The Fudan students and teachers I asked said they had not seen “tear gas”;
Fudan students and teachers I asked had not seen Zhang Weiwei, the director of Fudan University's China Institute, beaten on campus; a liberal arts faculty member said that Zhang Weiwei should not be on campus at the moment;
On March 13, 2022, Fudan University announced the closure of the campus.
On April 4, 2022, Fudan University announced the closure of the building.
So far.
It's been 45 days since Fudan closed its doors, what's happening on campus?
Before I pressed send, I struggled with the idea of changing the entire article to “a college in the Northeast.” There is an argument to be made that “don't discredit your alma mater.” I did graduate from Fudan and have been graduating for many years. The four years I spent at Fudan are, to this day, the time I miss the most. There are many teachers and teachers whom I respect here, and I have also met many excellent classmates. Fudan had such an important influence on me, and many of the principles I learned in Fudan are still useful to me.
Because of this, I feel it is all the more important to let the voices on campus be heard.
The epidemic is changing the lives of people all over Shanghai. Are the students in the Ivory Tower also experiencing changes in their lives?
What happened in Fudan?
April 20, Fudan University's official microblogging suddenly published a statement: “Recently, there are network rumors rumor ‘Fudan this will be in the things.’ The school hereby solemnly declares that the campus is stable, teachers and students are concentrating on the fight against the epidemic, epidemic prevention and control and other work are normal. We strongly condemn this kind of rumor-mongering behavior of making something out of nothing and disturbing the general situation of the protest, and have bagged to the relevant departments, to bring to investigate and deal with in accordance with the law.”
On April 24, Shangguan News posted an article titled “Liberation Daily reporter seeks confirmation | quiet Fudan, ‘noisy’ Fudan”. The article mentioned that April 23rd was the first day of Fudan's trial of sub-area grid management, where Fudan students were allowed to go to the campus in batches and at staggered times according to regulations. Only one university student was interviewed (his name was not coded) in this “news” report, which was written in a loose style. In the reporter's writing, this student found Fudan quieter than usual, and the years were quieter than usual.
With 4,022 new Fudan undergraduates in the 2021 academic year, the story has caused polarization on the Internet. Many Fudan students believe that “quieter than usual” is not the current state of mind.
What is the situation in Fudan?
Several students and teachers on campus have recounted what's happening at the school these days. These voices are certainly not the whole picture of the school. But I think the more people who narrate, the closer to the truth the facts are pieced together. At a time as special as the present, it is worthwhile to record these moments. Even if it's just a record.
More comments and additions are welcome.
March 13, School Closure
March 13th was a Sunday. Shanghai student J just happened to go home for the weekend. At 08:59 in the morning of this day, Fudan University's public WeChat released the announcement “Notice on Starting Quasi-Closed Management of Campus” (No. 1 of 2022).
The notice said that the campus quasi-closed management will be launched from 20:00 on March 13, and the students and faculty at the university will not leave the campus. “Taking the separate campus gate area as a unit, teachers and students will not move across the area, and the shuttle buses within the campus will be suspended. Quasi-closed management time is tentatively set for 2 weeks, the end time will be notified.”
J said that the school means that students and faculty who have a permanent residence in Shanghai can apply to leave the school and live at home. After approval and orderly departure from school. If they need to return to school, they also need to apply and can return to school after approval and authorization. In principle, outsiders will not enter the school.
J thought, then stay at home first. 2020 epidemic is also the same, whether at school or at home, always in the online class.
D is also from Shanghai, but her boyfriend is in the school, she does not want to “long-distance relationship”, also do not like to listen to parents nagging at home, so she decided to stay in the school.
As for the teaching activities, the school officials also explained. Suspension of offline lectures (including laboratory courses, clinical internships, etc.). Off-campus internships are suspended for students living on campus.
During the quasi-closed management period, the cafeteria suspends dine-in and provides packaged take-out services. Masks are required to be worn throughout the meal purchase with a good 1-meter interval. The library, self-study classrooms and sports halls are open to students and teachers in the area only. The swimming pool is suspended.
Students can still pick up courier, but the school hopes that teachers and students can “minimize online purchases”, courier needs to be unloaded outside the school gate, after standardization and disinfection, transferred to the relevant site by the rookie station. East express lockers are suspended, students can go to the main station to pick up.
