Betrayal

I do not consider myself naive about higher education. But what’s happening this month has me at a loss.

I really thought I knew better than this.

This week marks ten years since I started a career in higher education. In that time I have experienced institutional failures; racial, gender, and economic inequities; sexual abuse and violence; shocking hypocrisies from the scholars I admire most; and the failure of my own academic career.

I thought that I knew what it meant to feel jaded. I have made a name for myself writing ironic and snarky things on twitter about how exploitative and violent universities are. I have worked hard to channel my own disappointment into solidarity-building projects that advocate for change.

I have worked hard to use my platform to model and share evidence of solidarity and transformative action from across higher education. Even during this difficult year, I felt buoyed by the advocacy work of my colleagues and friends.

I suppose this is because I believe, somehow, that access to higher education and the learning that can be done there matters. I believe, somehow, that academia exists to support what my friend Itza calls our collective good.

But this week, as universities re-open and the bars of my own college town fill with excited students returning to campus after 18 months away, I feel undone.

Today I looked up information about the impact of campus reopening policies last year on our communities.

An article in the New York Times last updated December 2020 reports: “A New York Times survey of more than 1,900 American colleges and universities — including every four-year public institution and every private college that competes in N.C.A.A. sports — has revealed more than 397,000 cases and at least 90 deaths since the pandemic began.”

An article in the New York Times last updated March 2021 reports: “since the end of August, deaths from the coronavirus have doubled in counties with a large college population, compared with a 58 percent increase in the rest of the nation. Few of the victims were college students, but rather older people and others living and working in the community.”

I was pretty callous about higher education. I’ve seen universities drive people towards taking their own lives. But I didn’t think universities would actually kill them directly.

And I don’t understand where the accountability is. How are we simply moving towards what deans and provosts are describing as a new normal without a single person being asked to take responsibility for the harm they have caused?

For many people in higher education, the new normal has already started.

Maybe you are on a campus that is requiring masks and vaccines. Maybe your campus is strongly encouraging safety protocols. Maybe your campus is allowing you to shift to a hybrid or remote model.

I am appalled that we are returning to in-person instruction.

Call me delusional, but in some states, death and hospitalization rates are higher than they ever were pre-vaccine. Though breakthrough cases are rare, they are not non-existent. Given how quickly things are changing, and how dangerous things feel, I don’t understand how anyone in a position of leadership could make a choice that increases risk.

The decision to reopen campuses feels like a massive betrayal of students, who deserve to live, and to remain healthy, and to learn in an environment where everyone is safe. I understand that students might learn chemistry, or history, or engineering better in a face to face environment. But what lesson, exactly, do we think students will learn from an educational institution that chooses to put its own community’s lives at risk, over and over and over again?

The decision to reopen campuses feels like a massive betrayal of university employees, who have faced unprecedented levels of stress and work in the past year, and deserve some relief. University staff deserve to be spared the choice between their jobs and their safety, for the sake of their mental health, for the sake of their survival. Asking them to return to campus is an unspeakable burden.

The decision to reopen campuses feels like a massive betrayal of communities, who now have to determine how to maintain their own safety.

But the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that really takes my breath away, is the betrayal of anyone who is vulnerable or who loves people who are vulnerable.

In the midst of a deadly pandemic, how dare we — how dare we — say the residential college experience is worth the death of immunocompromised staff. Of children. Of elderly or disabled loved ones.

What happened to our concern for caregivers, whose careers have already been torn apart by the pandemic?

What happened to our concern for accessibility, which we talked about so gleefully during last year’s the pivot to virtual?

As many disability advocates have written, this pandemic gave us an opportunity to redefine and recenter access in education, and for a moment I was hopeful they were right.

Now I see us looking the other way, and I am devastated.

So where do we go from here?

I don’t know. One of the hardest things for me is to see how unpopular my opinions are. Students don’t want to go back to virtual learning. Faculty don’t want to go back to virtual learning. Nobody wants to be in a pandemic anymore. Not even me.

Which is why the failure of leadership is such a massive problem. We needed strong leadership focused on helping us maintain hope, and faith, and strength as we made disappointing decisions that were necessary for our well-being.

In the absence of that, I’m leaning towards the dissolving of all university boards, the redistribution of all university endowments, and a truth and reconciliation commission that can help us understand what transitional justice might look like from here.

Or at least, for the time being, the shutting down of campuses.

Better a lawsuit over virtual coursework than the heartbreak of a single wrongful death.

Post-script 8/23: I wrote this when I was very upset, and so I wrote about death, which is the uncrossable line that I think we should all be drawing. But death is not the only unacceptable outcome here. There is long covid, the long-term, debilitating symptoms that some covid patients face.

And just as important, I think, there is the trauma that parents will face as they look at their unvaccinated children and decide whether they are willing to risk their children’s lives. It may be, of course, that the delta variant is as gentle on young children as previous versions have been, and that those children’s will be untouched by these events. But to ask parents, lacking information, to take that risk? That is not something that is easy to forgive.