UCSD plotting a path back to normality
It’s an unexpected sight on a campus dominated by big, bold buildings.
UC San Diego erected four circus-like tents in its engineering quad, creating space for students to take classes when school resumes Jan. 4.
La Jolla’s sea breeze will ventilate the tents, helping fend off the coronavirus and enabling UC San Diego to increase its in-person enrollment to 7,400, up 800 from the fall, the university says.
There also will be 1,000 more students in dorms. Six restaurants will start to open in a new campus village that houses 2,000. A second village of similar size is coming. And a grand plaza is taking shape where a Blue Line trolley station will open in November.
The anti-COVID-19 campaign has given the university the confidence to slowly open the campus more broadly and to quickly build what it needs to handle upward of 41,000 students.
The virus infection rate among students is 0.8%, compared with 7.7% countywide.
The university also believes the COVID-19 vaccination program that will start nationwide this week will vanquish the virus, making this the ideal moment to reinvigorate a school that — like others — has mostly been operating online since March.
“Our momentum might have slowed, but it did not go away,” Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said.
“It looks like the campus will be about 80% populated in the fall. I think we’ll still be wearing masks. We will not be greeting each other with hugs and handshakes as often as we used to. Our classes will not be as crowded.
“But there will be a sense of normalcy.”
The desire for change is palpable. Students say they’ve been worn thin by the loneliness, isolation and “Zoom fatigue” associated with online courses.
UC San Diego is leaning hard on Return to Learn, a blueprint that the school began to draft shortly after the pandemic hit.
Khosla marshaled his resources, which are considerable. The university operates two major hospitals, clinics, a healthcare network, drug trial units and separate schools of medicine, pharmacy and pharmaceutical science, and public health.
It’s also teeming with scientists who specialize in finding, tracking and fighting viruses.
By early May, UC San Diego was beginning to test asymptotic students for the coronavirus. Today, UC San Diego Health does more testing than the University of California’s other four medical centers combined.
The university succeeded, in part, because it got buy-in from students on testing and wearing masks.
That’s not entirely surprising; the school is centered on science, technology, engineering and math.
But hundreds of “health ambassadors” have been roaming campus and politely offering face coverings to students without masks. Students who are wearing them receive praise and sometimes a Starbuck’s card.
The “soft touch” has made a difference.
“Students prefer to be asked to do something rather than told,” said Kimberly Giangtran, president of Associated Students.
Things turned out differently at San Diego State, which struggled in the early days of the fall semester to find effective ways to talk to students. More than 1,700 students have tested positive for the coronavirus since the semester began. The situation has improved in the last couple of months.
San Diego State , like the county’s other major universities, is planning to remain primarily online through the spring.
UC San Diego also has benefitted from its decision five years ago to recruit renowned gastroenterologist Rob Knight.
Knight knew that COVID-19 turns up in a person’s feces during the early phase of infection, before someone tests positive. So he tapped into the school’s wastewater system to search for traces of the virus.
He then created an early warning system, using sensors to look for the virus in waste water coming out of many buildings. When there’s a positive signal, the university notifies people who might have used the building’s restrooms during a specific period of time and asks them to get tested.
The network has 52 automated sampling stations, the most of any university in the country. It will be expanded in the coming weeks and is expected to be particularly useful in early January when residential students return from the holiday break.
UC San Diego also helped run a pilot test for CA Notify, a COVID-19 exposure notification system for smartphones. The Bluetooth-based technology is being used on campus and was recently made available to all Californians.
Khosla is getting praise for crisis management.
“There was some skepticism among faculty when he started talking about bringing people back on campus and even opening up in-person teaching,” said Steven Constable, chair of the Academic Senate.
“But he followed through on the execution of Return to Learn, and not just in testing. It’s the ventilation in classes, it’s instilling a culture of responsibility in students, it’s contact tracing, and it’s putting people in place to make systems works.”
