WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Will college students be able to start the fall semester on campus?

Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, doesn’t think so.

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels said “We won’t have natural immunity by then, we won’t have a vaccine, so the question is, how do you reconfigure the way we teach, the way we house, and the way we feed our students?”

He believes if students and professors have to start the fall with online classes, he is confident they will handle it well, just like they had to handle the end of this spring semester.

“Our faculty used their spring break to transform over 5,000 different courses to some form of remote learning,” Daniels said. “We’ve been surprised so far with how smoothly it has seemed to go.”

With students more than likely not attending classes on campus in the fall, Daniels isn’t sure if college sports in the fall will happen either.

“Well, I’m worried,” he said. “Again, it was a huge disappointment, first of all, for our spring athletes who lost the season, and now, we do have to worry that whatever else we have to do come August, September, October, might not involve thousands and thousands of fans in a confined space.”

Daniels said if the time comes to make a hard decision about the future of fall sports, the decision won’t be made by individual schools, but rather the NCAA or individual conferences.

 

 

cover image (Alex Kumar/Purdue University photo)