School hospitals and other emergency services are operating normally, if you need to be referred to the faculty, apply to the faculty, after consultation and observation and completion of two nucleic acid tests can be sent back to the hostel area by the epidemic-prevention vehicle.
Most school teachers have gone home, while a few full-time staff such as counselors with janitorial jobs have stayed behind. Many students from Shanghai also went home. One young liberal arts teacher said this was what he had learned.
“Bubbles” and ”Virtual Tunnels”
For readers who are not familiar with Fudan, let's popularize the situation of Fudan campus. Handan Road Campus refers to the headquarters, East, North, South, most of the current Fudan majors are in Handan Road, so this campus and Fudan people called “headquarters campus”. The South District is divided by Handan Road, there are Liberal Arts Building, Library, American Research Center, School of Management, South District Dormitory, etc.; the East District is divided by Guoding Road, there are School of Journalism, East Dormitory, etc.; the North District is the living area of most postgraduates, and the volunteers who distribute food to the North District told me that there are more than one hundred dormitory buildings in the North District. In addition to the East District, the Main, South and North Districts all have their own independent cafeterias. The Jiangwan Campus and the Fenglin Road Campus, which can be reached only by bus, are not included in this article.
The idea of “immunization bubbles” is a recent one. The main campus and the North Campus, which are not separated by an off-campus road, are divided into one bubble; the South Campus and the East Campus are each divided into one bubble. In order to ensure the safety of epidemic prevention, there can be no movement of people between the bubbles, and each bubble is a closed management area.
But closed is not absolute. There is no cafeteria in the East Zone bubble, and for meals, East Zone people must go to the cafeteria in the main bubble.
The university's response is to start a “virtual channel” between the east bubble and the main bubble. In the official public number of Fudan University on March 14, the university responded to the ten issues that students are most concerned about, such as eating in the cafeteria, express delivery and takeout. The text pointed out that “every morning 7:00 ~ 8:00, noon 11:30 ~ 13:00, evening 17:00 ~ 18:00, the East District, Zhengtong Road dormitory and the headquarters campus area to open a virtual channel for students to the headquarters cafeteria to buy food and other needs.”
A student provided an official release of the scene when the virtual passage was in operation. With student volunteers pulling the line, representatives from the East District dormitories buying food were pulled inside the line to cross the street from the crosswalk into the main campus. Some students commented that this was like “kindergarteners crossing the street”. However, the university argued that it “helps prevent epidemics.
A student who lives in the East Zone told me that the counselor asked them to send a representative from each dormitory to buy food. so as not to spread the word unnecessarily and cause crowding.
“So how does this representative know what everyone is going to eat?”
“Just can only say roughly. Extraordinary times, everyone understands. It's already good enough for others to go buy food for you, it's not too nice to make requests.”
“So what if two people from a dorm go for it? The school doesn't know, does it?”
“Supposedly there are volunteers who will check off the list at the entrance to the cafeteria, go to one dorm and check off one. But I haven't seen it.”
“That's not a lot of work for the volunteers?”
“Yes, volunteers work hard.”
“Are the volunteers all students?”
“Basically. People sign up.”
Closed building, official notification in the early morning hours of April 4
Students in an undergraduate department received an in-class group notification at 2:08 a.m. on April 4th. In the notice, it was requested that from the 4th onwards, students' feet do not leave the building. The cafeteria will send representatives in the form of packages to fix the route to the cafeteria to pick up food (the headquarters) or to go downstairs to pick up food (East and Zhengtong Road), wear a good mask to do a good job of protection. The virtual channel is closed and the shuttle buses are out of service.
This means that from this day on, you will not be able to go to the cafeteria to buy your own food. Three meals a day will be delivered downstairs by volunteers. As for takeout, Student D said the last package she accepted on her own was from March 30th. There has been no online shopping since then.
A graduate student, Student A, who had been involved in the delivery of meals in the North End and had done the coordinating work, told me about the delivery process.
