BRUNSWICK, Maine — About 25 Bowdoin College students will be housed at the nearby Brunswick Hotel over the college's winter break, and dozens more will live at the hotel during the spring semester, the college announced Monday.
About 25 students who can't travel home over winter break, from Dec. 23, 2020 to Feb. 5, 2021, will stay at the hotel, which abuts the campus, and about 50 students "for whom home is not a place conducive to remote learning" will live there during the spring semester. Meals will be taken on campus, and students will pay the same cost as college housing.
The spring semester will begin two weeks later than usual, on February 8, the college announced in October.
All sophomores, juniors, and seniors are due to return to campus, as well as first-year students for whom home is not a place where they can learn. All other first-year students will study remotely.
The college will have access to the hotel's 51 guest rooms, lobby, restaurant, banquet room, and parking lot.
The agreement is a win for both the hotel, which was seeing fewer guests and had closed its restaurant, and the college, Matthew Orlando, senior vice president for finance and administration at Bowdoin, said in a release.
“We are grateful for the flexibility the Brunswick Hotel demonstrated as we worked through the details of this agreement and we feel really good that this will help the hotel retain staff during a period of unprecedented challenges," Orlando said.
Classes in the spring will continue to be offered primarily online. Faculty will have the opportunity to offer in-person classes, and the school expects there will be a number of in-person upper-level classes, including laboratory courses.
All juniors and sophomores who are not studying remotely will be required to live in campus housing. All students living on campus will have single bedrooms.
A "core group" of hotel personnel will continue to work throughout the semester.
The hotel bar will remain closed and the housing will be substance-free.
The Brunswick Hotel and Noble Kitchen & Bar are scheduled to reopen to the public just prior to the college's graduation weekend in May.
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