The head of North Carolina's college system knows who to blame for Chapel Hill's botched reopening: Not the school but 'students behaving irresponsibly off campus'
Aug 21, 2020, 04:31 IST
- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ditched its hybrid reopening plan on Monday, just one week after welcoming students back to campus. Roughly 130 students tested positive for the coronavirus.
- As of Thursday, the university has reported six COVID-19 clusters, including within fraternity houses and freshmen dorms.
- Other schools are now facing the same need to halt in-person instruction as UNC. North Carolina State University also announced that it will move toward remote learning on Thursday due to a coronavirus outbreak on campus.
- In response to the news, Peter Hans, the president of the UNC school system, told the Associated Press that every Carolina campus had different but well developed plans for reopening — and then blamed students for dismantling them.
- "This hard work is being undermined by a very small number of students behaving irresponsibly off campus," Hans told the AP, "which unfairly punishes the vast majority of their classmates who are following the rules."
- Even as videos have surfaced of UNC students participating in slip-n-slides, some have criticized the university's reopening plan. The school's newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, published a biting front-page editorial on Monday calling the school's management of the situation a "clusterf---."
- Hans just started his post as UNC system president at the beginning of August.
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