UVA students who have been exposed to someone with COVID-19 are quarantined at local hotels, including the Fairfield Inn. PC: Staff photo
More than 1,300 UVA students have contracted coronavirus this semester. Though cases have declined since last month’s controversial fraternity and sorority rush events, over 300 students currently have the virus.
Per the university’s coronavirus guidelines, students who live in school-run housing facilities and test positive for the virus are moved to on-campus isolation dorms for 10 days. And those who’ve been in close contact with someone with COVID-19 are put into quarantine housing: an assortment of local hotels. (Students who live off-Grounds are required to isolate or quarantine inside their residence. They may also go home if it’s safe to do so, as can on-Grounds students.)
From the moment they found out they’d been exposed to the virus, some students report receiving inconsistent communication from the university.
After one of her close contacts tested positive, first-year Zulma Escobar claims that she and four friends (who also had been exposed to the virus) all received different instructions when they contacted Student Health. Though Escobar was advised to get tested the following day, her friends were not tested at all before checking in to their quarantine hotel.
“Sometimes things were just poorly communicated, both to the people trying to help us and to us,” says Escobar.
While students in isolation have roommates, those in quarantine are in rooms by themselves and are not allowed to interact with others. However, these safety guidelines are not always enforced.
At his hotel, first-year Patrick Cloud says he heard students congregating in rooms and hallways, and even smelled marijuana at times. He called the front desk and the dean on call to report his concerns, but he says they both claimed there was nothing they could do about it.
For many students, the biggest downside to quarantine has been the food, which is delivered twice a day by a catering company. The meals often arrive cold, and microwaves can be hard to come by, report students. Those with restrictive diets or food allergies may not even be able to eat them.
Sometimes things were just poorly communicated both to the people trying to help us and to us.
Zulma Escobar, UVA first-year
First-year Alexa Williams says her suitemate, who cannot eat most carbs, contacted the university about her dietary restrictions and was told to order her own groceries.
“Not all students have access to those resources, so it’s a little concerning,” says Williams.
Another student says she lost 20 pounds during her hotel stay because the quality of the food left her eating just once a day.
“The lunches have been pretty sparse. [One day] all I got was a banana and 50 calorie salad,” says fourth-year Quintin, who asked that we not use his last name. “It’s been a couple times where I’ve had to call friends to ask them if they can drop off Taco Bell or something, just to avoid nasty delivery fees.”
“We work hard to accommodate student needs,” says UVA spokesman Brian Coy. “If issues arise, we ask that they contact the university so that we can address them as quickly as possible. We recognize isolation or quarantine are difficult for our students, and our team works hard to make it as comfortable as possible.”
To improve quarantine conditions, students ultimately hope the university will provide clearer and faster communication, and completely revamp its meal program to meet all dietary needs.
“I don’t know anyone who didn’t order food or groceries at least once,” says one first year after a quarantine stay. “It’s ridiculous.”
A new Q joint started smoking last Friday. Vision Barbecue is pioneered by co-owners Mike Blevins and Gabi Barghachie, who came up with their “vision” for the restaurant while working together at Maya. These barbecue boys are on a mission to add their own take on authentic smoked meats and sides to the downtown restaurant scene. “We are using local wood and a match,” Barghachie says. “No chemical starters, no gas, no electric. Everything done the way it’s supposed to be done.” The menu offers meats by the pound, traditional sides with a spicy variation on pimento cheese, and Little Pig- and Big Hen-sized sandwiches for all appetites. Be sure to grab the wet naps when you pick up VB’s signature sammie, The Hot Mess, loaded with 10 ounces of brisket, pork, and chicken, and topped with pickled onions and jalapeño plus housemade cheese and pepper sauces. Vision Barbecue is located next to The Shebeen at 249 Ridge McIntire Rd., and is open Thursday through Monday.
Crammin’ the good stuff
While we can’t imagine students completely ditching Gusburgers, donuts, and Chinese food delivery, it’s exciting to see UVA’s commitment to healthy, sustainable eating through a new partnership with Harvest Table. A subsidiary of Aramark, Harvest Table specializes in bringing locally sourced, high-quality food to institutional dining. Throughout the fall semester, the company tested its “immersive culinary movement” with pop-ups inside Runk dining hall, before fully integrating to bring Hoos a fresh, eco-friendly alternative.
All Runk food now comes from within a 150-mile radius of Charlottesville and is prepared entirely in-house—no premade hamburger patties, no packaged desserts. Through the initiative, students can choose non-GMO, antibiotic-free, and grass-fed as well as plant-based proteins, and there are options for those with food allergies and sensitivities.
