“Students, faculty and staff are all in this together, and it is only by working together that we can stay safe and stay on campus for the rest of the semester,” said university spokesman Dennis K .Brown in a statement to CNN.
The university said on Tuesday that it would move to digital learning two weeks later in an effort to stem the spread of the virus as the number of cases jumped. If the virus continues to spread, the school will shift to distance learning for the rest of the semester.
“The university administration has largely blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on students attending parties on campus,” the editors said. “While this has not been completely misplaced, it was used to remove responsibility from the entire administrations who admitted they were ready for us to return to campus. They clearly were not.”
The editors cited flaws in testing, tracing and isolating contacts and ineffective accommodations as quarantine as evidence that the university was unprepared. In particular, the editorial staff marked a gap of almost two weeks between returning to campus and implementing oversight tests, which it said “represents a gross oversight on the part of the administration.”
“The blame for this does not lie with just one party. We – as students, faculties, staff and administrators – must share responsibility for the outbreak on our hands,” the editors said.
If more is not done, the editors said, the worst could yet come.
“We wanted to make the messages clear that we all need to play a role in keeping the tri-campus community safe,” said editor-in-chief Maria Leontaras, a senior at St. Louis. Mary’s, to CNN. “There are more people here than just young students who could possibly recover from the virus.”
The school’s editorial staff and administration agree, Brown said.
“As was made clear in the university’s letter to students on Tuesday and the editors of The Observer on Friday, we are on the same page,” Brown said.
Leontaras said she and other editors also want to see more transparency from the university, such as how many students are in quarantine.
The editors of The Observer ended on a sober note. Let us not write obituaries, it said, but also, “Let us not write of you.”
CNN’s Steve Forrest and Elizabeth Joseph contributed to this report.
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