For the first time since COVID-19 forced Bowdoin College students to vacate their dorms and return home in spring 2020, the campus will operate without mandatory surveillance testing this fall, according to a community message from President Clayton Rose.

Masks, which the school previously required in most indoor spaces, including classrooms, are now optional for most students, and visitors will be allowed on campus.

“The SARS-COV-2 virus, with its many variants, will clearly be with us for the foreseeable future, and our priorities now are to protect the health and safety of our community and to return to a normal or as close as possible to a normal Bowdoin College education and experience,” Rose wrote in his August 3 message. “Importantly, the health and safety imperative very much includes mental as well as physical health.”

While Bowdoin has loosened its COVID restrictions, including mask requirements, during periods where regional case counts have been low, eliminating weekly testing is a significant departure from the school’s previous policies. According to Matt Orlando, the school’s senior VP for finance and administration, the shift reflects the administration’s belief that the dominant variants of COVID-19 are both too contagious to contain with surveillance testing and unlikely to produce severe illness among vaccinated individuals.

Students were asked to test negative for the virus before arriving on campus for the start of the fall semester on Wednesday. Students who start to show symptoms will have access to antigen tests from the school’s health center throughout the semester, but students not experiencing symptoms will need to purchase their own test kits.

Colby College and Bates College have also eliminated their testing programs and mask mandates, according to their websites. The schools will continue to evaluate their policies as the pandemic changes.

Bowdoin students, who must maintain up-to-date vaccination records, including boosters, will benefit from the academic and social environments that the move away from testing and mandatory masking will help facilitate, Orlando said.

“Whether it’s a small seminar or a large lecture, the strong preference is to be unmasked,” he said. “To pick up the facial cues, to see the smiles, to project your voice – it is a different dynamic if everyone has a mask on when they’re trying to communicate in the classroom. The campus at large is really excited about having the real college experience here and being able to move about and engage with one another in ways we used to enjoy.”

Bowdoin junior Noah Desmarais said he was looking forward to finally getting to see professors’ and classmates’ faces during class, but he added he had gotten used to regular testing.

“It was a bit of a surprise just because it had been so stringent about COVID protocols before,” he said of Rose’s announcement. “I think I miss the testing just because it was nice to know what my status was.”

Junior Sydney Starks said she also would have preferred easy access to a testing facility but added that option may no longer have provided much peace of mind at this stage of the pandemic.

“It’s kind of the state of 2022, having (COVID) out there,” she said. “It’s kind of a new flu. It’s something we’ll have to deal with.”

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