Stanford vs. Harvard: Two Famous Business Schools ’ Opposing Tactics for the COVID-19 Pandemic

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Northern California, the stories got weird almost immediately upon their return for the fall semester. Students say they were being followed around campus by people wearing green vests telling them where they could and could not be, go, stop, chat or conduct even a socially distanced gathering. Some say they were threatened with the loss of their campus housing if they didn’t follow the rules. “They were breaking up picnics. They were breaking up yoga groups,” says one graduate student, who asked not to be identified so as to avoid social media blowback. “Sometimes they’d ask you whether you actually lived in the dorm you were about to go into.” On the other side of the country, students at the Harvard Business School gathered for the new semester after being gently advised by the school’s top administrators, via email, that they were part of “a delicate experiment.” The students were given the ground rules for the term, then received updates every few days about how things were going. And that, basically, was that. Two elite programs, two wildly different approaches in tone and execution. In terms of the substance of their efforts, though, Harvard and Stanford wound up aligning very closely with one another—and that may explain why, in the end, the schools both have achieved ongoing success in limiting the spread of COVID-19 in the age of pandemic. For months, college ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news