What does Temple University’s reopening mean for North Philly?

By: Hafeezat Bishi

Like all students, I received an email from Temple University this summer detailing the plans for reopening. We were to follow Temple’s four safety pillars, avoid social gatherings, and do our best to keep one another safe while a mix of in-person and online classes began. However, what was left unsaid was how efficient would this move be, and how the communities Temple University occupies would be impacted.

While students initially wanted to be back on campus, many had realized that it wouldn’t be the best move and would result in the shut down of the university. We had seen spikes in cases in the news at universities such as University of Alabama and University of North Carolina, and did not want Temple to become another statistic. At the very least, we did not want to be part of a COVID-19 social experiment.

Spoiler alert: we became a statistic. Within two weeks of reopening, Temple University experienced an outbreak of cases and decided to suspend 95% of in-class instruction for the Fall semester, with essential courses still being held in person.

Case numbers were so high that they impacted the overall amount of new cases that the city of Philadelphia reported. “The city’s overall positivity rate for test results reported Wednesday [September 2nd] was 8.3%, which is unusually high; last week the positivity rate was 3.7%,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Maheen Shafi, a senior neuroscience major, was not content with the idea of reopening.

“I thought that it was a terrible idea,” she said. “There's just no way that the university can bring back like thousands of students and expect a viral disease not to spread.”

Shafi, who is a part of Defund TUPD and the Black and Brown Coalition of Philadelphia, worked on a campaign urging the university to stay closed for the semester, citing that within a week of reopening, the university surged past 100 cases.

Minus the effect of Temple University’s reopening on the overall city, the university’s proximity to North Philadelphia may prove to be dangerous, especially since off-campus residents are still living in the area despite the university halting in-person courses. North Philadelphia is a majority BIPOC community, and reports have shown that BIPOC are more likely to contract COVID due to a series of factors including underlying health issues, area of living, and access to healthcare.

Temple has not specified if residents of the North Philadelphia community can utilize testing facilities on campus. They’ve also failed to disrupt off-campus party culture which impacts the surrounding community. Kayla Paul-Koch, a sophomore political science major, shared that while she has seen folks on and around campus wearing masks, there is the issue of off-campus students congregating that serves as a hazard.

“There's no masks, there's no distancing in sight, and clearly those people don't live together,” Paul-Koch said.

And she’s right. On-campus students have done fairly well to abide by the university’s rule of having a face covering while on campus, but once you get into the neighborhood, you see students in large groups with only one or two masks in sight.

Everyone else in the crowd usually either has it on their chin or doesn’t have one at all. Parties have continued to occur both on- and off-campus, which is a recipe for disaster not only for students but for North Philadelphia.

Temple University has put the blame on students for the rise in cases and lack of social distancing, but fails to take responsibility for bringing students back into the city in the first place. Students are tired, socially deprived, and have missed their long-distance friends. What did the university expect to happen except what has, and continues to, occur?

Paul-Koch and Shafi do not believe that the university put the North Philadelphia community in mind when it came to reopening campus for the semester.

“It's literally another form of gentrification for Temple to open its campus during a pandemic and do something that is without a doubt going to harm the people that are living around the university,” Shafi said. Koch seconds this statement, calling the university “purely gentrifiers.”

“They didn't even offer [the neighborhood] testing when they brought students to the community. So no. I don't really think they consider [North Philadelphia] when making decisions,” Koch continued.

When asked if there was anything the university could do to rectify this error, Paul-Koch and Shafi recommended a tuition reduction, or at the very least a decrease in university fees. With the Fall semester already half way over, this may be a possibility for the Spring. But for now it is best for students to continue to socially distance themselves and mask up, for the sake of their health and the wellbeing of North Philadelphia.