Peter Bizon, executive chef for Harvest Table at Runk, says that university dining halls provide an excellent opportunity to bring local businesses together. He’s teamed up with Shenandoah Joe’s for coffee and Blue Ridge Bucha for on-tap kombucha.
“Some farms have the necessary licensing to do business with us and some don’t,” says Bizon. “We specialize in connecting the ones who don’t with the ones who do in order to foster cooperation among local producers. It means a lot when you can work with local farmers. You can get others involved and create a strong community.”
Harvest Table is also partnering with Babylon Micro-Farms, an organization founded by UVA alumni that helps restaurants grow produce in-house with systems that are remotely climate controlled and can support a wide
variety of plants, from lettuces to herbs, and even some edible flowers.
The university hopes to extend Harvest Table’s services to its other two dining halls in the future.
Frites on hold
While many local restos have pivoted creatively to stay open safely, using igloos, outdoor heaters, blankets, and stepped-up takeout offerings, Brasserie Saison has opted to close temporarily for the winter. The official statement from the popular Euro-pub says, “The health and safety of our restaurant family and community come first and we feel that the risk is too great for indoor dining during these winter months.” Owners say they plan to reopen in the spring, after the majority of the restaurant staff is able to receive vaccines. Then we can finally get back to enjoying the moules frites.
Frites on the go
Meanwhile, just up the mall, there’s another new restaurant from Ten Course Hospitality (the group behind Brasserie Saison, Revolutionary Soup, The Alley Light, The Pie Chest, The Bebedero, and most recently The Milkman’s Bar at Dairy Market): Café Frank, with an original menu from Chef Jose De Brito, whose resume includes Fleurie, The Alley Light, and The Inn at Little Washington. The new café is located in the former home of Splendora’s Gelato (we miss you!), and promises casual, French dining on the Downtown Mall (plus a robust daily to-go menu). The café’s bar program is by Mike Stewart, and Will Richey will curate the bistro-style wine list. We are excited to try the Royal Paella-for-Two with lobster, mussels, shrimp, and chorizo, but the hidden gem of this new foodie magnet might be the 4pm aperitif hour, when De Brito creates unique bites to pair with a prosecco bar-style sparkling wine list and cocktails. Café Frank is accepting takeout orders, and will be open for in-house dining Monday through Saturday beginning in March. —Will Ham
The map above, shared by UVA last week, shows where those with new COVID-19 cases live.
PC: UVA
By Amelia Delphos
Last Monday, the University of Virginia reached a record-breaking 118 positive student COVID-19 cases in a single day. The next day, 229 students tested positive for coronavirus, making up 10 percent of Virginia’s total new positives that day. Cases continued to climb until the student positivity rate reached 4.2 percent on Friday.
Tuesday night, around 5:30pm, an email sent out to the university community declared that the school would enter a complete lockdown.
UVA banned all in-person student gatherings and shut down libraries and recreation centers. In-person classes and research would continue under the new guidelines, and dining halls would remain open but in-person seating would be restricted to two people at one table.
The spike in cases occurred just after UVA’s annual fraternity and sorority rush events. In a normal year, rush sees hundreds of students cycle through old, cramped Greek-life houses, showing off their personalities (and beer pong skills) in hopes of winning admission to this or that social house.
This year, the student-led Inter Sorority Council limited its member organizations to a virtual rush process with an option for an in-person bid day, while the Inter Fraternity Council ruled frats were allowed to conduct some in-person rush events and an in-person bid day, so long as they adhered to a six-person gathering limit and wore masks indoors and out.
But on Sunday, February 14, the rush process concluded in its traditional way, with groups of students socializing on Rugby Road, posing for pictures at Mad Bowl, and gathering in groups obviously larger than six to celebrate in-person “bid day” after the conclusion of the week-long rush process.
There’s no doubt that rush contributed to this.
UVA President Jim Ryan
Following the Tuesday night lockdown, students immediately took to social media to blame frats and sororities for the spike in cases. Rumors of late-night parties, dumping maskless rushees in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and mysterious venue reservations made the rounds on Twitter and Reddit.
Despite all of this circumstantial evidence, the university released a statement on Thursday that reminded the community that Greek organizations had been subject to the same gathering rules as everyone else. The email also stated that noncompliance with the rules and transmission of the virus were widespread, and there was no evidence the recent spike was linked to rush.
