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There are two parts of the arguments against reopening college campuses that I find dispiriting, particularly from faculty. One is a kind of standard unwillingness to compromise, and the other is an assumption that college students just suck.
The "unwillingness to compromise" is a pretty standard part of the landscape these days, on-campus and off, where people just dig in around their preferred option and won't accept that anyone else might prefer other options.
In the case of arguments about bringing students to campus, this amounts to a view that the only possible policy is one that would be acceptable to the most risk-averse members of the community.
Ultimately that's just not practical-- we're not going to achieve zero risk ever, even after a vaccine. We should absolutely provide online-only options for faculty and students who aren't be comfortable on campus, but that can't preclude in-person options for those who are.
Regular testing, sensible precautions, and careful monitoring can push the risk down to a level that's acceptable; a lot of the policies we're seeing go farther than I think is strictly necessary, but I'm good with that if it makes more people comfortable.
(And as noted in a big long tweetstorm the other morning, I think online-only compromises what we do in ways that go WAY beyond the financial impact.)
But in a lot of ways, the intransigence around risk is just par for the course. Faculty are notoriously bad about nursing grudges-- there are still a few people who won't let go of arguments about policy decisions made before I was hired (in 2001).
What's really dispiriting to me is the other line of argument, which is basically "Sure, you can make a policy that SOUNDS good, but college students will never follow it, so therefore you can't open at all."
There's a level of disdain for college students here, bordering on contempt, that I find annoying from random pundits, and downright depressing when it comes from fellow faculty.
If you push a little on this, most faculty will retreat to the motte of "Our best students [i.e. the majors in my department] are great but, you know, there are THOSE students..." There's always a shadowy They who are ruining it for everyone else.
And, again, I did a tweetstorm about this recently, but my feeling is basically "If you don't think we can ask and expect students to be better, why are you in this business?"
Are they going to be perfect? No, because they're human. Some of them will make poor choices, but then some of the FACULTY are going to make poor choices. [Insert joke about deciding to be faculty here]
Again, with the right policies and sensible precautions, we can minimize the risk of those inevitable poor choices. More importantly, though, we can and should set high expectations for our community, and expect students to rise to meet them.
I find this especially galling because, looking back and comparing the students of today to my own antediluvian cohort, they're just better people across the board then we were back then. The douchiest frat boy I've had in class would've been around the median in 1991.
I think we can get the students of today to do what needs to be done. It's not going to be easy, it's not going to go perfectly smoothly, but it's a challenge we can ask them to rise to. But that can't happen if we treat them with contempt.
