COVID Theater
American Colleges Need to Change Now
When we returned to campus for this spring’s semester, we did not expect to find our Dining Center rearranged so that communal dining–that is, eating at a singular table with other people–was unavailable. Instead, we now have smaller tables spread out. Only one person is allowed to eat at any table. Does this policy actually prevent covid transmission? No: it is set up to give the appearance of fighting the virus while arbitrarily restricting safe social interaction. It is just the latest act in our Covid Theater. A close look into the college’s COVID mitigation policies and rationale for this type of decision demonstrates the complete lack of nuance and logical decision-making our administration has acted with in response to a dynamic situation.
The Dining Center policy is yet another in the downright ridiculous list of policies handed down by our college’s administration. The problem is that those making the decisions are extremely out of touch with the facts on COVID-19. Surely, the medical experts that guide decision-making at the institution understand that people aged 15-24 with a booster shot are possibly the lowest risk group. How can we continue to limit movement and socialization when the risk of serious illness is so low?
Our personal concerns with sharing a normal meal with friends are far from the heart of the issue. Being arbitrarily held back from normalcy is causing a mental health crisis at our college–and in our peer institutions at large. In America, before the pandemic, only about one in ten adults said they experienced anxiety or depression. Now, that number is over four in ten. College suicides and suicide attempts are becoming alarmingly frequent, and substance abuse disorders are skyrocketing. We have faced two years of locked-down, repressive policies. The administration has canceled classes, athletic competitions, and extracurricular activities.
To think that these policies are not related to the dismal state of mental health on our campuses is negligent at best. The college experience–not to mention general happiness–expands well beyond the four classes we take each semester. So much learning is done outside of the classroom. The lives that we lead through our extra-curricular activities not only keep us happy but are also vital to our development as human beings. A central tenet of a liberal arts education should be the pursuit of a well-rounded experience. This is based on the idea that being a well-rounded individual allows one to contribute the most to society and experience fulfillment in many different ways. When we chose to pursue a college education, this idea was marketed widely and was promised as a crown jewel of choosing liberal arts.
Now, in the wake of these changes, and instead of showing concern, the administration has shown contempt: our college, thinking that they were doing us a favor, put a petting zoo on campus for our “mental health.” Such an outlandish idea is only possible in a place where policies are conjured in an echo chamber of fearful career administrators who are more concerned with being in touch with fringe notions of safety than grappling with the reality of student well-being.
To demonstrate this, let us recall an email from the end of last year. One administrator wrote on December 30, 2021, that “Those who are unvaccinated or have received only the initial courses of vaccination are proving to be at a greater risk of contracting and transmitting Omicron now than they were with previous variants.” It is unclear why, at the end of 2021, our college was discussing low vaccination rates as a reason to be afraid of Omicron. The college mandated two doses of vaccination for the fall semester, plus the booster shot for the spring. Accordingly, the vaccination rate among students has been over 99% for the entire school year.
Our college has adopted guidelines that go beyond the CDC’s, as we openly refer to being “fully vaccinated” as equivalent to–and nothing less than–having received the booster shot. We’re not trying to argue that this is somehow an injustice–it makes sense that the college requires students who are eligible to receive the booster to get it. While we know that Omicron is highly contagious, the booster shot effectively decreases transmission (mostly, it seems, through causing asymptomatic infections) and lowers the severity of the virus. So why do we continue to act like this is the same unknown threat we faced in March of 2020? And why do policies remain in place that was specifically authored under the assumption of an unvaccinated and unprotected population? And, if the college is indeed “watching our data,” as they claimed to us in another recent email, then why has nothing changed despite an extraordinarily low positivity rate of around 1% for the first two weeks of the semester?
The answers to these questions, we’re afraid, are simple: they’ve allowed dogma to become policy, enforcing a new covid orthodoxy without allowing for reasonable discussion on what policies make sense and which ones don’t. Those who agree with us—the silent majority on our campuses—feel like they can’t speak out because of the ease with which they will be called names on social media (like an anti-masker or a conspiracy theorist). We know you are there, so join us in calling for our colleges to make the changes we all need and deserve.
It’s time, in American colleges, for a change in direction. Yes, this pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands–lives we will never get back. That is deeply saddening and something we will not forget for the rest of our lives. We could have saved more lives by targeting our aid at those who are most at risk instead of attempting to hold everyone back. In doing so, we gave away a greater chance at herd immunity while allowing the virus to stick around for longer and mutate.
And even now, with a much milder variant that you will get no matter your vaccination status, overbearing covid policies are futile. Infectious disease experts have made clear that these policies simply don’t make sense anymore. The people who run colleges in this country need to step up and change our direction on covid. Or else, we might look back on this moment in history as a profound moral failure: a failure to nurture the well-being of the many.
One part of this I find tricky is that, while I'm sure there are plenty of people who oppose these rules and who are lonely and unhappy in large part because of them, I would bet that a lot of the people whose mental health has deteriorated over the last couple of years support a lot of the current restrictions--it's remarkable how few people eat in the dining center these days. If that's true, it's not just an issue of the college restricting people's freedoms (though I certainly take issue with that) but also of the college nudging people toward behaviors that are likely to make them worse off--encouraging them to withdraw from various aspects of social life in the name of public health. In other words, Haverford has claimed a degree of responsibility over students' (adults') lives in the past couple of years, but not enough to generalize to other areas: at this point, one could argue that it has an obligation to push in the other direction and nudge people toward socializing, but that would be invasive and paternalistic. We're nowhere near that, of course--I'd be happy if they would just stop actively discouraging people from living socially--and I certainly think that colleges should be taking less power over students' lives, not more. That said, if I woke up tomorrow as a college administrator I would be very confused as to what my responsibilities toward students are--what obligations I would have to undo the damage done, by restrictions necessary and unnecessary.