WEST LAFAYETTE – Purdue has purchased what Mitch Daniels described as more than one mile of Plexiglas as the campus retrofits classrooms to separate faculty from their students during lectures in the fall, the university president told a U.S. Senate committee Thursday morning.
During a two-hour session, in which he and other college presidents fielded questions about how they could reopen campuses safely in the age of coronavirus, Daniels repeated what he’s touted in national publications and in local letters to students, faculty and staff as Purdue’s duty to reopen, after months of remote access during the second half of the spring semester.
And he outlined for senators checklists of changes formulated on campus to get it done: Dorm rooms reworked so roommates can keep their distance, grab-and-go meals in campus dining halls, mandatory use of masks on campus, the elimination of big events, testing protocols for students and staff, more than 500 rooms set aside for those who need to quarantine and setting up one-third of Purdue’s 14,000 employees to work remotely.
And the Plexiglas shields in lecture halls.
“All this will cost, before we’re done, tens of millions of dollars,” Daniels told the Senate Committee on Health and Education, as he linked in remotely from his office in Hovde Hall. “But we’re just going to try to leave nothing to chance.”
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