CUNY moves booted dorm kids to Queens College
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Queens College will become a new home for CUNY students from across the system. Photo via Queens College
By Victoria Merlino
Queens College will house students from across the CUNY system who are forced to move out of their dorms due to the COVID-19 outbreak, university officials said Wednesday.
CUNY forced students out of their dorms throughout the city after ending nearly all in-person classes and moving to distance learning on March 12. Students were initially told that campus facilities like libraries and dormitories would remain open for student use, but the plan changed as the virus spread. Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered for all nonessential businesses to close, and stricter rules around social distancing were put into effect.
On Tuesday, the College of Staten Island, and Manhattan’s Hunter College and City College asked students to start packing their belongings to move out of dorms, THE CITY first reported. Manhattan’s Baruch College also asked its students to move out that day. The school told students that they would be transported to Queens College if they had nowhere else to live.
“CUNY is doing all it can in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, including making dormitories available for use as medical facilities, as requested by the state,” CUNY spokesperson Frank Sobrino confirmed to the Eagle. “Students residing in these facilities who are unable to go home are being offered placement in a dormitory at Queens College, where they will continue receiving full services.”
A Queens College spokesperson directed questions to CUNY.
Neel Hatwar, a Baruch student who lives in Dubai, said that he will be making the move from his Manhattan dorm room to Queens College on Saturday.
The order to leave the Baruch dorms “was really shocking,” Hatwar said. “We were expecting to stay in the dorm for the foreseeable future.”
After classes went online, he planned to stay in the city for internship opportunities over the summer, or to take a summer class. If he had known that Baruch would be emptying its dorms, he probably would have returned home, but now flights are canceled, he said.
Three of his friends will be joining him on the trek to Queens — Hatwar said he hopes they can room together.
Though Hatwar thinks that Baruch could have given more warning ahead of time about the dorms, he is grateful that CUNY is finding him and other students a new place to stay.
Baruch College freshman Harris Semertzidis lives in the dorms at Baruch and said many of his peers have no other housing options.
“A lot of people that are staying at the dorms don’t really have anywhere else to go,” Semertzidis said.
Semertzidis said he had returned to his home on Long Island after his classes went online, but was forced to return to the dorms this week to collect the rest of his belongings. He described the scene there as “apocalyptic.”
“It was eerie,” he said. Many students like himself, who came back to the dorms from home to retrieve their belongings, were wearing protective equipment like gloves and masks, he said.
Semertzidis said he wore gloves, and tried not to touch high-traffic surfaces, like elevator buttons.
Semertzidis thought that CUNY could have done a better, less confusing job of alerting students about the sudden change, but he didn’t fault the university system for dealing with an unprecedented challenge.
“When people have to move out quickly during a pandemic, things need to be organized,” he said.
Queens College has also been named by Cuomo as a potential site for a temporary hospital. Cuomo said Thursday that the state plans to build a 1,000-bed hospital in every borough to contend with the spread of COVID-19.