Some students felt the school was too quick to shift the blame away from Greek organizations. “UVA keeps gaslighting all of us,” says one third-year, “saying it’s all of our faults that there’s a massive spike, when it’s so glaringly obvious to the whole student body that the IFC simply didn’t follow the rules laid out for rush.”
Last Friday, the UVA administration’s bigwigs held a virtual town hall to discuss the outbreak and the new restrictions.
According to Dr. Mitch Rosner, chairman of the department of medicine, there was no single “superspreader” event that led to the outbreak. A slide during his presentation at the town hall read, “Contact tracing and our analysis of case distribution does not identify a single or even a few dominant sources of transmission. Instead, widespread issues with adherence to public health measures appears to be the major issue.” Rosner pointed out that cases are also widespread, and approximately 75 percent of them are off Grounds.
At the town hall, UVA President Jim Ryan addressed rush’s role in the outbreak head-on. “There’s no doubt that rush contributed to this, in part because it brought groups of people together,” he said. “There’s also no doubt that mistakes were made, as were willful violations in the context of rush.”
“In hindsight, perhaps we should have tried harder to discourage all in-person rush events,” Ryan said. “As leaders of the university, I wish we had been able to prevent this spike, and I’m sorry we weren’t.”
In an ongoing effort to atone for its racist history, the University of Virginia could provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers as soon as 2022. PC: Eze Amos
For nearly a year, Isabella Gibbons has peered over Charlottesville. Inscribed into the rough-hewn granite of the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, her eyes not only draw attention to the cruel realities of slavery—but ask what we are going to do to rectify them.
As UVA continues to atone for its racist history, a form of reparation may finally be on the way for the living descendants of enslaved laborers like Gibbons, who helped build and maintain the university for decades.
On February 5, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that would require five state colleges established before 1865—the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Military Institute, Longwood University, and the College of William & Mary—to offer full four-year scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers, allowing them to attend the school of their choice.
“When you think about the centuries of legacy admissions that have occurred, this is really just the bare minimum that could be done for a community of people who are responsible for these institutions existing,” says Justin Reid, manager of the General Assembly Virginia African American Cultural Resources Task Force.
“More than anything, this bill gives the General Assembly’s seal of approval for efforts that in many cases are already underway,” he adds. “There are institutions doing this work that wouldn’t be doing it if it had not been for student activism, faculty support, and descendant organizing.”
If the bill is passed by the state senate, the colleges will have to tap into their large endowments (or fundraise) to pay for the scholarship program, which would take effect in the 2022-2023 academic year. They will also be obligated to build a memorial to enslaved laborers, if they have not done so already.
At UVA, descendants have already established their own independent organization. Though the group is still getting organized, one of its main goals is to establish reparations scholarships.
“Our ancestors [not only] put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating and building the university,” says Bertha French, co-chair of Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA, “but their bodies were a part of a system of finance that were foundational to the beginnings of our country.”
In addition to providing free higher education—which is “a passport for upward mobility,” says French—to thousands of African Americans, these scholarships would rectify the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were defiled and abused in the name of scholarship, she explains.
“People were robbing graves and taking cold bodies to use for research in medical schools, and to study anatomy,” French says.
For founding co-chair DeTeasa Gathers, the fight for descendant scholarships is personal. In 1963, her late mother graduated from UVA hospital’s segregated licensed practical nurse program—but was not allowed to attend the university.
“As she was passing, she told me not to forget her,” says Gathers. “Not forgetting her is also part of my push for this process.”
There are institutions doing this work that wouldn’t be doing it if it had not been for student activism, faculty support, and descendant organizing.
Justin Reid, manager of the General Assembly Virginia African American Cultural Resources Task Force
Per the proposed law, the five colleges will be required to work with the State Council for Higher Education to identify as many of the enslaved people who worked on their campuses as possible, which will determine how many scholarships or grants each institution awards. For UVA, that number will range between 4,000 and 5,000.
One of the challenges of establishing programs like these is locating the descendants of enslaved people, which often must be done using incomplete or nonexistent historical records. Genealogist Shelley Murphy has already built over 100 family trees, and identified more than 45 descendants of people enslaved at UVA.
In 2019, “I began with doing presentations about the research and who I am looking for: descendants of the enslaved laborers, descendants of the slave owners, other genealogists, and family historians [who] have central Virginia ancestry connections,” she says. “I also use social media…The more that know about it, the chances increase in finding more descendants.”
