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  3. COVID-19 Update: Message from the President

April 5, 2020

Dear AUC Community,

We are fortunate that no AUCian has yet tested positive for COVID-19.  Nevertheless, we must continue to do our full part to mitigate its relentless spread.   

Provost Abdel-Rahman announced the decision to continue online instruction through the spring semester to give our faculty and students the security of knowing the plan. Our experience with online instruction and remote work gives us all confidence that we will accomplish our critical mission not only this spring, but also through the summer term and the new academic year, whatever turn the pandemic may take. 

Now it remains our duty to further reduce the physical presence of people on both of our campuses to the barest minimum necessary, and to deploy any additional effective measures to protect them from either contracting or spreading the contagion. We sharply reduced the number of our student residents last month. In the coming days, we will find solutions for the remaining handful of student residents, some with special needs, to continue their studies off-campus. Further: all of us in the administration and faculty will conduct business from locations other than our two campuses, with the briefest exceptions for essential purposes. These are: conducting and supporting communication and online instruction; and supervising and executing other tasks critically necessary to preserve campus health, safety, security and infrastructure. Explicitly included to meet these essential needs are individual faculty and staff, at all ranks, who may need to access their workplaces for periods limited strictly to accomplish those purposes while rigorously observing all protective protocols.

None of us can predict when we can safely and responsibly begin to resume normal operations. We must continue to prepare for the worst, while we all hope and pray for the best. As we decide how best both to protect the health of our people and our students’ academic progress, we will continue to rely on the guidelines of the scientists and officials of the World Health Organization and the Governments of Egypt and the other home countries of our AUCians. 

Sincerely,

Francis Ricciardone
President