BREAKING NEWS: UNC-CH Shifts To Online-Only Instruction For Undergraduates

CHAPEL HILL, NC  – Following a report of 177 COVID-19 cases on campus in a week, in-person classes for undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will move online. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off-campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, the university said.

Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said the change goes into effect Wednesday. The university will take steps to allow undergraduates to leave campus housing without financial penalty if they wish.

“We understand the concern and frustrations these changes will raise with many students and parents,” UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, and provost, Robert A. Blouin, wrote in a statement. “As much as we believe we have worked diligently to help create a healthy and safe campus living and learning environment, we believe the current data presents an untenable situation.”

Guskiewicz’s announcement comes just hours after Barbara Rimer, dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, called for classes to be moved online.

“After only one week of campus operations, with growing numbers of clusters and insufficient control over the off-campus behavior of students (and others), it is time for an off-ramp,”  Rimer wrote in a statement Monday. “We have tried to make this work, but it is not working.”

Faculty and staff, too, were calling for a review of the situation.

Graduate, professional, and health affairs courses will continue to be taught as they are, or as directed by the schools.

Clusters of cases had popped up in three residence halls and a fraternity house at UNC-Chapel Hill in the first week of the fall term, sending students into isolation and quarantine rooms and raising faculty worries about how far the dangerous pathogen will spread in the campus community.

No changes are reported for classes on the other campuses within the UNC System.