Now that the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers has been open for almost a year, Murphy says she’s had a lot more people contact her directly about being a descendant. If their intake form shows a possible connection to the area, she meets with them over Zoom, and begins to dig into their family history.
Across the commonwealth, other colleges and universities have taken their own steps toward addressing their troubled pasts.
Since 2009, the Lemon Project—named after an enslaved man—has worked to uncover William & Mary’s deep ties to slavery, offering courses, symposiums, and other educational events. The college has also commissioned a $2 million memorial to enslaved laborers, which is set to be completed next year.
Other institutions are not as far along in the process. After facing scathing accusations of “relentless racism” by Black students and alumni, VMI removed its statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson last year. While the school’s policies and culture remain under third-party investigation, it has begun to research and identify the people it enslaved.
If the legislation is approved, Reid ultimately hopes it can be expanded upon to include even more colleges in the state.
“Virginia wouldn’t exist without the labor of enslaved people,” he says. “All of our higher ed institutions have benefited from this history.”
Tuesday afternoon's data showed an unprecented spike of COVID cases in the UVA community.
Going viral
On February 12, UVA confirmed that a case of the extra-contagious B.1.1.7 British coronavirus had been found in the university community. (Though the British variant of the disease is more infectious than previous strains, it isn’t any more dangerous once the subject has been infected.) “These are concerning developments, but we believe we are capable of managing them as an institution and as individual members of this community,” the administration wrote in a community-wide email on Friday.
On Tuesday afternoon, the school experienced a dramatic new spike in COVID cases, with 121 cases reported in a single day. Previously, the highest single-day total was 59 new cases detected on September 17.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the school reports 364 active cases among students and another 12 active cases among faculty, staff, and contract workers.
In the fall, cases hit their highest point in the semester about a week after classes began. An even more drastic early-semester spike seems to be taking place this spring: Spring semester classes began February 1, and February 9 saw a record number of new cases.
The school has decided that in-person classes will continue, though all social gatherings are banned for the time being. Mandatory saliva testing for all students continues.
__________________
Quote of the week
“The new administration has been night and day. For one, just to know that the administration is committed to vaccinating our population.”
—Governor Ralph Northam, on how Biden taking office has affected Virginia vaccine policy
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In brief
Take my statue… please!
The huge statue of Sacagawea, Lewis, and Clark at the intersection of Ridge and McIntire has been a thorn in Charlottesville’s side ever since descendants of Sacagawea came to town in 2019 and called the statue “the worst we have ever seen.” The city hoped to remove the statue during planned renovations to West Main in the next few years, but the local government is now looking for other options. Last week, the city posted a call searching for “any suitable organization or person who would be willing to safely remove, relocate, and take ownership” of the racist bronze eyesore. If no one comes forward, we hear it might be posted on Craigslist.
Hill family demands footage release
A group of UVA students and community members gathered outside the Rotunda last week to mark the one-month anniversary of the death of Xzavier Hill, a local 18-year-old who was shot and killed by a Virginia State Police trooper in January. The state police are investigating the incident but have not released body camera footage thus far. The Hill family says the footage, if released, will confirm Xzavier’s blamelessness in the incident.
Progressives coalesce
City Councilor Michael Payne, who introduced Bernie Sanders at a presidential campaign rally in Richmond last February, has now endorsed a progressive candidate for Virginia governor: Jennifer Carroll Foy. Thus far, Carroll Foy’s fundraising has reflected her position as one of the left-most candidates in the race. Thirty-six percent of donations to her campaign come from donors who contributed to progressive Tom Perriello’s 2017 run, by far the highest share of any 2021 candidate, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Lisa Woolfork is the producer of “Stitch Please,” a weekly podcast that explores sewing
and social justice. Publicity photo
By Erika Howsare
Lisa Woolfork had been sewing for years when she came to a realization—or, rather, a resolution. “I would never again trade my humanity in exchange for doing something I love,” she says. As a Black sewist, she had too often found herself in a compromising position: trying to participate in white-dominated sewing communities, but unable to “show up as my full, complete, and whole self,” as she puts it.
It was fall 2017, and Woolfork had recently had the harrowing experience of being on the ground for the deadly events of August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville. She’d been nearby when Heather Heyer died. But when she arrived at a sewing event in a different Virginia town, she wasn’t intending to discuss those things with the other, mostly white and conservative, participants.
“When I got there, people started asking me how I was, asking what it was like,” she remembers. “I would just answer, and say ‘yeah, it was hard, it was scary.’ I did not walk in to give lectures or speeches or anything. I just wanted to sew my project.”
