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Mason President Gregory Washington offers an overview of the steps the university is taking to operate safely, and to address concerns about one step taken to safely welcome students back.

We are fewer than two weeks from the start of the Fall semester and soon will be welcoming many of our faculty, staff and students back to ºÚÁÏÉç’s campuses. We do so with a mix of excitement that accompanies every fall return to campus – and trepidation, because this is 2020 and the pandemic has changed just about everything.

Preparation is underway for what may be the greatest campus-wide challenge the ºÚÁÏÉç community has ever taken on – our safe return to campus.

This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it would discontinue visa exceptions for international students on F-1 visas who take all of their courses for the semester online. This decision could force hundreds of thousands of international students to leave the United States and threatens to interrupt the academic work of more than 3,000 students here at ºÚÁÏÉç.