JAMES MEAD
Managing Editor
I want to be clear on this: I love SUNY Fredonia, and I believe in the SUNY system.
But that’s why it pains me to say that I’ve lost faith in its leadership.
Gov. Cuomo refers to colleges as “canaries in the coal mine,” saying that how we reopen with COVID-19 will set the path for K-12.
Does he understand what that expression means?
Miners would take caged canaries into the tunnels with them, not because they’d chirp a warning when dangerous gases accumulated, but because they’d be the first to die.
The miners weren’t listening to the canaries, they were looking for their corpses.
It’s apt though, because in the same way, our schools haven’t been responding to student or faculty voices — they’ve been watching for student and faculty cases.
With over 600 cases shuttering SUNY Oneonta, we have our first dead canary.
Alarms are going off, but the rest of us are wondering who’s next.
I returned to campus because I believe that in-person education is more effective than online, but a problem emerges when my in-person education develops a reasonable chance of being unsafe.
Suddenly, it turns the straightforward question, “Which do you prefer, in-person or online?” into a catch-22: “Which do you prefer, your education or your health?”
That was not included in my tuition.
I was always given a warning that COVID cases may spike, that a quarantine dorm would be prepared for students and that classes may go remote again.
I guess I just “trusted” my university in the same way that it “trusts” its students.
I trusted that my governor wouldn’t allow schools to reopen if he didn’t feel they’d do so safely.
I trusted that the entire SUNY system wouldn’t elect to reopen campuses if they didn’t have the resources to support it.
I trusted that when my school was crafting policies, they were doing so following the best guidelines available.
Yet somehow all of that trust now turns out to have been built on a universal delusion that no students would act recklessly.
My school has reached over 75 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and I suspect more, given that our dashboard only shows evidence of around 166 students having been tested.
Our new SUNY chancellor, Jim Malatras, said, “…we understand people want to party. But individual responsibility plays into the collective good, so your individual actions have enormous consequences on everyone else in your college community.”
I believed when he spoke that there were contingencies.
Even at a smaller university like Fredonia, what are the odds that all 4,221 students — or a significant enough number to contain COVID cases — would act responsibly?
That is not to claim that many students aren’t to blame for flouting the health of their community, but no one is entitled to feign surprise that in a group of over 4,000 young adults, some would do so.
Since I believed that there were policies in place to handle those outliers, I let obvious red flags pass by:
- The 13th SUNY chancellor, Dr. Kristina Johnson, resigned in June, abandoning over 400,000 students in the midst of a pandemic after she found a conveniently higher-paying position at Ohio State University.
- Her successor, “a loyal ally of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo,” was appointed by late August through closed-door sessions by the SUNY Board of Trustees, who were themselves largely appointed by the governor. For bypassing public input, they received not only a vote of “no confidence” from faculty representatives and the SUNY Student Association, but condemnation from my own assemblyman.
- At Fredonia and many other schools, the touted “daily health screenings” amounted to a list of COVID-19 symptoms and a “yes/no” checkbox as to whether a student has any. There’s no enforcement to fill it out, and no way to enforce students to fill it out accurately.
- The initial plan for testing amounted to waiting to test until after symptoms, and pool-testing a random sample of the student population (so far, just 76 out of 4,221 — our second pool test will only be revealed later this week) once every two weeks. This wasn’t because measures like entry testing were proven to be ineffective — rather, it was “unknown” whether they would be effective.
- The Fredonia administration distributed and sold masks which they were later forced to admit were ineffective — somehow realizing weeks after everyone else that if the purpose of a mask is to reduce transmissions from breathing, you should not be able to clearly feel your breath through it.
Now I can only come to one conclusion: I feel set up.
We were brought back to campus under the pretense that our schools “trusted us,” yet they’ve had years of experience dealing with students.
Gov. Cuomo admitted in recent remarks that, “…part of the college experience is socializing, I know many people who are on this phone call when they were in college, they socialized, I know many of them went to parties, many of them consumed alcohol and did all those things.”
They know how students behave, and they knew that there would be reckless individuals.
Despite that, the plan to avoid a resurgence of COVID-19 from colleges has largely amounted to a “Just Say No” campaign, with late revisions after watching their neighbors fail.
Even after parties began at Fredonia, joint statements from our local police chiefs indicated that they felt, “troubled by recent reports of students gathering in violation of social distancing mandates,” but failed to mention how they’re putting a stop to it — just that they’ll “work to identify those persons who put our community’s health at risk,” and share the information with our school.