Nonetheless, these conversations got her uninvited to the group’s next event. Woolfork realized that her presence was only accepted in this setting if she remained within very narrow boundaries. A friend told her, “‘This is what happens to Black folks when we go from being a pet to being a threat.’”
Woolfork, a professor of English at UVA, decided that she was done playing the role of minority in her creative life. Instead, she would create a new community in which Black makers stood at the center. In 2018, she began using Instagram to organize Black Women Stitch—“the sewing group where Black lives matter,” as she defines it. “Our intention is not to diversify the sewing community,” she says. “The advocacy is to create instead a space where Black women, girls, and femmes are centered in sewing.”
BWS gathered steam over the space of about a year, as Woolfork connected online with other Black women who wanted to talk sewing without leaving their identities or politics at the door. “I was looking for other Black women who had values similar to mine, including things like radical self-love, interest in Black liberation, and interest in racial justice,” Woolfork says.
The next big step was to organize an in-person event in early 2019: Beach Week, a week of sewing and togetherness in the Outer Banks. About a dozen people came, from as far as Texas and California. “We all came looking for the same thing: a sewing sisterhood,” Woolfork says.
They found a profound fellowship—“A friend described it as lightning in a bottle,” says Woolfork—and they emerged with another idea, too: a podcast. Woolfork uploaded the first episode of “Stitch Please” in September 2019. She conceived of it as a space to talk about sewing craft, Black women makers, and social justice, all at once. “There are podcasts about racial justice, womanism, feminism, all of these important practices for freedom and liberation and building a better society,” Woolfork says. “Then there’s podcasts that talk about sewing techniques, sewing celebrities, patterns, fabrics, all of these things. My podcast is the only one that is able to do both.”
Anyone who doubts that these topics belong in the same conversation might start to understand after listening to an episode or two. In one show, Woolfork discusses a controversy that arose within the general sewing community in January 2020 when the National Quilt Museum’s Block of the Month program included a free quilt block pattern that showed a pencil erasing the letters “in-” from the word “injustice.” A number of club members complained about this design, refused to participate, or altered the design with words like “Peace” or a picture of Mickey Mouse. As Woolfork puts it on the show, “It’s a revelation of the white fragility and racism that is prevalent in the sewing community.”
The mix of topics on “Stitch Please” has turned out to be a very potent brew. In one year, the podcast has seen an 1,100 percent growth in its audience, with 110,000 downloads representing 95 countries. Tobiah Mundt, also a Black maker and the co-owner of The Hive Cville, says she attributes that success to Woolfork’s authenticity. “She’s so real and she’s just herself,” Mundt says. “She’s not trying to be anything but Lisa, and she inspires us to have the courage to be ourselves and to live unapologetically.”
Shana Jefferson, a listener and occasional podcast guest who also attended the BWS Beach Week, agrees. “She’s uncompromising,” she says. “She’s been approached to have different sponsors or partnerships, and she takes very deliberate intentional time to think through those. If you’re not there to support Black women, girls, and femmes, she has no problem saying no.”
Woolfork says that sewing—an art she’s practiced for 25 years, and traces back through generations of women in her family—is a metaphor for community building. “This was an ancestral craft for African Americans,” she says. “[Community organizing] is a similar energy of transforming and creating and pulling together and binding.”
Access to healthy foods and safe production are on the table for discussion at Food and Justice in Virginia.
Table manners: Agriculture in Virginia has a legacy of harm, particularly to Black and Indigenous farmers, and equitable access to nutritious, affordable, and sustainable food has been overlooked for a long time. UVA partners with Morven Farm for Food and Justice in Virginia, a discussion that addresses safety and equity in our current food systems. Moderated by Associate Professor of Politics Paul Freedman, the event, part of the university’s MLK Celebration, features Shantell Bingham of the Charlottesville Food Justice Network and Cultivate Charlottesville, along with other social justice and sustainability advocates from the area.
In an ongoing effort to atone for its racist history, the University of Virginia could provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers as soon as 2022. PC: Eze Amos
At UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, some people are remembered by name: Billy, Jane, Lewis. Others are remembered by occupation or relationship: Woodcutter, grandmother. And others still are represented by nothing more than gashes in the hard rock, denoting a life’s worth of details lost to history.
Standing in front of the wall, Myra Anderson’s eyes fell upon the name of her ancestor, Thirmston Hern, who had been enslaved at Monticello and sold to a university professor following the death of Thomas Jefferson.
