work. I think that the differences of a lot of the responsibility on the nuts and bolts of how to work under a pandemic are on key people within student life that have had to change their work.
Is there anything you are looking forward to at Conn as the spring semester comes to an end?
Arcelus: I’m looking forward to seeing you all enjoy these last few weeks of the semester. I’m looking forward to seeing the performances this weekend: the dance performances, and the cabaret performance on The Dune. I am looking forward to seeing the athletes continue to compete. Basically, just seeing students around campus. I live on campus so I am regularly here and walking around and I am hopeful that everyone can have as enjoyable of a spring on campus as we can possibly have.
Recently, Conn has said that they will have a vaccination clinic at the Athletic Center. Were you involved in that planning?
Arcelus: Yes. I have been in regular touch for the past several weeks with various different partners to identify a potential source of vaccine that could be brought to campus. I have been in contact with Hartford Healthcare, with Walgreens, with CVS and the community health center. In the end, the Community Health Center made the most sense for us to be able to have the Pfizer vaccine on campus for one day where we could do a large percentage of the student body. This is all thanks to the state of Connecticut and how supportive they have been of having college students get vaccinated before they leave campus because there is a window of time to do it. Given the challenges that have been happening with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, the only option really was Pfizer because it had a three week gap for the two doses and we had to be able to do it next week in order for students to get the second dose before they leave campus. I was very involved in identifying the vaccine and negotiating all of the details.
Going back to the preparation for the fall semester, is Conn going to require students to be vaccinated before arriving on campus?
Arcelus: At this moment, we are not requiring it. I know some institutions are beginning to communicate that they are requiring it. We are not at that point at the moment. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue to evaluate the details for the fall. The good news is that roughly 95% of students are planning to be vaccinated which is good for the fall.
At the very beginning of the school year, you framed our success regarding COVID as something that could “put Conn on the map.” Do you think Conn’s response to COVID might change public perception of the school?
Arcelus: I think at the beginning of the year what I tried to convey to students was that I think we could demonstrate how we are a community that has always been a place that we take care of each other and that the way that we handle COVID is a way for us to demonstrate to ourselves, to our alumni, to the broader public those broad values of care and concern for each other. I think that that started to get communicated after the fall semester. There were some articles written about the successes of our fall semester in the national media and my hope is that we can continue to have a successful spring semester and be able to tell our story more broadly about how we were able to provide you all with an on campus experience in the midst of the pandemic.
Do you believe that our success could be attributed to the kind of close-knit community we are?
Arcelus: I think it comes together in a wide variety of factors that contribute to our success. I think the core part of it is the fact that this is a place where people care about each other and take care of each other where we really came together as an institutional team to figure out the challenges that we had to overcome in order to be able to be in person that way that we have been. When I think back to March when this all got started, I remember that there were all these cruise ships that were all having outbreaks on them and I sat here thinking about how we would bring everyone back to campus, thinking about the fact that we have “cruise ships”. Each residence here has its own cruise ship and I am thinking to myself, “how are we going to operate a campus with all these cruise ships on campus.” Over the course of the summer in partnership with Hartford Healthcare, colleagues all across the country, and our alumni medical professionals, we came up with a set of protocols and plans for how to do this. I think that says a lot about the community that we have that we were able to be as successful as we have been for the course of the year.
When you look back on yourself from a year ago, is there anything you would tell yourself about how well Conn is doing under the circumstances? Were you worried about Conn’s future or did you think that we would be successful?
Arcelus: No, I was very worried. Through the summer I have had many sleepless nights, wondering how this would all play out. Particularly, when we were working through how to establish a testing center and have access to tests to be able to regularly test the community. I think that a key part of this whole process is to have the kind of data and information to have the prevalence of COVID on campus. The BROAD Institute has been an incredible partner in this- the testing center closes at 5 pm, the results are driven up to Boston, let’s say the results have gotten there by 8 pm, by 6 am, I have the results from yesterday’s tests up on my computer. In an incredibly fast matter, we are able to have the results of campus and that I think has been a really important piece to the puzzle.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Arcelus: Just my deep appreciation for how wonderful everyone has been through these difficult times and how just supportive I think students have been with each other and how collaborative students have been with the faculty and staff and figuring out how to do this.
