Covid-19 risk mitigation plans on campus - Fantasy documents

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times:

As the debate over how to reopen continues, I would urge students, parents and university administrators to look at a fascinating piece by the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson posted on Sapiens, a platform for social science.

Both Tett’s article and Gusterson’s are worth reading.

Drawing on his research of university student behaviour, Hugh Gusterson outlines the risks of assuming that university students will follow policies required to keep campuses Covid secure when classes begin.

While Gusterson focuses on the universities in the USA, the parallel in the UK are similar. Universities have been marketed as a place the broader experience. Imprinted in the minds of many students is that university is a place for social adventure, escaping the constraints of home and school.

Young people are more likely to play down the risks, and draw comfort from statistics that show that, at least in the short term, risk of serious illness and death are small for their age-group.

Gusterson uses the term ‘fantasy documents’ to describe risk mitigation measures that ignore these realities.

The contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2, young people’s behaviour combined with fantasy risk mitigation documents, creates the conditions for super-spreader events that could wreck havoc on university staff and people in the local communities.

Age and class, come into play. Lower paid workers at universities are more likely to be from minority ethnic backgrounds.

The Office of National Statistics reports:

  • When taking into account age in the analysis, Black males are 4.2 times more likely to die from a COVID-19-related death and Black females are 4.3 times more likely than White ethnicity males and females.
  • People of Bangladeshi and Pakistani, Indian, and Mixed ethnicities also had statistically significant raised risk of death involving COVID-19 compared with those of White ethnicity.

These workers are less able to take advantage of any work from home arrangements, and have less strong unions on campus to advocate for their protection.

University academics are more likely to be older, and more likely to have underlying health conditions. In the UK, vice chancellors have eliminated tens of thousands of part-time teaching posts, more typically filled by younger academics and graduate students, shifting the risks of infection during small group teaching to more vulnerable older academics.

University vice chancellors need to speak more forcefully and publicly about the Covid-19 world that students will confront upon graduation. That’s a world where unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, is high and employers will expect employees to be able to work from home, have high technical skills, be good at self management and independent work.

The education experience needs reconfiguration, accentuating the shift in the bundle away from the broader experience to one more relevant to the economic and political circumstances of our time.

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