Thirmston was not alone, Anderson learned. Five other members of his family were also sold and enslaved at the university—yet their names were not initially included on the University of Virginia’s memorial, which opened last year.
Earlier this month, however, Anderson’s five ancestors were finally etched into the granite wall: Davy Hern, Fanny Gillette Hern, Bonnycastle Hern, Lily Hern, and Ben Snowden.
The additions were unveiled to Anderson and her family during a small ceremony last week.
“It was a really heavy and emotional moment,” says Anderson, who grew up in Charlottesville. “It was more than just getting those names on the wall. It was really bringing dignity to my ancestors—slavery is something that robbed them of that.”
Since her ancestors were first enslaved at Monticello, Anderson was able to dig up estate sale records, along with books and documents, proving that the Herns had also lived and worked at the university. In addition, she discovered that Thirmston, Davy, and Lily were siblings.
For over a year, she contacted various university faculty and staff, advocating for the Herns to be honored on the memorial wall. But because there was no established process for adding names to the monument, it took a while to connect with the right person.
“I don’t think it was an issue of reluctance or resistance, as much as it was process,” she says. “At times I did want to give up, but I thought about my ancestors and it’s not in my DNA to do that.”
In December, Anderson finally received an apology letter from the university, announcing that her ancestors would be added to the memorial the following month.
Anderson’s persistence ultimately led the university to establish an official MEL Names Committee, composed of historians, genealogists, alumni, architects, and descendants.
PC: Eze Amos
From 1812 to 1865, an estimated 4,000 people were enslaved at UVA, and each is represented by a deep gash carved into the memorial wall. But researchers have only been able to find the names of 588 enslaved people, along with 311 people known by their occupation or kinship relation, to put above the memory marks.
“The MEL Names Committee is dedicated to working with genealogists and seeing the 4,000 memory markers on the memorial filled with the names of enslaved laborers,” says Carolyn Dillard, head of the committee. “[But] this is not just about a memorial wall—this is talking about people’s hearts and families that have been divided. We want to make sure we are engaging with descendants respectfully.”
At times I did want to give up, but I thought about my ancestors and it’s not in my DNA to do that.”
Myra Anderson, Descendant
Though the university will continue to look for people to add to the memorial, descendant families are strongly encouraged to bring forward names to be validated by genealogists, says Dillard.
Every year, new names will be added to the wall, and unveiled at a ceremony for descendant families.
Anderson hopes that the new committee will make the approval process much easier for other descendant families, even those with very few historical records.
“My worry is for the descendants who will come along whose ancestors didn’t come from Monticello or some place that had all of these documentations. Because during slavery, records are hard to find,” she says.
“We want descendants to come forward to share any documentation that they have—even oral history,” says Dillard.
Anderson also calls on UVA to continue to address and rectify its racist past, such as by creating legacy scholarships for descendants of people enslaved at the university.
“This university has flourished off of the labor, blood, sweat, and tears of my ancestors and other enslaved laborers,” she says. “When you’re thinking of righting wrongs of the past, that seems like a no-brainer.”
Nicole Ruzek, director of UVA Counseling and Psychological Services, says the university began offering support groups for students concerned about COVID, as well as those in isolation or quarantine.
Photo: John Robinson
By Caroline Challe
Mountains of reading, devilish final exams, finding your way into adulthood—college can be stressful under the best of circumstances. This year, coronavirus turned UVA’s public spaces into ghost towns, and rendered many college students’ traditional methods of de-stressing impossible, or at least unwise. (Although it’s true that some students made their way to the bars anyway.)
The weight of social isolation, normally rare in a college environment, served as a new stressor for many students. “One of the biggest issues I faced this semester was the lack of camaraderie,” says third-year Emily Kruse. “I normally like to study in libraries or in more public spaces. Something about seeing my peers working late nights gives me more of a sense of purpose than sitting alone at home.”
For fourth-years, these past nine months were starkly different than the rest of their UVA experience. There were big changes, of course, like online classes and community traditions deferred—but the virus also added a base layer of stress to the social fabric of college life. “I found myself constantly worried,” says Pilar Jimenez Larre Borges. “When I ran into someone or got lunch with people, outside and six feet apart, I wondered if they had COVID-19. Or what if I had it and gave it to them? And then they gave it to someone else?”
As older students adapted to a new type of life at UVA, first years faced a unique set of circumstances. Daniel Bojo says the virus made it hard to develop a social network in a new place. “The biggest challenge of being a first year during this time was reaching out and meeting new people,” he says. ”It’s hard to meet people for the first time on Zoom and only see them online.”
