Dean McFrownypants Is Sorely Disappointed in College Students for Being at College
College administrators are busy covering their own asses and blaming students instead of protecting them
You knew that America’s colleges weren’t gonna give up the gravy train that easily. The U.S. Covid-19 infection rate is dropping but is still alarmingly high, to the point where sending any child to any school is still a fraught proposition. This would have been a perfect time to kill off the entire American college racket, with its obscene costs and deteriorating classroom product. This would have been a perfect time to kill off a lot of shit: colleges, college football, New York City streets, every municipal police department, the U.S. Senate, and such and such. But 2020 has given you a firm grasp of how determined the people in charge of such institutions are to protect them. So you still get a hefty dose of everything that did suck to go with everything that now sucks.
Bereft of actual leadership from, say, the president, colleges and universities have already commenced the process of hoarding tuition money and simultaneously covering their asses. And the way many of them are going about it is by telling their students, “If you get sick and die here, it’s your fault.” The nice thing is that they’ve hewed to the classic 1987 teen movie stereotype and put on their Crusty Old Dean pants to deliver this news. Hear it from Penn State president Eric Barron:
On Wednesday night, we saw reports of crowds of students congregating in large numbers outside of East Halls on the University Park campus. Many were not wearing masks, or physical distancing, in violation of the University’s requirements and expectations for doing so, as well as the State College ordinance. … I ask students flouting the University’s health and safety expectations a simple question: Do you want to be the person responsible for sending everyone home? This behavior cannot and will not be tolerated.
Yeah! It’s not Barron’s fault everyone has to go home! It’s Dave’s! Or take this beauty from Syracuse vice chancellor J. Michael Haynie:
Last night, a large group of first-year students selfishly jeopardized the very thing that so many of you claim to want from Syracuse University — that is, a chance at a residential college experience. … Make no mistake, there was not a single student who gathered on the Quad last night who did not know and understand that it was wrong to do so. Instead, those students knowingly ignored New York State public health law and the provisions of the Syracuse University Stay Safe Pledge.
Or from Indiana president Michael McRobbie:
We are also aware of recent parties and large gatherings hosted by IU students that have violated county regulations and put our campus communities at risk. Thousands of IU community members, including many of your peers, have worked countless hours to ensure the safe return to on-campus learning.
All of these letters have the same template: “We caught some of you being very naughty. You told us you wanted to come to campus, so this is so terribly disappointing. Did you not sign the pledge before arriving that said you would get thee to a nunnery? Don’t you know how hard we administrators worked to make sure you could come? Well, now you’ve gone and ruined it for everyone. We’d hate to have to shift back to an all-virtual teaching model that helps prevent mass death!”
Everyone knew that trying to keep college kids from partying on campus was gonna be a joke.
If you’re a parent at one of these schools, you have my authorized permission to print this kind of letter out, roll it up, and shove it up Dean McFrownyface’s tweed asshole. Because all of these letters have been written in transparent bad faith. Everyone knew that trying to keep college kids from partying on campus was gonna be a joke. They’re college kids. They all wanna meet and drink and fuck, and they’re all too young and cocky to let the pandemic stand in the way of that, especially when the U.S. government has mostly treated the pandemic like it’s nothing at all. But why acknowledge that obvious reality when colleges can instead wave it off and, in the process, shift all the liability onto those same kids if they get sick and get others sick?
Meanwhile, a student at Iowa named Ann Gaughan who did get sick was banished to the college quarantine equivalent of Riker’s and told by the coordinator there that the university wasn’t “really anticipating anyone getting Covid on the first day.” How the fuck can you not be ready for that? Notre Dame shut down classes after a case spike, perhaps in part because the school had exactly one testing site despite having over 8,000 kids enrolled (the testing site got overloaded in a matter of days; over 100 cases have been reported on campus since). UNC shut down all of its in-person undergrad classes too, but only after a “clusterfuck” of a pandemic-management plan that the school’s own student newspaper saw coming a mile away. Alabama now has over 500 positive cases. USC already has over 100 kids in quarantine.
This is a crisis of the American university system’s own making, and yet they’ll never confess to it. Instead, they’ll pretend it’s the students who are irresponsible. According to Alec McGillis of ProPublica, Northeastern found out about a poll asking students if they were gonna go to parties this fall and then forced the pollster in question to narc on kids who said yes.
This is the scam. These colleges didn’t prepare. They didn’t want to. The only thing these colleges prepared for was having someone else to blame for their failures. Instead of sacrificing some money by going all virtual from the outset to keep students safe, joints like Northeastern instead decided to charge ahead and treat infected kids on campus like they cheated on a fucking midterm. It’s not the college’s fault that cases surged the second they opened their doors. No, no, no, that was those scheming kids at Lambda Lambda Lambda! We made them pinky swear to not be horny!
Going to college shouldn’t ever be this bittersweet. I have friends who have dropped their kids off for freshman year within the past couple of weeks, and the process was rife with that special brand of Toy Story 3 tear-jerking that we all know so well. A loaded car. A freshly emptied bedroom back at home. A busy dorm populated on moving day by more people than the average airport terminal. A dorm room with a shitty mini-fridge. Mom steadfastly refusing to say goodbye just yet before her kid chases her off. The total package. But, this being 2020, that whole ceremony was tainted by fear. Fear that their kids would get infected. Fear that those kids would be home in two weeks once classes shut down. Fear that they spent tens of thousands of dollars on nothing at all.
Colleges have justified every last one of those fears and then turned out and made it even worse with this “We’re not angry just disappointed” horseshit. It’s the moralizing that makes me want to punch through concrete here. These people were tasked with finding a way to safely and effectively educate our brightest young minds during the worst ongoing crisis of my lifetime and already had a virtual learning model from the spring to rely on to achieve this. Instead, they chose to absolve themselves of that task and instead call a bunch of 19-year-olds selfish for doing shit that 19-year-olds do. PSU’s Barron going “This behavior cannot and will not be tolerated” gives off the same impotent vibes as Marco Rubio does after Donald Trump does a shitty tweet. It’s all theater, and it’s all proof that our esteemed universities may be able to teach your kids but are terminally incapable of learning anything themselves. It’s not the students who deserve to be shoved off the campus.