The wave of restrictions began hitting college campuses around the country this past week. It hasn’t yet hit Kansas State University, but it seems almost inevitable that it will.
The University of North Carolina moved to online-only instruction Thursday, after 177 students tested positive for the coronavirus. Notre Dame suspended in-person classes when 147 had confirmed cases. These are obviously the result of parties and social gatherings in dorms, Greek houses and off-campus gathering points. At Iowa State, they sent a warning letter after hundreds of students gathered for a semester kick-off party, violating social-distancing rules.
Here in Manhattan, a Mercury photographer Friday night found the bar scene more crowded than a typical weekend night before the pandemic, and only about a quarter of the people there were wearing masks. On Saturday, officials confirmed that they had closed two Aggieville bars (O’Malley’s and O’Malley’s Alley) for violating pandemic-related restrictions.
Confirmed cases began surging last week, just as classes got underway. It’s not a coincidence.
The thing is, most college students and certainly all college towns would prefer to have operational campuses, with in-person learning. College kids don’t want to get booted from the dorms, forced to go back to live in Mom and Dad’s basement.
But college kids are also going to be college kids. They are not fully-formed, mature adults. We can ask them to be, we can plead with them to look out for one another, we can even boot them out of campus housing, as they’ve done to some partiers at the University of Connecticut and Drake University. Syracuse denounced a bunch of freshmen for wandering around the campus unmasked. Penn State suspended a fraternity for partying.
Truth is, this isn’t going to work. It’s like asking bars to restrict crowd size, make everybody sit at tables and stay 6 feet apart. A bar is going to be a bar. College kids are going to be college kids. Those things are going to lead to big surges in virus transmission, just as sure as the sun coming up in the east.
So what is there to do?
Where this is all leading is another lockdown, with colleges sending kids out of the dorms and bars shut down by government order. It’s almost inevitable, simply as a matter of risk management.
You might have a different viewpoint — you might say that college kids infecting each other is no big deal, that they’ll all be fine, and that nobody will really get sick. You might say that they’d be more likely to suffer actual harm just by, say, getting blackout drunk and falling down a set of stairs. Statistically, you might actually be right.
But institutions in positions of power simply cannot abide the risk of being responsible for death. There’s a virus that has killed 150,000 American on the loose, without a cure. If you’re a university president, do you want to face a plaintiff’s lawyer in front of a jury, asking you: “So, Madam President, you knew the risk and you chose to put my client’s life in danger anyway? You ignored the warnings of the health authorities in this country because you didn’t want to lose the tuition revenue?”
That’s not going to fly. All over the country, it’s the same story. College towns are trying to hold back the tide, and it’s not working.
— The Manhattan Mercury