The volunteers worked very hard, and the night before the coordinating team divided everyone into districts according to the list of volunteers who had signed up. One volunteer is responsible for about 3 buildings and each building has about 80 meals. During the meal delivery time, they need to get the disposable protective clothing a little bit earlier, carry out self-defense, and then go to the cafeteria of the headquarters to get the meal. According to the delivery list of each building, you will pack the corresponding amount of meals into boxes and carry them away in a cart. The food is delivered downstairs and handed over to the building manager. If things go well, a delivery takes about an hour or so. But not smooth is the norm. For example, if the amount of the box is wrong, a special volunteer will need to contact the cafeteria afterwards to make up the meal. Breakfast is the most troublesome, some students get up late, for example, at 8:00 to deliver the meal, only to get up at ten o'clock, and found that there is no meal. It would be troublesome to coordinate with the cafeteria again, and if they really can't, they have to skip the meal. At the end of the day, volunteers need to summarize the day's meal delivery, and volunteer coordinators need to make adjustments according to the actual situation to try to avoid the same mistakes the next day.
The process of delivering meals changes frequently. For example, instead of one student delivering to three buildings, a group of three students will deliver the meals together. The purpose of the change is to “reduce the number of volunteers and minimize the gathering”. However, every time the rules are changed, it takes a long time to get used to it, and the first one or two days are very confusing.
When interviewed, A said that on April 24, she waited until 7:30 p.m. to eat the boxed lunch she was supposed to receive at 5:00 p.m., and on April 25, she didn't eat until 7:45 p.m. “Then the students got their food,” she said.
“So the students got their meals cold?”
“Hot or cold people don't really care anymore. After all, this meal is given out for free by the school, and most of the students understand. The volunteers do work very hard too. Bumping into the first day of the rule change, I've heard of volunteers going to bed at 2 and getting up at 5.”
“All of them eat the same meal? Are there different set meal options?”
“Only halal and non-halal.”
Cameras in the girls' dormitory, official response
The public number “Doing Dreams to Start School” published an article on the Fudan girls' dormitory camera incident: “There is a right to privacy under the epidemic: on the issue of surveillance in the FDU girls' dormitory” (this article has now been deleted by the publisher).
On April 16, several workers in large white protective suits entered Building 2 with tools to check the ceiling alignment in the lavatory and other places.
On April 17, a student in Building 7 of the headquarters reported that a worker had entered the building. Girls in the building were concerned that the installation of cameras would violate everyone's privacy. However, students in Building 2 forwarded a response from the resident counselor, “There is no plan to install additional cameras [in the headquarters], but there are cameras at the entrance to the first floor as a public area, and if the inspection team does random inspections, they will sample the area, for example, whether or not to wear a mask when picking up supplies at the entrance to the dormitory building.”
On the morning of April 18, a Building 7 girl used her cell phone to record a conversation with an operating worker. “Master please can I ask what are you installing?” “Installing surveillance.” “Where to install?” The master pointed to the ceiling at the entrance. “Every building.” “I mean, will we install it in our building besides this location?” “Four for four doors.” The master pointed his finger at the location.
At noon on April 18, students in the building forwarded the Department of Academic Affairs from the Security Office, said that there is no plan to install new cameras, but only to repair the original cameras in the foyer; and said that it will improve the level of protection for people entering and leaving the building outside.
The concern of the girls in these buildings is that the cameras in this location will capture the east bathroom entrance, and also capture images of the entire building of girls passing through the foyer, blow dryers, etc., before and after bathing in their thin clothes or draped in bath towels.
April 18 at 14:30 pm or so, the school security office and the Ministry of Education and Work each sent a person to the 2 building, these two statements with the previous renovation workers completely different, said to come to the 2 building, 7 building just to add monitoring in the atrium nucleic acid point, there is no reboot or repair.
The students' question is why the workers in Buildings 2 and 7 claimed to have come to “install surveillance”, which is completely different from the answers given by the Security Office and the Office of Academic Affairs.
April 18, 19:12 pm, Fudan University official microblogging published a statement from the Office of Academic Affairs. The statement said that the installation of cameras at the door of the bathroom in the girls' dormitory is “untrue information”. “According to the Shanghai key units important parts of the security technology prevention system requirements of the relevant standards, since 2020, the school successively on the student dormitory entrances and exits, public walkways and other configurations of the camera, the installation location is not in the bathroom, bathroom door.” “The school of individual dormitory building foyer missing signal camera maintenance, and no new installation.”
The author consulted two lawyers on this issue. The lawyers believe that if it is in the corridor out of the building, this should belong to the public area; but if you can shoot the public water room, there is no independent bathroom and other supporting facilities in the bedroom, and each dormitory is divided into separate sex (such as girls' building, boys' building), the corridor should belong to the scope of privacy. Specific situations need to be specifically analyzed.