Was the expectation that a stern talking-to would prevent students from “socializing?”
“So you wanted a party,” Gov. Cuomo said last Monday, “OK, now you have to go to remote learning, which means you basically stay in the dorm. It’s a function of discipline and compliance.”
Are all 75 known cases at Fredonia from partiers?
What about the 651 cases at SUNY Oneonta?
How many parties, and how many attendees do you think accounted for those numbers compared to the willful negligence of university and state officials?
With thousands of new cases popping up across colleges in the U.S., we’ve already witnessed the natural end of this trust narrative.
Colleges close or outbreaks begin, and administrators admonish their students with phrases like, “We trusted you to behave like adults — and you failed us.”
Never mind the majority of students seen walking on campus with masks, doing their best at social distancing: our school, our administration and our politicians want to discuss the parties that went on.
They want to discuss how, after we betrayed their trust, they took charge: they ordered more testing, enforced stricter policies and did all of the things we hoped of them in the first place.
This narrative was written against us all along.
But let’s stop discussing the partiers for a moment, because there’s another narrative that’s been building: I no longer feel safe at school.
It’s heartbreaking, and I’ve never felt this way before.
Yet, I’m far from alone.
There are reports of students being contacted and informed that they’ll quarantine for 14 days with only an hour of forewarning.
They complain of little to no guidance on what the procedure will be — and unfortunately, they sound credible.
Faced with the outbreak in Oneonta, Gov. Cuomo sent what he called a “SWAT team” to their campus.
He was well aware of the imagery that conveyed, even while the reality only meant 71 contact tracers and eight case investigators.
He wanted to sound tough.
A student there described how, “they’re pulling kids out of their dorms at two in the morning by one guy in a hazmat suit shoving them in a van, and no other campus personnel [are] giving them any information.”
Even the New York Times wrote about this.
I commend my school and many others for creating a COVID dashboard and providing transparency with daily updates — yet I’ve gone to bed feeling anxious every day this week, because each morning contains my only meaningful insight into what’s happening.
Everything from social media is a rumor.
Everything from my university officials is misleading or deliberately vague.
I’m disgusted at the blatant gaslighting I’ve witnessed from my school and SUNY about how our school has the “ability” to test for COVID, or how SUNY has suddenly innovated with the idea of a SUNY-wide tracker when it had months to come up with this before campuses reopened.
When they were already at 334 cases, the president of SUNY Oneonta said, “I don’t think our plan actually did fall short.”
She pretended that all plans would’ve failed.
Where is the leadership? My university officials defer to the president, who defers to the chancellor, who defers to the governor, who defers back to the university officials for each campus.
Statewide guidance claimed that schools should shut down for two weeks upon reaching 100 active cases or 5% of the on-campus population becoming infected, but only days after SUNY Oneonta met the criteria for that, it had to shut down the campus for the full semester.
Why should I trust that my university will be able to respond any differently?
We were told that we should anticipate “clusters,” yet full university closures within two weeks of reopening is clear evidence that we did not.
Even now, SUNY is ignoring advice from some of the nation’s most trusted advisers on COVID.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that sending students home after an outbreak would be, “the worst thing you can do.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, advised students, “Do not return home if you’re positive and spread the virus to your family, your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents.”
Yet truthfully, most students wouldn’t know if we’re positive.
We haven’t been tested.
For those that have been and do test positive, Fredonia’s official response is that, “[the] SUNY System recommends that students who test positive be sent home, unless they are not able to travel home or do not feel safe returning home.”
Never mind the safety of the communities these students are returned to — it qualifies as one less active case on a SUNY campus, and one less canary that gets counted.
Should we have even returned in the first place?
Outwardly, of course, there were briefings, and meetings, and task-forces and strike-teams — but everyone knew that ultimately, the cost of college is for the “college experience,” and that value plummeted as soon as it became fundamentally unsafe.
Yet our colleges never acknowledged that it became fundamentally unsafe, because to do so would jeopardize enrollment — not just money, to be fair, but jobs.
Students were pressured to keep attending because the promise of a degree at the end is what we’ve been told will determine our careers.
Faculty, staff and communities were pressured to invite us back because their livelihoods depended on us returning.
And all of us were made into canaries.
I only wish I could’ve understood ahead of time that we die in that metaphor.
Disclaimer: The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 mentioned in this article reflect what was known at the time of its publication.