‘We can’t control those students’: K-State COVID cases show perils of in-person classes
Classes at K-State just started this week, and already, 13 members of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity have tested positive for the coronavirus. Manhattan, Kansas Mayor Usha Reddi posted pictures of students partying that she’s taken on evening strolls, and university administrators put out an urgent letter, begging students to behave responsibly.
“Right now, as never before in any of our lifetimes,” it said, “we need everyone to follow the same playbook. Our plans to reopen our campuses were built on our belief that K-Staters share a unique concern for each other. This means we must all do what it takes to protect our fellow Wildcats. If 90% of us follow the rules and 10% do not, we will not be successful in our efforts. … We ask each of you to personally reflect on the role you play as a member of the K-State family. Lives literally depend on it. Please help us be a university that successfully reopened, and stayed open.”
But is that expectation at all realistic?
Even if college were for retirees, it would be hard for students to return to campus safely.
Expecting teens on their own for the first time in their lives to observe social distancing or, as the letter warns, risk death, seems unwise of the institutions to which they’re paying large sums.
And while these are not easy decisions, it’s irresponsible of the adults who are running these schools.
‘Be emotionally prepared for widespread infections’
K-State is in no way unusual: Already, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began in-person classes and then sent its students home again after nine days and 135 COVID-19 cases.
Michigan State University will now start its semester online, and Ithaca College has just made that decision, too.
At the University of Notre Dame, where there’s been a spike in cases after off-campus parties, and the president had to apologize for taking undistanced selfies with students, they’re on a two-week “pause” of in-person classes and public spaces, as if human nature will be any different in two weeks.
At Yale University, some students received a July email from Silliman College Head of College and psychology professor Laurie Santos warning that shortcuts and half-measures wouldn’t work on COVID-19: “We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community,” she told them. “You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”
Increased transmission among young adults is accelerating the coronavirus spikes in many Midwestern states and far beyond. “People in their 20s, 30s and 40s are increasingly driving the spread,” Takeshi Kasai, the World Health Organization’s Western Pacific regional director, said on Tuesday. “The epidemic is changing.”
Yet some universities are still pretending that closures aren’t inevitable, and the reason is obvious. Chuck Staben, a biology professor and former president of the University of Idaho, told Inside Higher Ed that while no school ever wants bad press, all are “powerfully motivated” by the financial pressure to have in-person, on-campus classes.
“In most of their minds, the possibility that they can hold on-campus classes outweighs the potential for negative publicity,” he said, though “I have very little confidence that we can have a normal semester or anything close to a normal semester on our campuses.”
It isn’t that 18-year-olds can’t be responsible; of course they can. But the 100% compliance that K-State administrators correctly say would be required for this to work? We all know that’s not going to happen.
K-State is even planning to play football this fall, as are KU and Mizzou. And K-State is expanding alcohol sales at games, which in the middle of a pandemic is the original bad idea.
Does it matter where Phi Delts caught it?
At a Manhattan City Commissioners meeting on Tuesday night, K-State President Richard Myers said, “I doubt that the Phi Delt House got this virus on campus. Somebody brought it in or went out and got it from the community.”
Sure, but does whether they brought it from home, along with a mini-fridge and some candles, really make any difference?
“Our campus is pretty darn safe,” he said. “It can be made unsafe if people on campus don’t do what they’re supposed to do.” If students get sick, then, it will be all on them?
“We can’t control those students,” Myers told the commissioners, just like “you can’t control the population of the city. We know that.”
This is the truth, and very much the point. Then, however, Myers went back to wishful thinking.
“But you can be good role models for the behavior we’d like to see them emulate,” he said to the city officials. “And if we do that, we’ll get through this.”
At what cost — and to whom — is the question. It’s one that school administrators who have made the painful but probably life-saving decision to go online only until it’s safe to do otherwise won’t ever have to answer.