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Northeastern University says it has dismissed 11 students who gathered in a hotel room in violation of the school’s coronavirus policies and will not refund their tuition, marking one of the most severe punishments college students have faced for breaking pandemic rules.
University staff members found the first-year students hanging out last week in a room at the Westin Hotel in downtown Boston, which Northeastern is using as a temporary dorm for about 800 students, according to a university statement. Officials instructed them to take a coronavirus test, then leave campus within 24 hours.
The students, who were part of a study abroad program that was held in Boston this semester, will not be reimbursed for their $36,500 tuition payments, according to the university. They will be allowed back on campus in the spring. In the meantime, the university said, they can appeal the punishment in an expedited hearing.
Here are some other significant developments:
- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration was prepared to spend “another trillion dollars” to buoy the U.S. economy if President Trump is elected to a second term. Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday” that the administration was concerned about the ballooning national debt, and he called Democrats’ spending proposals excessive. But, he said, “in a war, you’ve got to spend whatever you need.”
- San Diego State University issued a stay-at-home order, asking students to remain in their dorms except for essential needs through the weekend, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The campus’s coronavirus case count rose to 223 over the weekend.
- Coronavirus-related deaths topped 6,000 in Los Angeles County, according to the Los Angeles Times. The county remains one of the hardest-hit urban areas in the country. California’s rolling average for daily new cases has trended downward in recent weeks, but the state is regularly reporting more than 150 deaths daily, most of them in Southern California, according to The Washington Post’s tracking.
The dismissal of the Northeastern students underscores the extreme steps that universities nationwide are taking to deter behavior that could accelerate the spread of the virus on campus.
“Cooperation and compliance with public health guidelines is absolutely essential,” Madeleine Estabrook, senior vice chancellor for student affairs at Northeastern, said in a statement Friday. “Those people who do not follow the guidelines — including wearing masks, avoiding parties and other gatherings, practicing healthy distancing, washing your hands, and getting tested — are putting everyone else at risk.”
But public health experts have cautioned that draconian actions by universities may do more harm than good. Intense punishments could discourage students from participating in contact tracing or reporting their symptoms, making it harder to track and contain the virus, said Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.
“There have been very clear threats about harsh, swift disciplinary action if they break the contracts they’ve been signing related to behavior around social distancing and masks. And I really think this is setting the students up to fail,” Marcus told WGBH on Friday. “If we all just take a step back and put ourselves in our 19-year-old selves for a minute, there’s no way I would report a headache or a fever, especially if I had just attended an event I wasn’t supposed to attend.”
Nearly every major university that has resumed in-person learning in recent weeks has reported coronavirus clusters among students and staff. Some large universities, including James Madison University and North Carolina State, have pivoted to online classes after outbreaks emerged.
As the pandemic rages on, health experts have warned that Americans nationwide appear to be letting their guard down when it comes to protecting themselves and others from the virus. That could spell trouble going into the fall as people spend more time indoors in close quarters and the cooler weather facilitates the spread of the virus.
“People are exhausted,” former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I think that people’s willingness to comply with the simple things that we know can reduce spread is going to start to fray as we start to head into the fall and the winter, and that’s another challenge, trying to keep up our vigilance at a time when we know that this could spread more aggressively.”
The rolling average for daily new cases in the United States dipped by a marginal 2.7 percent over the past week, according to The Post’s analysis of state health data. Southern states hit hard by a summer surge in infections continued to report progress in controlling their outbreaks, but the virus was on the rise in several Midwestern states.
Local officials and health experts cautioned that Labor Day weekend festivities could fuel a spike in cases similar to the wave of infections that began after Memorial Day, when large gatherings caused virus clusters to emerge nationwide.
At the end of May, the country was tallying about 22,000 infections daily. Currently, the country’s average daily caseload stands at nearly twice that much, according to The Post’s tracking. On Friday, the United States added more than 50,000 cases for the first time since Aug. 15.