As for the role of this monitoring, Fudan's counselors conveyed to the students explained that if found in the corridors, water rooms and other public areas without masks in and out, will be “informed of criticism”.
Diarrhea incident, no official response
Little M sent a message to a friend, “It's the body crying, sweat soaked white singlet. The feeling of intense vertigo is like being on an apparatus for the treatment of insanity, a rotating machine. Bowels numb, fingers rotting like twine. Vomiting vomiting.”
After the building was closed on April 4, all current students were limited to three meals provided by the cafeteria.
A tally sheet from students in the East End on April 18 shows that since dinner on April 17, about 60 students have experienced varying degrees of diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting.
The sick students were given Martin's Remedy, mini-hydrochloric acid tablets, and other gastrointestinal medicines, and the teacher urged them to drink plenty of water and rest.
“Do you know what you ate to cause this?”
“We have an excel spreadsheet of what the students with symptoms ate.”
The food everyone ate on the night of the 17th was: diced chicken with lettuce, chicken thighs, lettuce, and beef with onions.
“Has the school come forward to respond to this?”
“Nope. Just handed out medicine.”
Still, one graduate student said, it's important to understand the cafeteria and the school. There was also curdled soymilk in the North End a few days ago, and the cafeteria dumped all the soymilk after realizing the problem. But then the cause was traced back to scalding too hot.
Everyone is as scared as a bird.
Closure Routine: nucleic acids, antigens, transfers, doctor visits ......
After the March 13 closure, the routine was nucleic acids, about once a week.
Starting April 1, nucleic acids were done on the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 10th, 17th, and 19th (North data, other data may vary slightly).
Antigens started on April 4 when the building was closed, once a day at first, then to twice a day at 8 hour intervals. If nucleic acids were available on that day, the antigen was reduced by one.
All antigen reagents are distributed by volunteers and coordinated by building administrators. Each building has its own group of buildings, and the administrators have a lot of transactional work to do, such as distributing antigens, collecting information, and making timely communication between students and the university. Undergraduate students' administrators are served by graduate students, graduate students' by PhDs, and PhDs by lecturers.
Students recognize that the busiest people are these administrators. They spend a lot of time every day on watching the group, sending out notices, and collecting all kinds of information. Volunteers also work very hard. The vast majority of the volunteers are students, and they have to wear protective clothing when they go out, and they have to carry out strict decontamination when they go out and come back. However, many students still rush to volunteer because it allows them to go out of the building and look around.
On April 16, 34 days after Fudan had closed the school, a positive student appeared in Building VI. a girl in Building VII revealed that the close contact with the student in Building VI had been pulled to Changzhou for isolation. The conclusion given by the school is that the substance spreads. So the students started to do indoor disinfection by themselves with disinfectant chlorine water. Because many dormitory buildings do not have a separate bathroom, the whole building are on the first floor of the public bathroom bath. Teachers informed everyone that they had to wear masks when going out to the bathroom, fetching water, and bathing, and that they needed to disinfect the soles of their shoes before entering the dormitory.
In the last two weeks, positives are still coming in. Close contacts were moved.
A, who has done student work, said a student in the North District had a broken foot at the time. But the school hospital was closed and could not be sent outside for medical treatment. The faculty leaders tried many ways to send her a steel plate from an outside source to fix her. The steel plate was fitted by herself. “This has been a great deal of effort on the part of the university to get it.”
According to information released by the NHS, the unit price of antigen once is $15, twice a day is $30. Even if there are only 10,000 people in school, that's $300,000 a day for antigen. The university is not releasing the actual number of students and faculty who are at the school at this time.
Grid-based management on April 23rd
On April 23rd, Fudan University will begin a trial run of “grid-based management by area”. Students are allowed to move around the campus in groups of two and a half hours each day, staggered by area. The scope of activities is strictly limited, and no one can go out of the area where he or she can move.
In a report by Upward Bound News, the girl who was able to go out and let off some steam said, “It's a feeling of embracing with nature.”
But student Y said otherwise, “I felt intensely uncomfortable after being able to go downstairs. We were told so clearly where the boundaries of what we were allowed to do were, and the boundaries have never been so clear.”
J, who stayed at the school for her boyfriend, said that they are still in a “long-distance relationship”. Not to mention the fact that the building was closed before, they still can't hold hands even though they can let off steam at different times. When the wind will run to each other's downstairs, the other in the upstairs from the window to poke his head out, so look at, talk for a while.
