Julia Wall/The News & Observer via AP
Caitlin Sockin, left, a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill from Cary, North Carolina, packs up her belongings outside of Alderman Residence Hall, August 19, 2020.
It is unthinkable that an American university today would engage in scientific experiments without going through a strict process of ethical review. Universities long ago moved beyond simplistic invocations of the greater good in justifying their trials. That road, they learned, leads to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Baltimore Lead Paint Study, and so many other infamous examples of scientific hubris. Today, multiple layers of oversight ensure the informed consent of human subjects. For a scholar to violate that sacrosanct principle would be grounds for immediate termination.
And yet a vast biomedical experiment is precisely what some of the United States’ most distinguished universities are engaged in right now—with ruinous consequences.
The most outrageous one took just a week to show definitive results. Ignoring pleas from its own faculty and recommendations from the local health department, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill forged ahead with in-person classes earlier this month, bringing students back into dormitories and fraternity houses on or near the campus.
University officials recklessly assumed their elaborate plans for testing and quarantine would stem any outbreaks on campus. They were wrong. Within days, the outbreaks were already out of control, with multiple clusters around campus. By last Monday, more than 135 new cases of COVID-19 had been reported, with nearly 15 percent of tests coming back positive. The university’s quarantine dormitory was near its capacity—and the second week of classes hadn’t yet begun.
Classes were abruptly moved online, with students encouraged to move out of their dorms. For a university that allegedly wanted to ensure the quality and continuity of its students’ education, the result could hardly have been more chaotic and disruptive. Students who had traveled from all over the state and country to the coronavirus hot spots at Chapel Hill will now disperse back across the state and country.
Meanwhile, the university planned to continue its football season.
For a university that allegedly wanted to ensure the quality and continuity of its students’ education, the result could hardly have been more chaotic and disruptive.
Several hundred miles away, the University of Notre Dame saw results in its infectious-disease experiment, announcing that it was suspending in-person classes for its 12,000 students. As of August 21, Notre Dame’s Covid Dashboard was showing 336 confirmed cases—with an alarming 17 percent of tests returning positive. In their wake, Michigan State University abruptly shifted to online instruction, just days before students were set to move into their dorms.
What drove the reckless decisions to reopen by university officials? It’s hard to say. Arrogant and incompetent university leadership is the primary cause, of course—and yet that exists across the landscape of higher education today. Final decisions rest with university boards of trustees, generally staffed by large donors in private universities and political appointees in public universities.
In North Carolina, the Board of Governors has seen a hard rightward tilt in the past decade, its membership dominated by lobbyists, former legislators, and major Republican donors. The result has been an ideologically driven set of decisions whose similarity to the exhortations of President Donald Trump to reopen the country is more than coincidental.
Will there be blowback in the election? Let’s not forget that North Carolina was where the Republicans planned to hold their convention before moving it to Florida when state authorities deemed it too risky.
There is a lesson here. Combine inept leadership with neoliberal plutocratic oversight and the results are pretty bad. Combine it with reactionary oversight and the outcome is downright catastrophic.
The Notre Dame case was notable because its president had very publicly announced the university’s decision to reopen back in May—long before anyone could predict the public-health situation at the end of the summer, with little knowledge about the novel virus.
“The mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young,” he mused, justifying a decision that would heedlessly risk the well-being of his young charges. “We believe the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.”
It’s the kind of argument one heard from the scientists who engaged in the ghastly experiments they no doubt teach in introductory classes on medical ethics at Notre Dame.
It hardly takes an expert to realize that if you want to reopen universities, get control of the pandemic first.
In truth, the driving force in the push to reopen universities is probably financial—universities that must fill their dorm rooms to keep themselves afloat. The decision is particularly hard to justify in the case of state universities or wealthy private universities (Notre Dame’s endowment exceeds $10 billion).
Obviously, no one wants residential colleges and universities to move online. Although it serves a purpose for millions of students, online instruction is not what the residential college experience is about. For those of us who have dedicated our careers to serving in such educational settings, the shift to online teaching has been deeply alienating and unsatisfying.
But the alternatives are so clearly worse, risking the health and safety of students, service workers, faculty, and local communities—all without any trace of informed consent of those who are the subjects of these experiments launched for the cause of university finances.
The University of North Carolina has one of the world’s great schools of public health. But it hardly takes an expert to realize that if you want to reopen universities, get control of the pandemic first. But of course that requires deliberative and collective action of a kind that the United States no long appears capable of.
University officials did not need to conduct a vast experiment on tens of thousands of students to learn that lesson. But now they have.
They should all resign for violating the most basic norms of university ethics.
