‘It was surreal yesterday’: CUNY and SUNY students grapple with coronavirus shutdown
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Queens College students march during the college’s 2019 commencement ceremony. Eagle photo by Victoria Merlino
By Victoria Merlino and Rachel Vick
On Thursday afternoon, Hunter College senior Aidan Sartori was frantically focusing lights, hanging speakers and getting a campus stage ready for a theater department show set to debut on March 25.
The day before, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that all CUNY and SUNY colleges — more than 60 schools across the state — would stop in-person classes, and use a “distance-learning,” online format to help stop the spread of coronavirus. Sartori had no idea whether the show would actually go on, but no one had said anything different to him. And so, he said, he put on his “horse blinders” and continued to prep for opening night.
“Honestly I have a really hard time imagining that this is going to go up, but we’re just preceding as if we’re going to go up,” he told the Eagle Thursday.
That night, he learned the show had been cancelled.
“At least I can sleep now,” he said.
As the cases of coronavirus continue to rise in New York, nearly 1 million undergraduate and graduate students in the sprawling public university system are adjusting to the reality that the rest of their school year will be going much, much differently than they had expected.
With classes cancelled until March 18, and most classes moving long-distance and online by March 19, some students say they’re scrambling to deal with cancelled plans and struggling to come to terms with what could have been.
Noah Fleischman, a junior at Baruch College and an Astoria resident, had mixed feelings about classes being moved online.
“I’m not thrilled. You know, I suppose, it’s days off, it makes school much easier,” he said, adding that he thought officials waited too long to make the decision.
In the days before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the move to online learning, thousands of people signed a petition to close CUNY schools. The chairperson of the University Student Senate, Timothy Hunter, released a statement calling on Cuomo to close campuses and move classes online on March 10.
A John Jay College of Criminal Justice student tested positive for the coronavirus on Tuesday, the day before the announcement, and a Brooklyn College student tested positive on Thursday.
“I do not think I can go upstate to visit my parents,” Fleischman said. His family lives in an isolated area and he worries about accidentally carrying the virus with him, he said.
If classes had moved online earlier, he said, he may have made the decision to leave the city to be with his family.
A member of Baruch’s student newspaper and an active participant in student life on campus, Fleischman worried what would happen to end-of-year events, including graduation. He also wondered what would happen to next year’s club budgets, which are voted on by the student government at the end of the spring semester.
The student newspaper, usually printed weekly, will go strictly online for now, Fleischman said, though its members are concerned about the future.
“It was surreal yesterday,” he said, after Cuomo announced the distance-learning model. “In [our] Facebook chat, the whole paper was in shock.”
Although classes will continue and students will be able to meet graduation requirements, many say they are still in the dark about commencement. Seniors, in particular, are left to lament another lost experience.
Some, like SUNY Oswego education major Venise Valcarcel, have to compartmentalize their worries and stay focused on lingering school commitments. She needs to continue her student teaching responsibilities.
“I get that there’s a large number of homeless students and that makes it hard for [grade schools] to close,” Valcarcel said. “I’m sad about possibly not having a graduation.”
In addition to the plan to halt in-person classes, Cuomo on Thursday announced new restrictions barring gatherings of more than 500 people — an emergency measure that threatens to cancel graduation ceremonies if it continues into May and June.
Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency on the same day, predicting New York City could have 1,000 coronavirus cases by next week and that the virus and its impact could linger for the next six months.
Despite the uncertainty and disruptions, Joy Ling, a senior at Baruch and a Queens resident, said that her classes will have better discussions online and students will be more active in their learning.
Though she is sad that she will miss out on the end of her senior year, she said she is trying to reframe her expectations for her final year in school. She said she is also trying to maintain the close friendships she made throughout her time at Baruch.
“I actually think that I might be able to make closer friendships with people because it will be that much more precious when we have the chance to meet,” Ling said. “It’s almost like we have to think of ourselves as alumni already.”
Editor’s Note: Victoria Merlino is a former editor at Baruch College’s student newspaper, The Ticker.
