To President Joyce McConnell and
Colorado State University Leadership
In The Atlantic article, Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students, published over a month ago, Julia Marcus, epidemiologist of Harvard Medical School, and Jessica Gold, psychiatrist at Washington University, predicted that “Despite serious public-health concerns, Tulane and other campuses are slated to reopen for in-person instruction in the fall. Students will get infected, and universities will rebuke them for it; campuses will close, and students will be blamed for it.”[i] Colorado State University President, Joyce McConnell, began this exact process of rebuke and blame in an email sent to students on Thursday 20th August. In the email to her students, McConnell wrote “To those of you who are not compliant with state, county and university health protocols: you may be the reason someone loses their life. It is that serious.” This letter is written in response to President McConnell’s vilification of her students, her fortification of the institution's untouchable power over students, and her corresponding total lack of accountability for the obvious and inevitable implications of inviting students back to campus. The referenced email can be read in full here:
Students, staff, faculty, alumni - please feel encouraged to add your name to letter in solidarity with the concerns mounted. (Additional signatures can be made on the Google Doc which will be updated on this site regularly.)
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To Joyce McConnell and CSU’s ‘Leadership’: “you may be the reason someone loses their life. It is that serious.”
We write to you today in condemnation of the rhetoric the university has directed towards our students. Amidst a pandemic already associated with collectively declining mental health, you have burdened our young, developing students with a pre-emptive guilt for deaths in our community; a guilt that rightly belongs to university leadership. You have elected to control a pandemic by relying on the self-control of young adults returning to their dear friends for the first time in so long. Laying blame for community deaths at students’ feet is inexcusable.
When consulted, faculty voiced prominent concerns about student compliance with physical distancing measures[ii]. Research from The Committee on Improving the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Young Adults also corroborates those concerns; the committee explain that “many adolescents tend to be strongly oriented toward and sensitive to peers, responsive to their immediate environments, limited in self-control, and disinclined to focus on long-term consequences, all of which lead to compromised decision-making skills in emotionally charged situations”[iii] (underlining our own). We honor the many students who are responsibly practicing social distancing; however, with a number of large gatherings in Fort Collins over the last week, faculty concerns have proved prophetic; perhaps prophecy seems too magnificent a word for a basic employment of common sense.
When you make demands of our wonderful students to “Step up. Take responsibility.”[iv] you invoke a responsibility upon students that expert opinion insists we are not all yet ready to bear. You demand our students shoulder a burden we ought rightfully to expect their leadership to protect us from. Instead of protection, you have offered our students only blame.
When you threaten your students with “consequences for non-compliance, including student conduct proceedings and possible expulsion”[v], you threaten to rescind the very education that might prepare students for the heavy burden you bestow upon us. You teach students that we will suffer consequences in leu of the leadership we ought to trust.
And when you move from a rhetoric of consequence to a rhetoric of brazen, overt, intimidation; when you threaten your own students, “Don’t risk this”[vi] you employ a language of authoritarian aggression unbefitting of any institution that exists to serve a community, let alone a public institution for higher education. You, a leader of such an institution, teach your own students what it is to feel powerless.
The fortification of any Higher Education institution’s absolute power over the students it is supposed to serve is an ominous precedent to affirm as we look forwards to any post-COVID world. We hope we speak for all faculty and educators at CSU and beyond: Do not threaten our students’ hope for an education to hide from your own failed attempt in leadership.
These threats, and this blame, and this burden you shirk upon us is shirked in the midst of a pandemic in which young adults already find ourselves so vulnerable: we are more likely to suffer long term infection complications[vii]; we are already experiencing spikes in mental health issues; Black students and students of color already live with added daily threats to their bodies, their rights, and their safety; Black students, students of color, and students of low-income families are already disproportionately affected by COVID-19[viii]. Our mental health resources are stretched, and we have received no indication from leadership that such services will be expanded for undergraduates despite an inevitable influx for their need[ix]. You invite students, so many for the first time, away from the familial support network relied upon all our lives. You insist we do not seek the solaces found in real and intimate friendships. You demand we isolate from the friends on whose support we now must rely[x]. You threaten our young, and, yes, scared, students, for fleeing from the fear of a pandemic by seeking refuge in whatever sense of normality can be found. You have abandoned our students. You offer our students no safety.
We in no way condone the flaunting of physical distancing precautions by anyone. However, we see so clearly the untenability of the impositions you force upon students when you invite us back to campus and demand we no longer act as if we are young.
Contrary to any concerns for the safety of our own community[xi], in an email to faculty on July 17th, you called faculty forward as sacrificial lambs to institutional slaughter, insisting that “it falls to us to help sustain this great institution and move forward during the COVID pandemic.”[xii] We understand that a nation-wide shift to a ‘business model’[xiii] for higher education leaves us with few tenable options[xiv]. However, any institution that willingly jeopardizes the health of its entire community while deflecting blame onto its students no longer holds any right to name itself “great.” We are not party to the financial position of Colorado State University; however, we are party to the value of the life of each individual who has placed their profound and beautiful trust in this once great institution. The value of each and every life held by our community is unexchangeable in the metrics of finance. No lost life can be reimbursed. No lost life can be bailed out. No funeral in Fort Collins, no gravestone of any student, no loved one of any employee should be forced to read an epitaph crying that the dead gave their life for an institution that would not risk its own for them.
