Colleges and Universities Must Join Push for Normal

I am delighted to feature a guest post led by my friend and colleague Leslie Bienen. Leslie has been an astute commenter on all things COVID19 with pieces in the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal and Stat. Colleges and universities need to hear this.

-Vinay Prasad

---

Last night President Biden addressed a large audience at the State of the Union gathering. The attendees were mostly older and unmasked. The CDC also released updated guidance that places most of the USA in mask-optional territory, after nearly every state except Hawaii had announced a date to lift indoor mask mandates, including at schools. Hawaii’s mask mandate was already set to expire March 25th. Many more voices demanded a return to normal life for children—to remove masks at school, to stop treating children like vectors of infection and to start treating them like, well, human children again.

In contrast, however, the calls for college campuses to let go of restrictions have been far more muted. The Wall Street Journal has run an opinion piece or two, there have been some strong essays on Substacks, we published a piece in Time and the UK’s Daily Mail ran a well-argued and data-buttressed piece pointing out how senseless these policies are, but the media has in general been far quieter about the need to also return college students’ lives to some semblance of normalcy. This is a shame because college students are—still—along with K-12 students in deep blue districts, living some of the most restricted lives in America, despite being some of the healthiest people in the country.

Unlike in K-12 schools which are bound up in state mandates and union contracts, college administrators could ditch these unscientific restrictions easily if they chose. Such acts are long overdue. Northeastern University in Boston is a rare example of an east coast school that is dropping masks and abandoning testing and isolation this month.

In many ways, restrictions on college students are even less justifiable than on K-12 students, because the very same colleges and universities that are the most restrictive have also required vaccination, and likely boosters, for students, faculty, and staff. What is the possible rationale for continuing to demand that students mask in all indoor spaces, not visit each others’ rooms, not eat at dining halls, or even not dine off campus (Yale University)? Is denying students normal life experiences actually solving any problems?

These restrictions are a mix of useless and unnecessary to slow transmission in young vaccinated students.

There are many reasons why these restrictions are very likely doing little-to-nothing to slow transmission in vaccinated college students, even if you believe it is necessary to try (we don’t). First, recent models from IHME indicate that Omicron will spread regardless of restrictions; they simply don’t work well against this highly infective variant. Second, student behavior is inconsistent. Even if colleges close dining halls, for example, students still live together, bring their takeout to common rooms or to each others’ rooms, go to parties, and socialize. Denying the need of healthy young people to socialize with each other is very likely to be a losing battle.

But the restrictions are also unnecessary because students are already well protected—by their vaccinations and their age—from the consequences of Covid-19, particularly from the milder Omicron variant. Even if restrictions worked as intended, the virus will eventually result in breakthrough. As Anthony Fauci noted recently, everyone is going to get Covid-19 eventually. Students who live mostly cloistered from older vulnerable people, who are some of the most robust people in America, may even benefit from clearing the virus sooner rather than later, leaving them with stronger immunity going forward.  

Placing restrictions on healthy young people to stop transmission to (unrestricted) faculty and staff is placing the burden on the wrong group.

It is not lost on anyone that the faculty and staff are living life with no restrictions, but the oft repeated rationale for restrictions placed on students is to keep the older faculty safe. If this is in fact the rationale, the faculty and staff should readily agree to abide by the same restrictions. No eating out; no having friends and family over; no traveling off campus.

If they do not want to do those things, then they are not as worried about their Covid-19 risk as administrators seem to think they are, and no one should object to jettisoning these restrictions on students. If they are already doing those things—as more high-risk individuals may be—then they are controlling their risk far more effectively than trying to control it proximally from the students, and there is no reason to impose these draconian restrictions on students who, in the grand scheme of life, spend way less time in the presence of faculty than faculty do with their friends and family.

In addition to not meaningfully changing the trajectory of Covid-19 risk, these policies are also destructive. Students’ mental health has suffered during the pandemic; this fact alone should push college campuses to join the call for normal life being promoted by groups such as Urgency of Normal who are demanding return to normal life for younger students. Remote learning is demonstrably less effective than in-person, students like it less, and many have sued their universities for not providing the quality of education they signed up and paid for. In addition, campuses are also, importantly, about community. Universities say they care about creating diverse communities because it is important for students to mix with and learn from a variety of people. Yet their policies are inhibiting these same salutary effects on college campuses. Will this decrease alumni’s future willingness to donate to these universities, thereby harming the mission of higher education down the road?

Many colleges have encouraged students to report on one another. Students at Yale, Boston University, University of Florida (UF even developed an app for the purpose) and many other schools have set up reporting systems for this purpose. Common sense indicates that urging students to tattle on each other for minor Covid-19 behavior violations such as going without a mask cannot be good for already stressed students and will not help create healthy campus communities.  A student at Williams College wrote about this recently in the school newspaper, describing how toxic these policies are, as well as how they help create a lonely and depressing campus. Surely universities should ask themselves how these students will feel when they become alumni and are being asked to open their wallets.  

Last, universities and colleges need to never mandate another booster absent data that they meaningfully prevent severe illness or transmission. Those data currently do not exist, nor did they all winter when colleges were forcing students to get them to return from winter break. Some vaccine scientists have begun to speak up about the irrationality—and potential harms-- of forcing this age group to boost, and two esteemed scientists at the FDA resigned over the recommendation to boost all people 12 and up. Universities also claim to be invested in global contexts and say that they seek to prepare students to be citizens of the world. If they care about upholding those values, they should stop wasting booster doses on healthy young people and start calling for vaccine equity in lower income countries. This movement may also help suppress variant mutations in less-vaccinated countries.

These inconsistent and frankly hypocritical policies harm the reputations of universities and give fuel to critics who say that college campuses no longer stand for the values of critical thinking they purport to inculcate in students. It is past time to let the healthiest people on campus resume the lives they came there to experience—to socialize with people from all walks of life, to eat in the dining halls together, and to sit in classrooms where they can freely exchange ideas and conversation without being stuck behind screens or masks and without fearing a classmate will turn them in for what used to be, and what should once again be, considered normal social life.