Artwork by Nial Parmanan '23
On July 27th, 2022, more than two years of Cornell history–if not something much bigger–came to a close. With a pair of COVID-affected school years in the books, the Administration finally pulled the plug[1] on the last of their public health measures: the mask mandate. “Masks will be strongly encouraged, but are not required,” Provost Mike Kotlikoff wrote in a statement to the some thirty-thousand members of the Cornell community.
Yet, the ignominious conclusion of Cornell’s COVID regime highlights the many absurdities that Cornellians bore along the way. We at the Cornell Review do not intend on forgetting the past two years. Likewise, the Class of 2026 deserves to know what has transpired at their university in the years before their arrival.
Flattening the Curve
March 2020. The Class of 2024 waited in eager anticipation of acceptances and rejections, the Class of 2020 celebrated its last few months in Ithaca, and every year in between suffered through an ordinary semester at Cornell. Things were normal, until everything suddenly became anything but.
This is a familiar story. First came the travel restrictions. What began as a gentle request to avoid visits to China soon became sweeping prohibitions against traveling to Italy, Japan, Iran, and many others as the then “novel coronavirus” swept through Asia and Europe.[2] Cornell’s administration—and every other authority across the nation—ratcheted up the pressure until Friday the thirteenth [1] [2] of March, when Cornell shut it all down.[3]
Students, however, did not shut it all down, causing Ryan Lombardi to issue one of the most chilling statements ever released from Day Hall, simply titled “A public health plea.”[4] The message was, likewise, simple: get out. “I want to once again strongly encourage each of you that is able to leave Ithaca to do so as soon as possible. There is a possibility that domestic travel may soon be restricted by the federal government…”
Thus, Collegetown became a ghost town. Seniors left Ithaca, the first year to be deprived of commencement–though this fate would become quite common.
Round Two
The melting snow of Spring in Ithaca was accompanied by a deafening silence. In the absence of students, Cornell was left to its own devices to plan for the coming new year of classes . Beginning in the early summer, major university[5] after major university[6] announced the suspension of residential programs and major scaling-back of in-person classes and opportunities.
Cornell took a different path. In a momentous decision for the time, Cornell decided to welcome back its undergraduates. All of them. While many courses remained online-only, Cornell alone among major universities committed to reopening the university with as few caveats as possible.[7] Capturing the boldness—and at the time, courageousness—of this decision, the Wall Street Journal featured President Pollack and Vice Provost Kotlikoff’s reopening letter on the front page of their opinion section.
The 2020-2021 school year was one of a de-densified campus and extensive restrictions, but little in the way of crisis. Most classes remained online, allowing students the option of “ZoomU,” but many still returned to Ithaca. The possibility of a real return to normalcy rested in the following year.
Yet another climax
While the Class of 2024 had lost their senior year of high school, and, now, their first year of college, the 2021-2022 school year held new promise for a gradual return to normalcy for the Class of 2025’s entry to Cornell. The administration quickly disabused the new class of hoping for anything approaching normality.
COVID restrictions began even before the semester commenced. A month out from classes starting, Cornell reimposed the mask mandate after a summer of nationwide COVID relaxation. On July 30th began almost a year of variety[8]– COVID orders stretched from the questionable to the comically absurd.
The comically absurd materialized quite quickly. One day into the new semester, Cornell ratcheted the COVID alert level to Yellow[9], plunging the campus back into the depths of 2020-style restrictions. This new round of orders was highlighted by the outdoor mask mandate, in which the university begged, pleaded, and threatened the student body to wear cloth face coverings in the consistently-90 degree days of August. Even some outdoor joggers reported being reprimanded by university officials for exercising without masks.
With the Delta variant of COVID-19 ravaging the country, students were quick to comply with the new mandates, eager for a delayed but still certain return to normalcy; however, while the alert level soon reverted to Green and outdoor masks slowly faded away, the regime remained. The occupation of the once-former and now-restored Willard Straight Hall Reading Room, weekly COVID “surveillance tests,” and of course, the omnipresent masking, failed to end despite weeks of single-digit positive cases.
Cornell’s epidemiological model, released in the Summer of 2020, predicated the university’s complete reopening on weekly testing of the entire student and faculty population, so-called “surveillance testing.”[10] Every week, Cornell tested almost twenty-thousand students, staff, and faculty for COVID-19. Some weeks, ten (or 0.05%) came back positive. Despite the university’s semester-long containment of the virus, the administration refused to let up on restrictions, claiming indoor masking, social distancing, and the other public health measures were what allowed this low positivity rate to begin with:
“Alert Level Green is not an invitation to take risks or grow complacent, but rather, this ‘new normal’ status reminds us to preserve our low infection rate through a continued commitment to those actions that have been successful.”
Provost Michael Kotlikoff on September 24, 2021[11]
Cornell would later claim, amidst the Omicron outbreak, that there was “no evidence of classroom virus transmission.”[12] To recap, the university maintained masking in classrooms was necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19 despite there being, shockingly, no evidence COVID-19 was spreading in classrooms.
Returning to the Fall of 2021, the combination of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and students leaving from and returning to Ithaca for Thanksgiving resulted in a massive wave of positive cases, reflected in the large spike in the chart above.
