When Harry Butcher, 19, lost his summer job at home in Kent over lockdown, he pictured his new life at Glasgow University to be a “glimmer of hope on the horizon” after a difficult pandemic. Instead, he and his fellow freshers have been made to feel like criminals.
Police, security and the media have swarmed around his halls of residence for the past two weeks, he can’t see friends or family, and he and about 600 other self-isolating students might not be allowed home at Christmas amid rising infections (172 students there have tested positive). “Is this a student hall or the set of a prison documentary?” asks Butcher.
At Manchester Metropolitan University, where 127 students have tested positive, human rights lawyers have questioned whether the lockdown enforced by security staff is even legal.
Signs in isolating freshers’ windows read: “Let us out!”, “f** Boris” and “Tories out”. Another simply asks: “Refund?” amid calls to repay £9,000 tuition fees. The Government today said students should speak to their universities if they want to reclaim tuition fees, while Glasgow will offer a four-week rent rebate to students in halls in recognition of the “difficult circumstances”.
But difficult hardly covers the physical and mental health pressures students are under, says Butcher. Since higher education chiefs declared universities safe to reopen last month, students have been returning to campuses under new Covid restrictions including bans on parties, flatmate “bubbles” and in extreme cases, campus lockdowns in which they can’t leave their rooms.
In Newcastle and Manchester, students can expect rules to be enforced by police patrols and security marshals, while more than a dozen institutions have ramped up testing. Nottingham is running campus testing facilities to monitor for an outbreak, while Exeter has introduced its own private tests.
Still, on many campuses, security measures have not been enough to halt infections. Illegal freshers’ parties and the relocation of thousands of young people across the UK have triggered a spike in cases: at least 23 universities from St Andrews to Liverpool have reported outbreaks.
Naturally, some students are ignoring university rules: at King’s College London’s catered halls in Stratford, multiple freshers have been fined for hosting rooftop parties, says Kasey Ward, a first-year film student. Ward, 19, likes the people in her flat but Covid restrictions have forced her into some difficult social situations. One flatmate has started bringing outsiders into the bubble, which she reported to reception because of another flatmate being high-risk. “But you don’t want to get a reputation as a snitch,” she sighs.
It’s a sad way to start what should be an exciting time, says Liv Facey, a first year English student at King’s who was promised a “blended” timetable of recorded lectures and in-person seminars but arrived to find all learning would be online — a particular blow for students from overseas. Facey has been using the university’s Instagram network to arrange meet-ups with course mates - coffees in Green Park, six-person dinners at Pizza Express - but it’s shyer students she feels sorry for. Last week, her tutor “practically had to beg” some members of her seminar to turn their cameras on, and she agrees with Pete Syme, deputy editor of Exeter university’s newspaper Exepose: “You can’t make friends on Zoom.”
St Andrews Maths student Sophie Palmer, 19, agrees. Part of the reason she chose St Andrews over UCL was its presumed Covid safety over a city university.
As it turns out, she’s more locked down than she would have been in the capital. “It’s been so bizarre,” says Palmer, looking back on two weeks of beach gatherings, bonfires and coastal walks. “Everyone went a bit crazy over the first few days,” so she wasn’t surprised when all students received an email two Fridays ago announcing a university-wide lockdown. Now she can only mix with her “household” — the 12 people sharing three bathrooms in her halls — and it’s two students per table at meal times.
“It’s kind of depressing, you have to shout if you want to talk to someone,” she laughs. Queues for meals take 40 minutes as track and trace forms have to be filled out. "We're essentially paying £9,000 to be in prison," says another student there.
Ward admits she’s not a big drinker so a socially-distant fresher’s week has had its upsides. Louis Solito, organiser of London Freshers’ Week events for students from LSE to Birkbeck, says this year’s offerings include bingo and games nights for tables of six, “Netflix and chill” evenings, with silent disco headphones and dance-offs in PPE suits to embrace the “weirdness”. But while he and some club night promoters attempt to keep the boozy freshers vibe going, other universities have pivoted to a more wholesome line-up of quizzes, walks and picnics.
Ward says she’d rather have a picnic than go clubbing, anyway, and Syreha Allen, 19, a sports science student at Queen Mary University of London, says she partied “too hard” on her gap year so isn’t stressed about an 80 per cent virtual freshers’ week. She can see how lower-key activities might be a chance to form closer bonds. Indeed, a more “wholesome” freshers’ is something many hope will outlast the pandemic.
James Tooley, incoming leader of Buckingham university, said last week he hoped this year was a chance to smash the “cultural stereotype” and “unbearable pressure” of alcohol-fuelled welcome events and insisted students can enjoy themselves just as much “but don’t wake up with a hangover every day”.
“I’ve never been so sporty in my life,” laughs Palmer, insisting even the non-sporty types at St Andrews have signed up for football, lacrosse and hockey this year as a form of socialising.
Will the lack of hangover mean students work harder than ever before? Chinedum Okolo, 18, a first year chemical engineering student at King’s College Cambridge, predicts it will, partly thanks to a reduction in social distractions but also as a means of simply keeping up. Exeter drama student Minky Byrne, 18, agrees. She's had to use online textbook library Perlego to do “a lot of extra reading” around topics to make up for in-person lectures and if students do have face-to-face seminars, they’re often at antisocial times. At Nottingham, first year politics student Hattie says some tutorials have been scheduled for 9pm or at weekends to accommodate social distancing.
For many, the question is whether the online university experience is worth it. “We’re paying £9,000 for an online education,” sighs Facey, saying she would have gone down the Open University route or done a short-course in journalism had she known the pandemic was coming. She is angry because she feels it’s students and young people who are being “blamed” for spreading the virus, yet it was older City workers who were the ones spilling out of pubs last week while she enjoyed a socially-distant coffee in Green Park.
Others are happy to embrace the new normal for now. Second year St Andrews student Molly Luckhurst says she’d much rather be locked down with university friends after six months living at home with the parents, and not all is lost just because this particular fresher’s term has been somewhat decimated. Eloise Queally, 18, a first year at the European Business School in West Hampstead, says she’s already planning her master’s in Canada post-pandemic so she can have her dose of “freedom”, while Palmer is simply looking ahead to later in the academic year. Aside from the “nightmare” that’ll come with going home for Christmas, especially for the university’s high number of American students, she’s already buzzing for the day in-person teaching and partying starts again. “People will throw themselves in with the same levels of enthusiasm that they would have done in week one,” she says, optmistically. “Hopefully it’ll be just like fresher’s, just later in the year.”