Students who had been affected by the camera incident on the Internet said that many people called them names on the Internet, saying that they were “punching”, pretentious, and causing trouble for the school. The girls sent me comments that upset them, such as, “Shame on you for spreading rumors!” “Don't make trouble for the school during this special time!” “Rumor-mongering opens one mouth, disproves rumors, directly causes public opinion, and then disappears by itself.”
“It's not your fault!” I comforted them. This consolation was pale, but I didn't know what else to say.
Handbook: the essence of education
No matter how ivory tower, colleges and universities are actually a small society in miniature. Everything in the big society, this small society has. Often times, we assume that colleges will be purer, and maybe that's just wishful thinking on the part of many (I hate to admit that).
When talking to a few brave girls from the school, they made their anger very clear. They didn't care about publishing their names. I understood them, of course; I came from that time too, so simple and pure, with ideals hot and rolling. Still, I made careful work of all the sources. No one knows what the storm will be like, no one can predict what will happen, and once an article is published, its course can no longer be controlled by the individual. Where it goes, sometimes luck plays a huge part.
Just like the young girl who was interviewed by the reporter from Shangguan News, she was so young that she didn't realize what the interview would bring to her. But the reporter herself should have known that she knew her motives, and she failed to protect the girl.
At no time should children be tools and weapons in the hands. At no time.
I have tried to make a compendium of daily life since the 45-day closure of Fudan. There were no “big events” as rumored outside, and the campus even seemed too calm compared to the rumors that filled the sky. The children are kind, full of justice, and exceptionally good. But the children are suffering and in pain. They don't know why this is happening, and they can't understand many of the rules that have been suddenly announced. They can only receive them because they are related to their scholarships, their merit ratings, and in all seriousness, it's about their future. The channels through which they can react are nothing more than the class counselor, the building leader of the dormitory building, and even many teachers can't say anything.
One young teacher at Fudan said, “They have their own personal experiences of discomfort and difficulty, but people are isolated in their minds and interactions, so they are all independently in pain but powerless to fight anything.” This is indeed true, and it was a common state of affairs among the students I came into contact with on this occasion.
Many of the rules really don't stand up to scrutiny. Again with the grounding and circulation; what is the difference between one person out of the dormitory and two? Fudan's old dormitory building was not equipped with segregation conditions, since we all live together, share water rooms, bathrooms, toilets, in the corridor wearing a mask or not and what difference does it make? Why should we be criticized for such a form of notification?
I discuss the motives of these rule makers with respected teachers. Can a virus go away? What about “social cleansing” of something that is clearly impossible to eradicate? Everyone's starting point becomes, “To account for the past, I took action!” The action was taken, and I did my best to see if it worked or not.
The students, who are used to justify such actions, are thus wrapped up in the whole thing, and like the larger society outside, what all Shanghainese can't hide from, the students can't hide from either. Are Shanghainese suffering? We've been suffering too much in the past month or so. It's not that we can't suffer, but what exactly are we suffering for? The neighborhood committee was still notified at 3:00 am today that we were going to go to Nucleic Acid, only to have the system crash big time before the morning even started. After half an hour, a knock on the door brought in 20 antigen reagents.
Most notifications are issued late at night. Even late night door-to-door transports of seniors and late night pulls of babies less than a year old. Which part of the process was wrong? Orders were passed down from level to level, everyone was too busy to break down, too busy to eat or sleep, where in the world were they going to account for it? What kind of ending do we have to account for to be satisfied?
There is no liberal arts library in this bubble, so students can't go to the library to look up information, so how are they going to write their papers? This is the most immediate impact I can think of.What has become of the 2019 undergraduates, who have experienced two pandemics, repeated online classes, and the campus life they once envisioned so much? This is the most precious college life ever! And who can give them an explanation?
Many years ago I wrote an article, “Flowers bloom undefeated,” about my struggle to get into Fudan University after a whole year of hard work from the scum of the earth. That article inspired countless of my schoolmates who worked so hard, gritted their teeth and did their best to get into this school. They were top-notch students from all over the country. Would such a university disappoint them?
I still remember in front of the first teaching building (I don't know if it is still the computer building), in front of Guanghua Avenue, the stone plaque of the Fudan school motto that we used to go into every day: erudition and determination, cutting questions and close thinking.
“Have the leaders of the school, whom the students respect and trust so much, done so?