Cornell took no time in battening down the hatches, first announcing their concerns about Omicron on November 29th[13], then moving the campus to alert level Yellow ten days later[14], and not four days after that locking campus down.[15]
December 2021 was, in many ways, reminiscent of the previous Spring. The semester reached a violent, premature conclusion and exams moved online.[16] Once again, visitors were barred from campus, students were urged to leave Ithaca as soon as possible, and, perhaps most tragically, the third consecutive commencement was canceled.12
Amidst the chaos of another rapid, unplanned, disassembly of yet another semester, Day Hall slipped an extension to the vaccine mandate into its announcements[17], decreeing that all students, barring those with exemptions, must now take a third dose of the COVID vaccine to be considered “fully vaccinated.”
Nobody in December of 2021 would have predicted that the end of Cornell’s COVID regime was in sight. Indeed, the following semester, in which the regulations would all but disappear, began on the opposite note.
Loosening the grip
Almost immediately following the New Year, 2022 began on the same COVID-themed page that 2021 left on. The administration announced on January 6th, 2022 that all classes would move online for the first two weeks of the semester, in direct response to the “massive wave” of positive cases in December.[18] Cornell intimated that, not only would the mask mandate remain, but it would become more stringent—N95s would be the order of the day. Upon outrage from the student body, Cornell clarified that normal masks would still be acceptable, though discouraged.
Students began returning en masse to Ithaca throughout the final weeks of January and first days of February without a corresponding rise in cases. Yellow became Green, and campus returned quite quickly to the normal-approximate Cornellians had now labored under for 600 days. Cases remained low enough that Cornell, apropos of nothing, eliminated the surveillance testing requirement for “fully-vaccinated” students and staff[19] just before February break.
Not a month following the (almost) conclusion of surveillance testing, Cornell began to phase out the mask mandate,[20] leaving it in place only for public transportation, healthcare facilities, and classrooms.
However, while Cornell was slowly walking back its most draconian restrictions over the course of several months, peer institutions such as Ithaca College axed the mandates at once.[21] Cornell only finally relented on July 27th, 2022 and ended its mask mandate,[22] though New York State’s restrictions continue to this day.
The End in the Beginning
After two and a half years, normalcy—real normalcy, not the new normal—returned to Ithaca. While there is the temptation to file away Cornell’s draconian COVID restrictions as “in the past,” students would do well to remember the lengths to which the administration went to “slow the spread.”
From chasing students out of Ithaca to outdoor masking to once-a-week surveillance testing and back around again, Cornell’s response to COVID has covered the spectrum from reasonable to absurd. However, speaking in non-epidemiological terms, Day Hall seized the senior years of the Classes of ‘20 and ‘21, stunted the first years of the Class of ‘24 and ‘25, and left those in between with a greatly diminished college experience.
However, with the seeming end of restrictions, many would reasonably wonder why we at the Cornell Review have conducted such an extensive examination of Cornell’s COVID hysteria. Not a week into the new semester, many professors have openly opined about the possibility of another spike. Various other public health threats cloud the horizon–from monkeypox to other variants of COVID.
We have now seen how Cornell’s administration responds to public health emergencies, the depths to which they will plunge this university to avoid headlines reading “spike in cases at Cornell.” Cornellians new, old, and not yet matriculated must decide whether such an effort was worth the cost. First year students arriving in Ithaca must decide whether to follow the lead of the classes before them in accepting the university’s dictates or chart a new path forward.
This piece was originally printed in the Cornell Review’s September 2022 Freshman Edition.
Artwork by Nial Parmanan ’23
[1] https://www.thecornellreview.org/breaking-cornell-drops-mask-mandate-again/
[2] https://statements.cornell.edu/2020/20200302-public-health-update.cfm
[3] https://statements.cornell.edu/2020/20200313-5MTe7Z-update-on-classes.cfm
[4] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20200315-public-health-students.cfm
[5] https://president.columbia.edu/news/update-fall-term
[6] https://www.harvard.edu/coronavirus/planning-for-fall-2020/
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-cornell-will-reopen-in-the-fall-11593535516
[8] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20210730-indoor-masks.cfm
[9] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20210827-cornell-alert.cfm
[10] https://people.orie.cornell.edu/pfrazier/COVID_19_Modeling_Jun15.pdf
[11] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20210924-alert-green.cfm
[12] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20211211-additional-restrictions.cfm
[13] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20211211-additional-restrictions.cfm
[14] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20211210-cornell-alert.cfm
[15] https://statements.cornell.edu/2021/20211214-LTBmB1-ithaca-alert.cfm
[16] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20211214-online-exams.cfm
[17] https://www.thecornellreview.org/breaking-cornell-requires-boosters/
[18] https://www.thecornellreview.org/cornell-to-start-classes-online/
[19] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20220218-testing-reqs.cfm
[20] https://covid.cornell.edu/updates/20220311-mask-restrictions.cfm
[21] https://www.ithaca.edu/covid-health-safety/personal-hygiene-and-protection
[22] https://www.thecornellreview.org/breaking-cornell-drops-mask-mandate-again/
