The controversy surrounding UCF’s decision to target Greek life for random COVID-19 testing is causing concerns among the university’s top student leaders.
UCF Student Government President Sabrina La Rosa said as a member of the Greek community, she understands students’ concerns and has addressed them with university officials.
“Specifically focusing on a single group is unacceptable,” La Rosa said. “Though, to my knowledge, this randomized testing was made with the intentions of putting more efforts into contact tracing and Greek students are not the only group who will receive randomized testing.”
La Rosa said it is her understanding the university reached out to the different Greek councils to explain the actual intentions that the original email did not imply.
UCF’s Student Government Senate President Fritz Farrow said in a statement to Knight News that Greek houses have had reported cases and it makes sense to test these students because they live in close proximity to each other.
Farrow said it appears the university is not even-handedly applying the mandatory testing to students in residence halls who live in similar conditions.
“The university should apply its policies fairly,” Farrow said. “We would have made this clear if we were aware this plan was in the works.”
“The effects of COVID-19 are very real at UCF, and efforts to control the spread are paramount at this moment,” Farrow said. “The number of positive cases at UCF rises with each passing week, and the University is able to track these cases because many students voluntarily providing self reports.”
Farrow said many individuals are not likely to report symptoms, and the university’s decision to randomly test is consistent with decisions made at higher ed institutions around Florida and the country to keep students safe, but said this random testing policy should have been in effect before welcoming students back to campus.
“… A random testing policy should have been in effect before students arrived at the beginning of the semester,” Farrow said. “It would have helped the University in its work to keep our campus community safe during this extraordinary time.”
UCF’s Return to Campus Plan states the university could use a variety of metrics to assist with COVID-19 prediction, detection and health surveillance.
“These include the rate of new infections, symptom surveillance, randomized testing, and randomized or targeted population screening,” the plan reads.
Knight News is working understand more about the Return to Campus’ role in the targeted testing approach.
UCF announced its plans to test both random and targeted groups for COVID-19 to detect possible outbreaks on campus or identify emerging trends in positivity rates in a Sept. 4 update.
Last week, UCF announced the random, targeted COVID-19 testing would begin with Greek life, but that it will continue throughout the semester with randomly selected members of groups that UCF believes may be at risk of increased rates of COVID-19 cases, or with students, faculty and staff selected randomly.
As members of UCF’s Greek community received emails about random, mandatory COVID-19 test selection on Thursday, the College Republicans took to social media to call UCF’s targeting of the Greek community disturbing and hypocritical.
The College Republicans said the announcement of random testing — that started on Monday with individuals who reside in on-campus fraternities or sororities houses — should be disturbing to those who advocate for student equality.
“Beginning the process with Greek Life simply due to their reputation of partying while also ignoring the mass amount of students attending night clubs and their own parties is either a sign of prejudice or unwillingness to investigate others,” the College Republicans said.
This is a developing story. Check back with Knight News for updates.