Mimi Chapman, Chapel Hill’s Chair of Faculty, said that “UNC has some of the best public health, infectious disease [and] health communications folks in the country.”[xv] When its campus reopened, spread of the virus was uncontrollable. The university retreated to online learning[xvi]. Indeed, Chapman hopes that Chapel Hill’s “experience will be a real service to the country and to other institutions like ours, in how they think about these things, [and] how their governing bodies think about these things”[xvii]. But, president McConnell, can you hear her plea? Can you believe the words of those who have done what you are doing and failed?
Students at UNC wrote in The Daily Tarheel “We all saw this coming.”[xviii]
This is your community telling you precisely that: we see the future that you are bringing.
You have invited 26,000 students back to campus, to Fort Collins, in the midst of the first global pandemic of many of our lives. 178,000 humans have been killed by COVID-19 across America. 1,815 Coloradoans have died. 440 traditionally student age humans have been hospitalized in the state. 86 university members have already tested positive for the virus. It is only the third day of our semester[xix].
When you insist in an email to students that “Your health, the health of our faculty, and staff, and the health of the Fort Collins community is and will always be our top priority,”[xx] we must contest that this statement is a lie.
Which hospitalized student is your priority?[xxi]
Which GTA in need of unavailable counselling is your priority?
Which employee suffering prolonged infection is your priority?
Which occupied ventilator is your priority?
Which funeral in the community is your priority?[xxii]
Which death is your priority?
To students reading this letter, let us make some things abundantly clear: you are not murderers. Our president owes you an explanation and our president owes you a humbled apology.
We ask you, president McConnell and all of your leadership team, to publicly respond to the concerns apportioned in this letter. Offer genuine transparency to the young adults you have invited back to our campus; offer honesty to the families whose lives you are willing to risk. Tell us why we risked our life on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. Tell us why we will risk it on Thursday. Be as brave as you ask your faculty to be; be as accountable as you demand your students to be; be as gracious and fearless as any true institution for the public ought to be.
To offer your own words back to you, president: This is our call to action, Step up. Take responsibility.
Regards,
The undersigned
Alick McCallum, (3rd Year Poetry MFA and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Julia Oshiki, (2nd Year Creative Nonfiction MFA and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Jordan Osborne, (3rd Year Poetry MFA)
Robin Walter, (3rd Year Poetry MFA Graduate teaching Assistant)
Matthew Norwood-Klingstedt, (Writing, Rhetoric, and Social Change MA Alum; Former Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Jess Turner, (3rd Year Poetry MFA and Instructor)
Yusnavy Ramos, (3rd Year Creative Non-Fiction MFA Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Zachary Hazlett, (3rd Year Biochemistry MS and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Amy Young, (3rd Year Visual Arts MFA Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Tiffany Lingo, (Eng Ed BA Alumni, 2nd Year English Education MA, and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Brooks Mitchell, (Literature MA Alumna and former Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Michael Moening, (2nd Year Creative Nonfiction MFA and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Grace Loveland (2nd Year Fiction MFA)
Hannah Bright (3rd Year Creative Nonfiction MFA and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Leila Malekadeli (2nd Year Visual Arts MFA Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Carolyn Janecek (1st Year Poetry MFA and PRSE Fellow)
Hope Harbert (Literature MA Alumna and Former Writing Center Consultant)
Brendan Kelley (1st Year JMC MS, GTA, and Undergraduate Alumni)
Caitlin Johnson (Literature MA Alumna)
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[i] For more information please read The Atlantic’s full article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/colleges-are-getting-ready-blame-their-students/614410/CAto
[ii] From Joyce McConnell’s email to students, faculty, staff, and associates on Thursday 20th August, Addressing COVID concerns as the Fall semester begins: “I also know—and I think it is important for our students to know—that when we recently asked all of our employees what their biggest concerns were about this coming semester, the one we heard most often was that students would not follow public health precautions.”
[iii] Full paper citation: Committee on Improving the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Young Adults; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Bonnie RJ, Stroud C, Breiner H, editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 Jan 27. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK284782/
[iv] From Joyce McConnell’s email to all students on Thursday 20th August, COVID Call to Action for CSU Students from President McConnell.
[v] From Joyce McConnell’s email to all students on Thursday 20th August, COVID Call to Action for CSU Students from President McConnell.
[vi] From Joyce McConnell’s email to all students on Thursday 20th August, COVID Call to Action for CSU Students from President McConnell.
