In a guest column today, Matthew Boedy, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, shares concerns about the safety of students and staff on public campuses, which started reopening today and will continue over the next two weeks.
Boedy says students and staff are at risk returning to Georgia colleges, especially without widespread testing before they come back to bustling campuses and communal living.
Clayton State University and Georgia Gwinnett College began their fall semester classes Monday. Read how it went here.
By Matthew Boedy
It’s time to decide: is your Georgia higher education campus safe?
Hundreds of graduate students, faculty, and staff around Georgia have said no.
And if K-12 is a good barometer for how the pandemic will spread among a student body, those schools already open also implicitly argue any campus is not safe.
And yes, it depends on how you define safe. Do you want a guarantee you or your child won’t become infected? If that is safe to you, then no, college campuses are not safe.
But also, if you consider safe to be an assumed number of limited infections, a small percentage of the population, then also no, college campuses are not safe. Because it is not safe for those who get infected.
Yet this is definition of safe the University System of Georgia is working under.
Why do I think this? First, the lack of widespread testing. Such testing for all before classes start would tell us who is bringing what to campus.
But our college reopening plans describe a system based on symptoms -- students can get tested if they are symptomatic or come into contact with an infected person.
So, we are assuming safety for some, even many. But not all. This definition of safe also assumes a capability to limit any spread beyond a few around the positive case.
The summer should have taught us this was an inaccurate definition of safe.
Gov. Brian Kemp has said we have to learn to live with the virus. It’s clear few have learned how. It’s clear attending school will only amplify that miseducation.
It is also clear that when school leaders press valiantly that their top priority is safety, those who open schools for in-person learning are assuming student behavior they can’t control or mitigate.
Or won’t.
If you are wondering how I would answer my own question, I would say this: I don’t get an opinion. I have to go in, have to offer in-person classes of some percentage. I have to walk the hallways, ascend the stairs, enter the same door as students, multiple times a day.
Credit: UNG
Credit: UNG
I do not think it is safe for all. But nobody asked me.
We faculty have long known we would be building a semester around the pandemic – flexibility has been our theme. But what we are really doing is building a semester on hope.
Hope we don’t get infected, hope we don’t bring it home, hope we don’t need a hospital bed. And yes, hope we don’t die. If you are hoping for safety, you don’t have it.
If faith is evidence of things unseen, safety comes from evidence we can see. While we can’t see the virus, we can see (some) infections. And we can see the missing students, the quarantined faculty, the departed staff.
I don’t see safety. Do you?
Government failure at all levels over the last few months now has fallen on those of us on campus.
And so, the weeks ahead offer horrendous prospects.
The K-12 system has its own issues and perhaps darker prospects concerning the time bomb of cases set to go off after a few days or weeks.
But I do not see my college campus as a haven comparatively just because we are spread out and in different buildings.
Have you seen the picture of the high school hallway in Paulding County? We have hallways at college, too. Some during breaks that resemble New York City streets at morning rush hour.
Beyond the educational aspect, colleges and universities also have the burden of housing, feeding, and policing thousands of students. Our campuses are also communal spaces for some students who spend their down time on campus because home is an hour or more each way.
We are failing all of them because Georgia college campuses are not safe for all. There will be positive cases of students, faculty, and staff. [If you haven’t noticed, there already have been.]
Are you OK with being one of them? Are you OK with not knowing you have been chosen?
If not, don’t come. Find a way to do your courses online. I have offered all my students that opportunity.
Because I don’t think they are safe.
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