Days after this post was published, the University of Washington, which was among the first schools to switch to remote learning, back in March, disclosed that at least eighty students living in off-campus fraternity houses had become infected with the coronavirus. The Seattle Times quoted Daniel Leifer, a pediatrician who is studying at U.W., who said, “I don’t hold it against college students that they’re partying with each other and getting to know each other, because that’s everyone’s college experience. It just doesn’t make for a safe campus. . . . A lot of college reopening plans are premised on students wearing masks and social distancing. This crystallized for me that that doesn’t seem very realistic.”
A defense of campus life in the pandemic came from Cornell University, whose study concluded that fewer students and staff would likely get infected during an in-person semester than a remote one, because the university would be closely monitoring them. “If we have a residential, on-campus semester, then we have the authority to put all kinds of expectations and requirements on our students,” Martha Pollack, the president of Cornell, told Inside Higher Ed. She added that the university hoped to design “a series of escalations for dealing with misbehavior.” In other words, Cornell wasn’t challenging the premise that college students were likely to act irresponsibly but proposing that the university police them in person.
And yet, for weeks, tens of thousands of people of college age have managed to keep themselves safe, healthy, and organized during mass protests nationwide. Data from New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere show that the protests have not produced a spike in COVID-19; in cities that tested protesters specifically, the rate of infection among people who participated is the same as in the population at large. It no doubt helps that the protests are held outdoors, and that the vast majority of protesters wear masks. As I observed at Occupy City Hall, many people even sleep in masks. At marches large and small—beginning with the very first night of protests in New York City, which I spent with a jail-support team outside One Police Plaza, in Lower Manhattan—I have watched protesters handing out hand sanitizer and masks at all times, and there is always food, water, and first aid available. In my thirty-five years of protesting and reporting on protests, in this country and elsewhere, I have never seen this level of detailed, organized, and consistent mutual care. One of the popular call-and-response chants is “Who keeps us safe? / We keep us safe.” Another is “This is what community looks like.” Interdependence and shared responsibility are key elements of the protesters’ message and their identity.
Community is what students seek when they attend college in person. Sometimes that community is found at parties, but the meaning of collegiate social connections cannot be boiled down to drinking and fraternities. Young people attend college to learn how to think, and thinking is rarely accomplished in solitude. Thinking outside of any conversation—the sort in which it is possible to look your interlocutors in the eye, unmediated by a screen—is difficult beyond measure. Learning alone is nearly impossible. As the pandemic-era explosion of online reading groups illustrates, we need others to help us understand, to articulate and repeat ideas in ways that make them stick in the memory, and to stay engaged.
Let’s reframe the question by asking not whether colleges should get their tuition dollars by putting their students, faculty, and staff at risk but how to insure that the current generation of college students will be able to learn in a meaningful way. At Occupy City Hall, organizers have set up talks and teach-ins in a safe and responsible manner. Attendees have been learning about the workings of the police and city government, the politics of rent and housing, and the history of abolitionist movements, but, most importantly, they have been learning how to learn, together, while keeping one another safe. Colleges ought to be asking young people like them how to bring that knowledge, and that sense of care and responsibility, to campus. Instead, they are treating them alternately as clients and as children, people to be pleased or managed.
Back in March, decisions to close campuses were made by administrations, sometimes preceded by discussions in hastily called faculty meetings. Plans for the fall have generally been devised by working groups that include representatives of a school’s faculty, its administration, and outside experts. These working groups have often surveyed students to gauge how likely they would be to return to campus if given the opportunity or to take a gap year instead of studying remotely, and how receptive they would be to safety protocols. Most schools do not appear to have asked students to help design their new learning environment. Sonya Dutton, who is about to start college at Williams, in western Massachusetts, told me, via e-mail, “If recent events have shown us anything, it’s that Gen Z is uniquely ready to mobilize if given motivation and a voice. Rules will be followed more if students have input and view following them as a community responsibility vs. rules put in place by out-of-touch admin.”
“If I were in higher education, I would be so much more aware of our generation,” Avalon Silver, a rising sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, told me, by Zoom. “I think they think we are the people who don’t want to be wearing masks.” Silver, a public-health major, has been struck by many of the same things that impressed me at the New York protests: community cohesion and the extent and reliability of mutual aid. She was impressed by one of the early demonstrations in Asheville, where the police destroyed a medics’ station that had been set up by protesters, slashing water bottles. When Silver herself joined the protests in Raleigh, she saw “people with wagons of water bottles walking around, asking if you need anything,” including masks.
Silver suggested that students could help administrators rethink how colleges are interacting with students who are staying home, whether out of personal choice or because the university has asked them not to come to campus during a particular term. Such students, Silver told me, could organize themselves in local clusters by major; perhaps they could meet outside twice a week to discuss the material. “In Raleigh or in Asheville, we could go to a big park and sit and have intellectual conversations,” she said. The online portion of the spring semester was alienating, Silver said, and the idea of being able to connect with other students, at a distance but in person, was extremely appealing.
