Harvard University's Widner Library in 2007. Photo courtesy of Joseph Williams / CC BY 2.0
All undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard University will be taught online this fall, and the school will open campus to house up to 40 percent of its maximum capacity in dormitories, officials announced Monday as they unveiled their reopening plan.
All first-year students will be invited to live on campus during the fall semester while taking classes online, with any available additional spots going to older students who most stand to benefit from the learning environment. In the spring, first-year students will be asked to participate remotely and the campus slots will go to seniors.
Harvard University President Larry Bacow, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay wrote in a letter that the all-online teaching and strict cap on campus housing capacity will best limit risks of a new surge in COVID-19 transmission. The school will prepare a facility able to quarantine up to 250 people at a time and all students will be frequently tested for COVID-19, among other health measures.
“Anything less and we could find ourselves again facing the prospect of asking our students to leave, on short notice, prior to the end of the semester,” they wrote.
Harvard’s plan is one of the most restrictive among colleges and universities in the greater Boston area.
The near-term future of Boston’s rental housing market is seen as being bound up with decisions made by colleges and universities as to how they will resume classes in the fall.
According to city of Boston data from the 2017-2018 academic year, the most recent for which data is available, the largest contributors to the area’s demand for private, off-campus housing are Northeastern University (6,209 undergraduate students living off-campus), UMass Boston (6,133 students), Boston University (4,448 students), Berklee College of Music (3,223 students), Suffolk University (1,905 students) and Boston College (1,330 students).
Northeastern, BU and Berklee will offer hybrid in-person and online instruction with varying degrees of flexibility for how much remote learning students do. Boston College and Suffolk will offer a mix of in-person and remote learning, but have not yet released full details of their plans. Berklee says it expects to be able to offer housing to the normal number of students; Boston College plans to reduce capacity in some rooms that might ordinarily house three students; Northeastern plans to reduce capacity in its on-campus housing and lease additional units and hotel rooms – to be managed by the college – off-campus to make up the difference; Suffolk has not released its plans for housing or instruction.
