State Mandate Requires Vaccination for Higher Education

Earlier today, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced that all higher education personnel and students will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. This encompasses both public and private institutions. Bradley University will comply with this new state mandate. 

With this state mandate announced today, we’re revising our previous decision, and we will now require vaccinations for all employees and students at Bradley University.

According to the statewide mandate, employees and students must receive the first dose of a two-dose vaccination series or a single-dose vaccination by Sept. 5, 2021. Second doses of the vaccine must be received by 30 days after the first dose. If you cannot get vaccinated before the deadline, you’ll be included in our weekly testing protocols. This vaccination mandate also includes all healthcare workers, including nursing home employees and all pre-k-12 teachers and staff throughout the state.

I am happy to share with you, as of today, more than 65% of our students have submitted information confirming they’re fully vaccinated. This is significantly above the national average of 46.7% for the 18-24 age group. Our students continue to show significant leadership in how they have responded to the pandemic. To our students, a most sincere thank you.

Currently, our faculty and staff vaccination numbers sit at just over 47%, slightly trailing the national average at 51.8%. I believe these numbers might be artificially low due to the busy start of the semester, and many weren’t able to file their vaccination status submissions by our deadline.

If you haven’t submitted your vaccination status, please do so immediately by submitting it via the information below. If you’ve lost your vaccination card and were vaccinated in Illinois, the state has launched a Vax Verify portal to obtain your information.

Vaccination data will be a part of the COVID dashboard starting this Friday afternoon.

To sign up for a vaccination appointment on campus, use this link or find an off-campus location by clicking here. We're working on scheduling additional vaccination clinic times and will communicate those to you.

Information on how to request a religious or medical exemption from vaccination and details on our campus testing protocol will be shared with you in the next few days.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation, provide updates, and adjust our plans when needed. The Virus Response Team will continue to take the lead through this process. This group has played a pivotal role in helping us navigate through the complexity of the past year, and I want to thank them sincerely for doing so. One of my goals for the upcoming year is to increase participation and transparency by adding faculty, staff, and student representatives. I’ll be working with our University Senate President, Student Body President, and appropriate staff representatives to identify individuals to add to the Virus Response Team.

One of the parts we’re paying attention to is the developments in pre-K-12 education and the potential challenges the parents of young children face. I suspect there’ll be other challenges as the semester progresses. I ask everyone to continue to be patient and exhibit grace with one another as we continue to navigate through what we all hope is the tail end of the pandemic.

Thank you in advance for abiding by the governor’s mandate, Bradley’s guidance, and for doing your part in keeping our campus community healthy. We’re all in this together. Let’s continue to #BradleyUnite!

–Sent to all campus 8/26