A Note of Thanks and Important Fall Semester Reminders

Dear Colleagues,

As we head into the third week of the fall 2021 semester, I want to thank you for your efforts thus far, share encouraging news with you and underscore the many strategies we have employed to keep our community safe.

First, I appreciate the preparation and care you have put into your courses for the fall semester and for your continued patience and diligence to preserve the return to in-person instruction for our students. Welcoming students back this semester felt invigorating. I attended many graduate and first-year student orientation events in person with all of us practicing mitigation protocols including wearing facial coverings. The energy at these events was palpable. You could feel the students’ excitement to begin their studies.

Tartan Testing and Classroom Notifications

At the same time, I recognize the last few weeks have been stressful and that some of you have felt anxious about re-entering classrooms or received a notice about a student in your class testing positive during the arrival testing window.

I want to assure you that our mitigation strategy is working as intended. With arrival testing, the test results we have received so far show the positivity rate for our incoming students remains low — approximately 0.28% of the thousands processed in our Tartan Testing facility over the past weeks. We continue to follow the CDC and Allegheny County Health Department guidance on contact tracing and isolation protocols. It is important that you not interfere with this process and treat this team of hardworking staff members with grace and respect.

We have learned that the vast majority of those who have tested positive and are fully vaccinated either remain asymptomatic or experience only mild symptoms. We are confident this is because our community is highly vaccinated. In fact, the student rate of vaccination is 92% and increasing every day.

Risk Assessments, Mitigations and Accommodations

Because of these factors, our Allegheny Health Network consultants affirmed that Carnegie Mellon’s campus is one of the lowest risk places for contracting COVID-19 in Allegheny County. Evidence and experience also suggest that classrooms are not vectors for virus spread given our high vaccination rates, universal facial coverings and excellent ventilation systems. You may have seen a recent report in The New York Times indicating that vaccinated individuals have an extremely low chance of experiencing a breakthrough COVID case if they take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.

For this reason, we continue to remind faculty that a confirmed case of COVID in your classroom does not require that course to go remote. Rather, we ask those in that classroom to continue to monitor themselves for symptoms. Should a student be instructed by the university contact tracing team to isolate or quarantine, we ask faculty to provide reasonable accommodations using the flexible practices used for other kinds of illnesses. Please refer to newly published answers to frequently asked questions on Positive COVID-19 Cases in the Classroom for further information.

Thanks to the diligent, intentional and proactive planning of the COVID coordination team, the university has additional plans of action as part of our multi-layered mitigation strategy that can be implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19 among our campus community should they be needed.

Campus Posture

In the current transitional campus posture, the corresponding course schedule allows for approximately 90% of classes to meet in person, which aligns with the campus postures of our peer institutions. We will continue to monitor the situation daily with plans in place to adjust instructional offerings should we enter a modified or restricted campus posture. We have built these adjusted plans based on the detailed information already provided by your departments on preferred modalities based on pedagogy for your courses.

I also remind and encourage you to regularly view the faculty-specific FAQ section on the COVID Update website, that we update weekly. If you have more questions, please reach out to the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty at vpf@andrew.cmu.edu.

Supporting the Student Experience

The energy during orientation and the first few weeks of classes came from students excited to experience the world-class residential educational experience that only Carnegie Mellon can provide. And I will say that I also heard from a number of you excited to be back in the classroom in person with your students. You can see our students’ passion poured into classrooms, studios, labs and maker-spaces all across campus. You can feel it out and about in the library, the gym, and in our outdoor tents and seating areas. That energy makes CMU who we are.

Because of this, I must reiterate the importance of preserving in-person learning for our students to the extent possible. Of course you have local flexibility to address any short-term needs and always have pedagogical prerogative to hold a class period in whatever manner you think works best for your students’ learning. However, the overall modality must not be changed unless authorized by your department head and dean.

I wish you all a great fall semester and thank you once again for all that you do for our students and for Carnegie Mellon University.
 
Sincerely,
Jim Garrett
Provost and Chief Academic Officer