A Critical Time for Our Campus

Dear Colleagues,

As we head into the third week of the most complicated semester any of us has ever seen, I wanted to thank you for all the hard work that I know is happening right now. Never in our lifetimes has so much energy been spent getting us to this point of the semester. I recognize and appreciate how hard everyone is working to make it possible for us to continue to offer our students a high-quality Bradley education.

These next couple of weeks will be critical, as we all continue to adjust to this unique environment. Last week we saw an uptick in the number of positive COVID-19 cases on campus. We identified 18 positive cases through our surveillance testing and an additional 13 cases reported through off-site testing. The dashboard of results can be found here.  

Through the process of contact tracing, we’ve seen no evidence of virus spread in classrooms. Out of an abundance of caution, we require several residence hall floors, fraternities and sororities to quarantine for the next two weeks. A total of 230 students were in quarantine as of Friday. Given our aggressive quarantine strategy, we anticipate this number will increase significantly in the days ahead. I recognize the extra burden this creates as these students must now go virtual in your classes, but this is an essential step in mitigating the spread of the virus.

We will continue to closely monitor our situation and take the measures necessary to manage the spread of the virus on campus. We are watching what other institutions are doing to mitigate the spread and considering various options that do not include sending everyone home for the rest semester.  As a reminder, the criteria we use to determine if and when to make such a decision is available here.

There are moments in time for any organization that leave a lasting imprint. I suspect this is one of those moments for Bradley University. We will all be making decisions and taking actions over the next few months that impact who we are as a university. As we do so, it’s critical to remind ourselves that we are a leader in student engagement regardless of educational modality. We are a community built upon the valued relationships we find in each other as students, staff, faculty, administrators and alumni.

Many things about the current environment are outside of our control.  But ultimately, we control how we respond to the challenges we face. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do to reaffirm our commitment to student engagement and support each other as we all work to navigate the challenges ahead.

Sincerely,

Stephen Standifird
President
Bradley University

–Sent to Employees on 09/07/2020