[vii] For more information on the relation between COVID-19 and PTSD, as well as other mental health issues, please read the following articles: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/03/survivors-of-covid-19-show-increased-rate-of-psychiatric-disorders-study-finds. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/14/sheer-fear-mental-health-impacts-of-covid-19-come-to-fore
[viii] For more data and discussion on the racial inequalities of COVID-19 please read the New York Times’ report The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequality of Coronavirus, available here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html
[ix] We should note that students are being directed to a free online modules for cognitive behavioral through SilverCloud Health, as opposed to personal therapy due to excess needs for actual personal therapy. This, of course, is a severely inadequate resource for students suffering traumas and mental health concerns amidst a global pandemic. Graduate students will be offered and More information on CSU’s mental health resources can be found here: https://health.colostate.edu/mental-health-resources/
[x] In an email to all students on Thursday 20th August, COVID Call to Action for CSU Students from President McConnell, Joyce McConnell, as per public health guidelines, insisted students “Physically distance from other individuals at least six feet at all times.”
[xi] Many universities across the country announced a shift to remote instruction for the Fall Semester a long time ago. They did not wish to jeopardize the health of their students, faculty, staff, or community in large.
[xii] From Joyce McConnell’s email to academic faculty on Friday 17th July, Important COVID-19 updates for CSU Faculty.
[xiii] For further explication of the ‘business model’ of higher education please read Inside Higher Ed’s article The ‘Business Model’ Is the Wrong Model written after the financial crash of 2007-2008 which inspired higher education’s shift to the ‘business model.’ In effect, for the past decade, higher education has continued to employ a higher education model devised, poorly, for a recession. Full report available here: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/16/business-model-wrong-model
[xiv] According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities article, State Higher Education Funding Cuts Have Pushed Costs to Students, Worsened Inequality, between 2008 and 2018, tuition prices for higher education in Colorado increased 69.3%. In the same time state spending per student reduced by 9.6%. We ask how many low-income families pay more money for a lesser education for their children each year? We ask how many future generations will be condemned to a life of debt by our saving of the institution? We ask what is so great about our worsening of inequality? We ask whether the institution serves its students, or if it is students that serve the institution? More data corroborating the above can be found on articles on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, including A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding: State Cuts Have Driven Up Tuition and Reduced Quality.
[xv] Mimi Chapman’s interview with NPR can be read in full here: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/18/903682476/unc-experience-should-be-a-lesson-to-other-universities-says-faculty-chair
[xvi] UNC discovered precisely what The Atlantic predicted over a month ago: “Relying on the self-control of young adults, rather than deploying the public-health infrastructure needed to control a disease that spreads easily among people who live, eat, study, and socialize together, is not a safe reopening strategy.” Full article available here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/colleges-are-getting-ready-blame-their-students/614410/CAto
[xvii] From the same NPR interview: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/18/903682476/unc-experience-should-be-a-lesson-to-other-universities-says-faculty-chair
[xviii] Full report available here: https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2020/08/covid-clusters-edit-0816
[xix] Data for national COVID-19 deaths is accurate as of Tuesday 25th August according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center; further data can be accessed here: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html. Colorado’s COVID-19 case data is accurate as of Thursday 20th August according to the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment; further data can be accessed here: https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data; CSU’s case data is accurate as of Tuesday 25th August according to CSU’s COVID-19 Recovery page; further data can be accessed here: https://covidrecovery.colostate.edu
[xx] From Joyce McConnell’s email to all students on Thursday 20th August, COVID Call to Action for CSU Students from President McConnell.
[xxi] As of Thursday 20th August, of young adults aged 20-29 diagnosed with the COVID-19 in Colorado, 3.76% have been hospitalized. That is 440 traditionally student aged humans hospitalized by COVID-19 in Colorado. Perhaps we have been lucky so far, however Colorado Case Data would estimate that 3 (3.23) of the 86 CSU community members will be hospitalized due to the virus (this assuming most infections fell in individuals aged 19-29)
[xxii] Research suggests that spread of the virus among young communities subsequently drives the spread of the virus through older communities who are more susceptible to mortal health complications. In the 10th August Sky News article, Coronavirus: Are young people to blame for a new rise in COVID-19 cases?, Dr Kyrychko of the University of Sussex, explains “So those people [young people] will have disease earlier and then... it'll obviously move into the next age group and the next age group, and then it goes on and on and on.” In the past 30 days, 15-24-year-olds account for 44% of Larimer County’s new COVID-19 diagnoses. 25 of those days have fallen after you sent a mail welcoming students back to Fort Collins at the beginning of August. Research would thus suggest that this will contribute to a rise in COVID-19 diagnoses in the County’s older populations too. Data for Larimer County cases is accurate as of August 25th. Further data can be accessed here: https://www.larimer.org/health/communicable-disease/coronavirus-covid-19/larimer-county-positive-covid-19-numbers. The full Sky News article is available here: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-are-young-people-to-blame-for-a-new-rise-in-covid-19-cases-12039185.
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