In-person class set to keep going for Fayetteville

Campus leaders expect to see classes go remote at points

FAYETTEVILLE — In-person instruction continues at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville with disruptions expected given the current surge of covid-19, top campus leaders said Wednesday.

“We’re going to have people that need to be at home isolated, in quarantine,” Interim Provost Terry Martin said Wednesday. “They’re not going to be able to come into the office. And so there’s going to be classes — they’re going to go remote for short periods of time.”

UA’s spring term began Tuesday with face-to-face classes as planned.

Campus leaders on Wednesday held a forum open to students, staff and faculty where they discussed covid-19 and the spring semester.

Interim Chancellor Charles Robinson described the campus decision to start the spring term with faceto-face classes. A few other universities in the state, including the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, opted to begin their spring terms with remote instruction. Universities in Arkansas that began online-only have either resumed in-person instruction or stated plans to do so next week.

Robinson stated that “as long as our classrooms were safe,” he had “no strong justification” to make a change.

“The best thing to do, I thought, was to go forward with our plan for face-to-face instruction with our masking policy enhanced and trying to meet the needs of our students,” Robinson said.

Later in the day, UA faculty members in a separate meeting described concerns about enforcement of an indoor campus masking requirement.

The university on Friday tweaked its policy that generally requires masking indoors when others are present. In a campus announcement, the university stated that the requirement applies regardless of whether six feet of distancing can possibly be maintained. Earlier last week, Robinson, in a written message to campus, stated the university was “enhancing our enforcement of mask compliance.”

Neil Allison, an associate professor in UA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said during an online meeting of UA’s faculty senate that he observed students on Wednesday morning wearing masks improperly.

“But the thing that was more alarming was that two students walked in from the next class while I was packing up without any mask at all,” Allison said, addressing his comment to Martin. “Do we have security that can just sort of walk around and — not necessarily do anything — but suggest to students to wear masks? Because it seems like it’s all falling onto the faculty at this point for that.”

Martin replied that he did not think police should walk around the campus to enforce the mask requirement.

“We’ve tried to communicate it out. But it would not surprise me that a lot of students do not understand that just yet,” Martin said.

He encouraged faculty to remind students of the requirement but said “you don’t have to be the enforcer,” with UA having an online reporting system that can be used to share information about masking violations.

“I can assure you that our conduct office takes this seriously,” Martin said.