The following column is the opinion and analysis of the Arizona Daily Star’s Editorial Board:
The University of Arizona opened for classes on Monday armed with plans and preparations for safety during COVID-19, an ocean of hand sanitizer, masks, testing and a generous amount of faith and optimism that, in the hands of college students, could quickly turn into hubris.
The entire plan rests on the fantasy that thousands of young adults will follow directions and wear masks, stay at least 6 feet apart and frequently wash their hands to slow the spread of COVID-19 not only when they are on campus but in their daily lives.
The University of Arizona’s administration has sought to raise its national profile with ambitious plans for reopening the campus with in-person classes, starting with about 5,000 students taking classes that can’t really be done online, such as hands-on science labs or performing arts.
President Robert Robbins has been making the rounds of national media touting the UA’s best-case scenario: The expected “surges” of COVID-19 cases on campus can be managed, and by the week of Sept. 8 up to 30,000 students could be on campus during peak times.
Any experiment — and reopening campus is an experiment — has a variable, and in this equation it is student behavior. The UA, or any college, can’t keep its students from harmful behaviors like binge drinking or sexual assault, and no list of rules or catchphrases like “Bear Down and Mask Up!” will survive against the freedom and temptations many students embrace as essential to the college experience.
UA administrators know this. When dorms on campus opened, students had to be tested and approved before being allowed to move in — but thousands of students live off campus, many in massive apartment complexes designed for socializing or at home with their families.
During a recent press conference, UA administrators acknowledged that other schools, like the University of North Carolina and Notre Dame, have opened and then had to close and switch to all online classes because of spiking coronavirus cases.
Those problems weren’t the institutions as much as the “activities that go on outside of campus and then bring infections onto campus,” Robbins said.
Exactly the point.
Dr. Richard Carmona, the former U.S. surgeon general and a UA professor on the COVID-19 reentry committee, said at the press conference that he hopes a culture of we’re-all-in-this-together public safety will take hold. That would be nice, and we hope it happens, but faculty members and staff workers need to know now that they’re empowered to swiftly deal with students or even colleagues who refuse to wear masks or stay 6 feet away.
One of the most challenging side effects of living in this coronavirus pandemic is that what we’ve taken for granted is now uncertain. When classes moved online last spring, it came as we were all adjusting to the reality of COVID-19.
Now, the community needs to know that the UA has a plan not only to try to stay open, but to definitively move all classes online and close campus if necessary. Many UA faculty members and staff workers are already facing reduced pay because of budget shortfalls, and we must be clear in recognizing that revamping a class for online instruction is not quick nor easy and those doing this work must be compensated. (Disclosure: Star Opinion editor Sarah Garrecht Gassen has been an adjunct instructor at the School of Journalism for 17 years but is not teaching this semester.)
Robbins wants to assure us all that the university knows spikes of COVID-19 will happen, but that it is prepared with 600 isolation rooms for infected students. But the UA’s responsibility is greater than only to its students and those paying their tuition.
The University of Arizona is the heartbeat of Tucson in many ways, and we are keenly watching this experiment because the stakes are so high for us all.
