K College switches to online classes after pressure from students

Just two weeks before students are scheduled to head back to class, Kalamazoo College is switching to an all-online curriculum for the fall semester.

College President Jorge Gonzalez made the announcement Thursday via a letter to students, parents, and the community.

“Based on the worrisome trends we’re seeing nationally, we have come to the very difficult decision that bringing students back to campus in the fall would not be in the best interest of the community as a whole,” reads the letter.

The letter points to persistently high COVID-19 infection rates across the country including in the eastern part of Michigan and warns of dire consequences for schools that don’t take the pandemic seriously.

“As campuses across the country have reopened, we’ve seen many reports of COVID clusters and spikes as students return, and small colleges in similar settings to ours are experiencing troublesome rates of infection,” said Gonzalez in the letter.

The move comes just days after students, parents, and alumni published a letter calling on administrators to move classes online. It also comes amid an outbreak at Central Michigan University that has sickened as many as 106 people.

You can read the full letter here.