UVA’s Counseling and Psychological Services, the school’s student-focused mental health care provider, has been offering services online since March.
“Students have talked about the impact of remote learning,” says Nicole Ruzek, director of CAPS, “and how it’s been more challenging to find motivation for class and stay on top of course work when everything is online. Some have also talked about increased levels of isolation or loneliness.”
“We added specific groups for students concerned about COVID as well as students in isolation or quarantine,” Ruzek says. “Support groups help students talk about their anxiety in regards to COVID-19, about either getting it themselves or having friends or family who are getting it. Our isolation and quarantine groups give students other people to talk to while they’re going through that experience.”
Services aside, students have found new ways to manage stress this semester. Third-year Jack MacLeod has focused on the little things. “Going on drives out into Albemarle, drinking coffee on my deck, short walks in between classes—it all adds up,” he says.
And new rituals have replaced the old. “My roommate and I started a ‘feelings wall,’” says MacLeod. “At the end of each day, we’d do a little check-in with ourselves on a post-it note and place it on our wall. It started as a joke, but it turned out to be an emotional crutch for me.”
UVA detected 1,300 cases of COVID among students, faculty, staff, and contract workers this semester. Photo: Skyclad Aerial
It’s 11am on Thursday, November 19. The U.S. has reached an all-time high for COVID-19 infections in a single day. Colleges have reported record-high numbers as well, contributing to around 2 percent of national infections, according to the New York Times.
And UVA President Jim Ryan has declared victory.
In a video posted to the school’s website, Ryan said the university had accomplished “what many said couldn’t be done,” and showed the world “what being a great and good university looks like.”
It’s true that UVA has largely avoided the uncontrolled spread that worried community members in the summer, when the university first announced its plan to welcome students back to Grounds. At the time, Virginia was experiencing a Memorial Day spike in COVID-19 cases and inching out of its initial Phase 1 restrictions. After college students gathered en masse for the traditional Midsummer’s party weekend, some community leaders sounded the alarm.
“I, for one, don’t understand why the students are coming back into the community, from all over the globe, and why we’re taking that chance,” Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker said at a virtual press conference over the summer.
Some at the university also pushed back against in-person classes. The United Campus Workers union and Student Council both petitioned for an all-virtual semester. In early September, student and community activists held a die-in demonstration where 50 people protested by feigning dead on the Rotunda steps and the Lawn.
Three months later, the semester is in the books. (Students left Grounds before Thanksgiving, a little earlier than usual.) Since August, the university has identified just under 1,300 COVID-19 infections among students, faculty, and staff, a number the administration has deemed a success. Those cases resulted in zero deaths and zero hospitalizations, reports university spokesman Brian Coy.
This graph from UVA’s COVID dashboard shows cases detected at the school over the course of the semester.
“There were a lot of people who were skeptical that students, or the rest of our community, would follow those behaviors closely enough to avoid a major outbreak,” says J.J. Davis, UVA’s chief operating officer. “However, as a whole, this community showed that we were capable of coming together and doing the right things to protect each other and keep the semester on track.”
Provost Liz Magill says the university faced “impossible odds” when the coronavirus pandemic halted operations in March. She cited measures such as the high amount of isolation and quarantine beds, increased testing, and restrictions on gatherings when cases spiked. The measures “weren’t easy” but ultimately the university “overcame historic obstacles,” Magill says.
Final exams
An aggressive testing operation lies at the center of the school’s COVID prevention plan. As the semester wore on, UVA instituted a mandatory testing policy, periodically calling all students living in the area to report to the Central Grounds Parking Garage for a spit test. From November 15-21, as the semester wrapped up, the school conducted 9,453 tests. Virginia has 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students living on Grounds this fall; for comparison, Virginia Tech, a school of 34,000 students, conducted 4,910 tests during that same week in November. This semester, Tech has detected around 1,600 cases.
At the beginning of the semester, UVA created 1,500 quarantine beds for students who had been exposed to the virus. The ability to shift students into this quarantine housing proved pivotal in the early fall. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had to send students back home during the first week of in-person classes, when cases shot up and quarantine rooms dwindled to the single digits. UVA experienced a similar spike in cases during its first week of in-person classes (UNC had 130, UVA 199) but the school’s supply of quarantine beds was large enough to weather the storm.
