MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College removed 22 students from campus during the weekend for violating the school’s Covid-19 policies.
The students’ on-campus privileges were revoked after the college received reports last Thursday that “a number of students appeared to be in violation of our Covid-19 conduct policies,” Sarah Ray, Middlebury’s director of media relations, wrote in a statement to VTDigger.
Five other students had been removed from campus for breaking rules in the days prior, according to a new dashboard the college is using to track and share conduct violations.
“This is disappointing news in the context of the overall high level of compliance our students have demonstrated to this point, which has allowed us to advance to Phase 2 of our reopening,” dean of students Derek Doucet wrote in a statement posted to the college website Monday.
“These were very difficult decisions to make,” he said, “but there is nothing more important than the health and safety of our community.”
Administrators did not specify exactly what students had been doing that led to their removal from campus, citing privacy concerns. While they didn’t describe whether the students had been suspended or would be allowed to continue classes away from campus, Doucet wrote that “students removed from campus because of Covid-19 violations are ordinarily eligible to return in the following semester.”
Colleges around the country have sent students home for breaking their campuses’ Covid-19 guidelines this fall. Northeastern University made headlines after it suspended 11 students for socializing in a hotel room without masks and later refused to refund their $36,000 semester tuition (at least two students hired attorneys to appeal the suspensions). In August, Syracuse University sent 23 students home after they were caught partying.
While those schools made information public about the behavior that led to revoking students’ on-campus privileges, Middlebury is not disclosing those details for now.
However, on Sept. 17, the college did start compiling violations data on the new, publicly visible dashboard, after the state began requiring colleges to regularly report the following statistics: number of student violations, number of students disciplined and number of students removed from campus (as of Tuesday evening, Middlebury’s dashboard had not yet been updated to include the students disciplined during the weekend).
The state had recorded 532 cases of colleges disciplining students for Covid-19 policy violations as of Sept. 16, according to Ted Brady, deputy secretary for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the agency heading Vermont’s college reopenings.
Statewide, Brady said 16 students had been removed from Vermont college campuses as of Sept. 16.
At UVM, roughly 300 students have been disciplined for Covid-19-related violations, Enrique Corredera, the university director of public affairs, told VTDigger in an email. Sanctions have ranged from letters of warning to suspensions that bar students from participation in academics and all other university activities, typically for one semester. Corredera declined to provide a numerical breakdown of the disciplinary actions, citing student privacy.
At Middlebury, the need to enforce Covid-19 policies has led to some changes in how campus rules are enforced.
The Middlebury Campus newspaper reported student dorm leaders have taken on more substantial roles in enforcing rules on partying and substance use than in years past, in part as a way to limit risk of Covid-19 infection from staff interaction with students in residence halls.
Students entering or leaving town this weekend were also greeted by guards from a Burlington-based company, Chocolate Thunder Security. The college has hired three security guards to help monitor behavior and keep track of how many people come and go from campus on weekends, company CEO Mike van Gulden told VTDigger.
The guards have mostly taken a hands-off approach to rules enforcement, and have been told to refer serious incidents to the college Department of Public Safety.
“If I see someone holding a Bud Lite can, rather than saying ‘you’re in trouble and this is going to happen to you,’ I go over to them and say, ‘I need for you to dump that out,’” Van Gulden said. “If I do have to call Public Safety and they have to reiterate the rules because I wasn’t being listened to, they may take an additional step.”
Van Gulden said he didn’t know of other Vermont colleges hiring private security to help enforce Covid-19 rules. Middlebury’s configuration, he said, which includes mostly clear lines between town and college, is conducive to his team’s kind of work: keeping track of movement into and out of a space — a job that might be harder on a campus like UVM’s, where lines between college and city are often blurred.
Though 22 students who were sent home during the weekend, Van Gulden said the bulk of students seem to be following the rules.
“The students I talked to during Phase One, when they couldn’t leave campus, were willing to wait because they know it’s worth waiting for,” he said.
Middlebury’s Covid-19 numbers support that sentiment: The college reported just two student cases upon arrival and has had no new cases since then, according to its Covid-19 dashboard. Statewide, after administering 42,000 tests, colleges had a Covid-19 test positivity rate of just 0.09% as of Sept. 11.