Frank Frisch, a physiology professor at Chapman and the soon-to-be president of the Faculty Senate, is accustomed to teaching in Chapman’s most spacious lecture halls and looking out at a sea of undergraduates. But when Frisch came back to teach in person March 29, he was greeted by vacant chairs. 

Of the 105 students enrolled in Frisch’s sole physiology course this semester, only one student shows up to participate in person — occasionally. The professor said he is ready for normalcy, having been vaccinated since February.

“100% safe is an unrealistic, unattainable goal,” Frisch said. “We go about our business taking risks, and if the majority of people are vaccinated and I’m vaccinated, then I’m comfortable with that risk.”

The mentality, driven out of a desire to resume fully in-person learning, is shared by other faculty members on the Chapman Senate Executive Board (SEB, who Frisch collaborated with to craft a letter to President Daniele Struppa requesting the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students, faculty and staff in the fall semester. He and other members of the executive board helped current Faculty Senate President Alison McKenzie edit the letter before sending it to Struppa April 29. 

Frisch said the group was pleasantly surprised when, at 9:19 a.m. the next morning, they checked their inboxes to see the latest CU Safely Back Update confirming their request, discontinuing all online learning and mandating vaccination. This new policy goes into effect next semester.

The announcement requires that all students, faculty and staff planning on attending the university fall semester must be vaccinated for COVID-19 once one of the vaccines receives full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Frisch hypothesized that approval could be granted by July or August, but until then, Struppa’s April 30 community-wide email states vaccination is “highly recommended.”

“Once any one of the vaccines is fully approved by the FDA and no longer under the emergency use order, we will still allow for any of them when filing that a vaccine is complete,” Jamie Ceman, Chapman’s vice president of Strategic Marketing and Communications, told The Panther.

Starting June 1, members of the Chapman community who have successfully self-reported their vaccination and continue to fill out the daily symptoms questionnaire will be allowed use of university facilities without weekly COVID-19 testing. Conversely, individuals who wish to remain unvaccinated will have the ability to file a personal declination to the university, but will have testing frequency increased to twice a week in order to retain campus access.

“We know that people have a myriad of reasons for not getting a COVID-19 vaccination, not unlike other required vaccinations,” Struppa wrote in a May 5 email to The Panther. “With that, we must provide a way for people to decline vaccination, just as we do with other vaccinations.”

Though Frisch was unable to specify how the vaccine mandate will be enforced and what the criteria is for special exemption, Ceman told The Panther that more information will be released in the coming weeks. Frisch discussed the idea of a “passport,” similarly modeled to the Othena passport that failed at the county level due to backlash, but also noted the ease in which individuals can fabricate such documents.

“I suspect we won’t know (which) people don’t want to take the vaccine,” Frisch said. “I want to put my Disneyland hat on and believe in the fairytale world that people will make the right decisions.”

Camille Jacobson, a business administration major, took a leave of absence when the pandemic hit, determined to maximize the value of her education by waiting to resume her classes in person. She’s currently planning to come back to Chapman next fall to finish off her senior year. The day after the vaccine mandate was announced, Jacobson worked with her father to write Struppa a letter of complaint, suggesting the addition of a third category for students with already-present COVID-19 antibodies, like herself. 

Having recovered from COVID-19 herself this past March, Jacobson told The Panther she feels comfortable remaining unvaccinated because of her present COVID-19 antibodies. Jacobson wants this additional group to be free of biweekly testing that may return with positive results even three months after a full recovery.

Jacobson clarified she supports people making a personal choice to get a COVID-19 vaccine, such as her parents, but staunchly rebukes the infringement of this choice on individuals from any institution.

“I’ll be honest, I considered transferring when I saw that email, because I just don’t want to go to a school where they’re going to force me to put something in my body in order to get an education,” Jacobson said. 

Frisch did concede that the decision, though formulated with the expertise of professionals from the Office of Legal Affairs and the Department of Pharmacy, also faced substantial criticism within Chapman University’s legal department for the inevitable financial toll it would wreak on the institution.

“If we force vaccination, how many lawsuits are we going to get?” Frisch asked rhetorically. “If someone gets sick because we didn’t enforce vaccination, how many lawsuits are we going to get? Those sorts of arguments are played out in a very sober, monetary way.”

In spite of his full faith that legal disputes will arise out of the university’s new mandate, Frisch remains confident that Chapman is prepared to handle such adversity. He proudly reflected on how the institution managed to avoid any staff and faculty layoffs during the pandemic and relatively maintained financial security. That’s a move, he said, that will allow for sustained intimate class sizes that can facilitate learning even with COVID-19 protocol in place.

The Panther surveyed 287 people and found that 91% agreed with the university-wide vaccine mandate, leaving only 17 respondents to disagree. The result is reflective of Chapman’s increasing vaccinated population. As of May 7, 79% of faculty, 64% of staff and 48% of students are fully vaccinated, totaling 54% of the overall campus population. 

Conversation about enforcing vaccination as a solution to return to in-person learning has been in the works since the start of the pandemic, according to Frisch. Though he believes the SEB letter may have had substantial influence on a decision that Struppa said was primarily his own, the announcement comes just over two weeks after the University of California and California State University school systems released a similar mandate.

“The responsibility falls on my shoulders because I am the president, and a decision of this magnitude can only be taken by the person ultimately responsible for the institution,” Struppa wrote in an email to The Panther. “In reaching my decision, I listened to the opinion of the SEB, of Student Government Association, of all my senior staff and of the COVID-19 task force that has been working to manage our response over the last 14-plus months. I have also consulted with the chairman of the Board of Trustees.”

The implementation of the decision to return fully in-person with vaccination is contingent on Orange County’s ability to transition into the yellow, “minimal” tier, which Orange County Executive Officer Frank Kim announced May 7 could be a feasible reality if the county can get the case rate down to two per 100,000. As of May 9, the county COVID-19 dashboard shows rates hovering around 2.4 cases per 100,000 residents.

Vaccination will become increasingly more scarce across the county starting June 6, with the closure of major vaccination sites in an attempt to focus efforts on areas with vaccine resistance, seeing as the demand for first doses in Orange County has dwindled by over 75% since the end of April.

In the meantime, the university will continue to offer vaccination to the Chapman community, as seen through two clinics hosted in partnership with Ralph’s Pharmacy May 6 and May 8, both of which were capable of vaccinating 1,000 people. The Student Health Center hopes to obtain its own personal supply of the vaccine in the fall semester. 

“The country and the state are slowly pulling back on restrictions as the risk of COVID-19 lessens, which is allowing us to do the same on campus,” Struppa wrote to The Panther. “We are all eager to get back to a Chapman experience closer to what we expected when we chose this university, and we believe we’re on the right track – but that is contingent on people being vaccinated.”