Denis Binder, a professor at Chapman’s Fowler School of Law, is 74 years old and asthmatic. Despite being on track to receive his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, he is uneasy about returning to in-person learning at any point during the semester. But if Chapman University does welcome its students back into its classrooms before the summer, he’ll be there — sporting a face mask and shield combination while keeping a close eye on social distancing.

“You can’t hide yourself from life,” Binder said. “Particularly as an educator.”

After nearly a year of remote learning, a number of students and professors appear to welcome Chapman University’s plan for a transition back to hybrid learning March 29 after the university’s spring break, which President Daniele Struppa announced on the CU Safely Back website Feb. 9. 

However, this goal is only feasible provided COVID-19 cases fall enough in Orange County to qualify for the “substantial” tier of the county watchlist. Currently, Orange County remains in the “widespread” tier, with a daily case rate of 20.7 positive tests per 100,000 residents as of Feb. 21. Chapman Provost Glenn Pfeiffer told The Panther that the decision to return to campus after spring break comes from the predictions of the Orange County Health Care Agency.

To alleviate safety concerns, Chapman requires mandatory weekly testing for those accessing on-campus facilities through the end of the semester, as well as mandating mask-wearing and social distancing policies regardless of whether students have been vaccinated.

Almost all faculty members, save those who are exempt for health or other supplemental reasons, are required to offer hybrid lectures. This drew much criticism in the fall semester, and Gordon Babst, a professor in the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, said he was worried about the potential spread of the coronavirus following community travel during the week-long spring break.

“I’m very skeptical that students who do in fact travel ... are going to voluntarily self-quarantine when they get here,” Babst said. “If they had said instead, ‘We’ll start in-person classes 10 days after spring break’ ... that would have made a lot more sense to me.”

Pfeiffer, in turn, said if that start date was pushed back any later into April, there wouldn’t be much point in returning to campus altogether. Instead, the university strongly encourages students, faculty and staff not to travel over the break, and if they do, individuals will be asked to self-quarantine for 10 days prior to returning to campus. 

Pfeiffer hoped students would utilize “peer pressure,” in the most positive sense of the phrase, to encourage one another to be safe in traveling over spring break. That was a strategy endorsed by Michael Buchmeier, an associate director of the Center for Virus Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). 

“College-aged kids respond to social pressure,” Buchmeier said. “So why not allow them to take some social pressure at this point, to assume the responsibility that they should have?”

The Panther surveyed 245 people and found that 38% of respondents voted would attend in-person classes, a figure in line with independent surveys conducted through the Office of the Provost and the Faculty Senate, Pfeiffer told The Panther. That interest appears to have grown over the past few months, as Struppa estimated that in-person turnout for hybrid fall classes varied between 5% to 35% of entire course rosters. 

“Six months ago, it was a completely different situation,” said Kyle Farmer, a junior film production major. “It’s important to start focusing on a safety program that we can all feel confident in and for some students to feel a little bit more open to that possibility, just for the sake of avoiding the tuition strain and the lack of value that we’re getting out of it right now.” 

The Panther survey also revealed, on the flip side of the coin, that a majority of students weren’t interested in returning to campus. Max Lopez, a senior political science and peace studies double major, simply feels it’s not worth it to return for two months in his final semester when his foot is already halfway out the door. 

“Let’s say, hypothetically, I had to go back (to campus) and one of my classmates had COVID-19 and I got in contact,” Lopez said. “I just don’t want to deal with quarantining for a certain amount of time before I can start seeing my family or my girlfriend.”

Other universities in the area, such as UCI and California State University, Fullerton, have announced they’ll be extending remote learning through the end of the spring semester. Despite similar cumulative positive cases between Chapman University and UCI — approximately 370 to 400, respectively — Pfeiffer said the difference came with Chapman’s status as a small-scale, private university with condensed class sizes. However, Chapman’s positivity ratio is worse than UCI’s, sporting an undergraduate size of 7,404 to 30,382, respectively. 

Farmer has witnessed his friends struggle with the mental strain of continued isolation in a Zoom environment. He empathizes with those difficulties, given his own lack of motivation in his studies.

“The main thing is a sense of purpose. In general, the No. 1 problem right now is that there’s just less of a sense of academic integrity, of effort,” Farmer said. “You just feel like you’re constantly doing work all day, and you don’t really have the purpose of why.”

Conversely, Babst told The Panther he conducted an evaluation in his interterm class of about 70 students, and reported a majority seemed perfectly happy with staying remote. Babst himself would strongly prefer to continue teaching over Zoom, and actually obtained university permission to do so by virtue of  living with an at-risk person in his household. Yet, Pfeiffer said the university placed emphasis on students rather than faculty choice in deciding to return after spring break. 

“The problem with giving faculty the choice like we did last fall is if you choose not to come back, you’ve taken that choice away from the students,” Pfeiffer said. “I want to give students the choice. So my message to (faculty) is, ‘Students may not want to come back, but we have to give the ones that do some in-person experience.’”