Additionally, testing allowed UVA to monitor residence halls and identify clusters in places like the Balz-Dobie and Hancock residence halls. Regular dorm wastewater testing combined with mandatory dorm resident testing kept infections from exploding on Grounds.
Dr. Taison Bell, a pulmonary and critical care physician and graduate student who also works in the UVA hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, thinks the university learned its lesson from other colleges across the country.
“A lot of peer institutions were having issues with large-scale COVID outbreaks,” Bell says. “So maybe it was a combination of learning lessons from those institutions and effective messaging at the university.”
Laying down the law
Even with that containment structure in place, videos periodically surfaced during the semester that showed troubling scenes for those who had hoped to see social distancing.
In October, an anonymous student sent a video to CBS19 of students packing, mask-less, into the first floor of Trinity Irish Pub on the Corner. Weeks before, Ryan signaled out bars specifically in a video message sent to the UVA community, saying “If you can’t stay six feet apart, don’t go in.”
“It seems hypocritical to me that the administration tries to pretend like they’re enforcing these rules when in reality there are these events that are happening,” an anonymous student told CBS19 at the time.
Days later, students were seen waiting in long lines to enter bars on Halloween weekend.
Davis concedes there were “some issues of noncompliance,” but the school responded by laying down the law, tightening restrictions after the potential super-spreader weekend.
“There were a couple times where more strict messaging had to go out to the university community,” Bell says. “But it seems like, after that happened, the prevalence [of the virus] overall went down and the system wasn’t strained…I think overall they did a really good job.”
The Balz-Dobie and Hancock clusters prompted new gathering restrictions early in the semester, barring students from gathering in groups of more than five people. The university’s ambassadors, a school-run safety force that patrols areas on and off Grounds, enforced the rules strictly, and violations could result in academic punishments.
In a September video, Ryan alluded to several interim suspensions of students failing to adhere to social distancing policies. The university’s policy directory states that students cannot hold an event, indoors or out, that includes multiple groups from different households. The policy also outlines the face mask and social distancing requirements.
Fourth-year Hallie Griffiths says the stricter penalties had a real effect. “I know friends that would have gathered in bigger groups regardless of safety because they felt that if they got sick, they would be fine,” but they didn’t want to get expelled, she says.
The looming terror of the virus made it a strange time to be a student, Griffiths adds. In addition to the interruption of extracurricular activities, classes, and Greek life, students had to cope with ever-changing rules, the complexities of online classes, and fears of infection.
Constant safety adjustments were a whirlwind as well. The university has updated and added information to its Return to Grounds plan at least 24 times since August 4, an experience Griffiths says was “confusing and frustrating.”
“Every week there was a new email and a lot of people’s lives were turned to chaos,” she says. “And then we would adjust and then there’d be a new email.”
“It was scary in the sense that all of us came into it not really knowing what to expect and then it very quickly became very real,” Griffiths says. “All the traditions are gone. Time is stopped in one place but also going very fast. …Especially with classes ending this week, I’ve realized that time is gone and I’ll never get it back.”
Community containment
A central concern for observers in town was the possibility of community spread, especially for vulnerable communities surrounding the university. Although cases spiked at UVA in September and October, the numbers don’t suggest that on-Grounds cases resulted in large numbers of city and county residents getting sick.
But while UVA was cracking down on restrictions, the city was as well.
“Coronavirus ordinances in Albemarle and Charlottesville that were passed were aimed at being in conjunction with UVA returning,” says City Councilor Michael Payne.
In the summer, Charlottesville imposed more severe gathering restrictions than the rest of the state, in part to mitigate the effect of students returning. In Charlottesville, restaurants were unable to operate at more than 50 percent capacity and people weren’t allowed to gather in groups of more than 50.
“I think UVA was taking a huge risk in terms of having all these students come back,” Payne says.
“They have been able to prevent a massive community spread in a worst-case scenario. So in that sense it’s definitely been successful,” the city councilor continues. “But there’s no way around it: When you have that many people coming into the community, you’re going to see a big spike in cases, and that’s what we did see.”
And of course, the story is far from over. Students will return for the spring semester in February. As cold weather drives groups inside and students travel back to Charlottesville from COVID hot spots, the university could once again become dicey terrain. Referencing the cold weather and spring semester, Magill said that “vigilance will be more important than ever.”
“I’m never going to say that I feel comfortable with where things are, because there’s always the possibility that things can break loose,” says Bell. “But what I will say is that, in general, our area has done fairly well with controlling the pandemic compared to a lot of areas of the country…I think this means that, going forward, we have to keep that same diligence up.”
