Daily Lumina News 073120

Colleges and universities are under pressure to reopen, but bringing students back on campus safely means dealing with dizzying logistics. As the virus surges in Miami, Florida International University gets ready.
FIU is a research university and Provost Ken Furton is applying his own expertise as a scientist in the huge undertaking of safely reopening the campus. For 20 years his chemistry lab has worked with dogs to detect drugs, explosives, and even diseases. Now his lab is training dogs for a pilot study to detect areas that may have been contaminated by the coronavirus.

When Rutgers University told students to remain home for the rest of the spring semester, Natalia Leguizamon—who is the first in her family to attend a four-year college—had no idea what she would have to endure.
The coronavirus and stay-at-home orders are putting many first-generation students like Leguizamon in a bind. Many lack the resources to leave campus and go back home; others must do their work in parking lots with nearby Wi-Fi.

When the coronavirus shut down high schools, standardized tests vanished almost overnight. The disruption prompted more than 200 selective colleges to suspend—sometimes permanently—their SAT and ACT requirements. By late March, the certainty of the ritual was gone.
This summer's racial-justice protests also reminded higher education to consider college-entrance requirements in their essential context: structural inequality. Now, college officials are at a moment of reckoning that could change the assessment industry and diminish its most-familiar products.

As college students and professors decide whether to head back to class, and as universities weigh how and whether to reopen, the coronavirus is already on campus.
A New York Times survey of every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities, revealed at least 6,600 cases tied to about 270 colleges over the course of the pandemic. And the new academic year has not even begun at most schools.