BY JEFFREY ISAAC

Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He posted these thoughts about reopening IU on his personal blog, and we are reposting them with his permission.

In the past month it has become much clearer how U.S. colleges and universities will handle the coming Fall semester in the face of the coronavirus. Some, like the California State system, have declared that the demands of public health require them to keep campuses closed and to hold classes using distance learning and online teaching techniques. But many, like my own Indiana University, have chosen to reopen campuses in August. Like Indiana University, most of these institutions will employ a complex “hybrid teaching model” designed to foster maximum social distancing. But equally central will be the welcoming back of students to campus, where the vast majority will live and pay substantial room and board fees, even as some of their classes are taught online.

Indiana University will require all faculty, staff, and returning students to sign a “Community Responsibility Acknowledgment.” The statement is prefaced by an explanation:

Indiana University is concerned for the health and well-being of the entire community. The nature of the COVID-19 disease is such that each of our individual actions affect not only our well-being but also those of every other person we interact with or every person who uses the same spaces we use.

In order to keep the university community safe, it is important that every member of the university community is aware of, and their actions are informed by the health and hygiene recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”).

Therefore, you are asked to agree to abide by the following best practices to ensure that IU students, faculty, academic appointees and staff all have a safe and welcoming environment.

The “Responsibility Acknowledgment” that follows is a substantial text that begins with “I agree”; lists a number of rules for personal health responsibility, social distancing, and the use of masks; includes a statement on “understanding the risks”; and ends with a space for all to affix their signatures and thus officially, legally, to acknowledge their own personal responsibility for rule-following on campus.

Personal responsibility is never a bad thing. And in the abstract, statements such as this one serve useful functions, by reminding people of the importance of understanding and following new rules, and by “nudging” them to do so.

All the same, like most bureaucratic documents, this statement simultaneously enacts and obscures certain relationships of power and authority. On the one side there is “the university” and its impersonal imperatives—“it is important to . . . “—and on the other are the human beings who are expected, and indeed required, to comply with these imperatives. One might almost believe that institutions like “Indiana University” simply exist, as Platonic forms whose values are self-evident, eternal, and beyond decision—though not beyond the duty to obey.

It is ironic that a university, of all modern institutions, would adopt such a posture, for universities claim to be bastions of enlightenment and science. And if there is one thing that all modern scholarship teaches us, it is that universities are not Platonic forms. They are fairly recent and ever-changing organizations of knowledge and of authority, they structure inquiry and education, and they are run by leaders who are invested with extraordinary power to make decisions for everyone else–a kind of Guardianship without the accompanying Form.

The leaders of Indiana University decided to reopen campuses in the Fall. Then they told everyone else that the campuses will reopen and there are new rules that must be followed. The decision was announced by President Michael McRobbie, who indicated that the decision had been taken by him in collaboration with an Executive Council that includes various Vice Presidents and Provosts. (Note: none of these officials, each an identifiable human being, are referenced in the “Responsibility Statement” that speaks for “the university.”)

When this decision was announced, a number of people, including me, raised questions about the basis for the decision. I pointed out that while the medical and biological science of the coronavirus was well-represented in the decision document, no serious attention was given to the social processes whereby the new social distancing rules would be disseminated, promoted, and enforced. More specifically, I questioned on what basis there was any reason to assume that large numbers of the 40,000-plus students who will return to Bloomington in August will follow the rules in their dorms or in the many off-campus places—rental houses, Greek houses, bars, clubs, gyms, etc.—where they regularly congregate, drink—usually in violation of the law– and exchange bodily fluids.

As far as I am aware, IU leaders have still not furnished any kind of answer to this question.

These leaders have made clear that teachers have the authority to require students in violation of the rules to leave their classes. But, even assuming that this “authority” easily translates into ability—in many situations a heroic assumption–classroom distancing is a very small part of the distancing that is required by IU’s own new rules. Here, the governing rationale seems to be that educational and moral authority will suffice: we must use our pedagogical abilities to get students to see the importance of the rules and to commit themselves to embracing a strong sense of “community responsibility” and thus following the rules. Pedagogy as declaration. Social power as exhortation.

The U.S. is currently experiencing widespread mass demonstrations against police violence. Imagine a responsible public official or criminology professor who said “we must make new rules, and circulate them widely, and urge everyone to follow them, and to sign a pledge, and they will follow them.” Such a response would be a joke.

But we are expected to believe that because IU administrators have crafted a “Community Responsibility Acknowledgment,” and they have required every student to look at and sign it, and they post the rules everywhere, then students will act accordingly. Just because.

It is extraordinary that the leaders of an institution so dedicated to science, STEM research, and the most up-to-date computing technologies, would be so ignorant of and uninterested in both social science and common sense.

Nonetheless, the leaders have decided. Campuses will reopen, and we are all required to sign a “Community Responsibility Acknowledgment.”

And I submit that if the subjects of the university administration are expected to sign such an acknowledgment, then the decision-makers should also be expected to officially, legally, acknowledge their responsibility for the risks that the rest of us are being asked to manage, by signing a similar statement appropriate to their roles as power-holders.

I propose something like the following:

I hereby acknowledge that I participated in the small group that decided to reopen campuses in the Fall, and that I am co-responsible for this decision. When our group made this decision, it understood that the coronavirus is a deadly and infectious disease and that large indoor gatherings of people pose a danger of superspreading of the disease. Yet we decided that these dangers could be minimized by instituting rules of social distancing and telling everyone that they must follow the rules. We admit that our belief that the rules would be followed by large numbers of students rests on no social scientific evidence but a great faith in our moral authority. We acknowledge that everywhere in the state of Indiana, including Bloomington, large numbers of people are already congregating without masks and in utter disregard of any physical distancing. We also acknowledge that our campus rules can have no force off campus, where many thousands of students live and thousands more spend parts of their days and nights. And yet we believe that because we have made new rules it is safe to reopen campus and welcome the students back. As a member of the group, I hereby declare that I stand by this decision, and assure IU faculty, staff, students, their families, and everyone in the broader community, that the rules will largely be followed, things will be safe, and the educational mission of the university will continue unimpeded.

If faculty, staff, and students are required to attest to their responsibility, then those officials who decided to reopen the campuses, expose us to risk, and require us to do this, should do no less. They have decided that the risks of reopening are acceptable, they have decided the parameters under which everyone linked to campus will live, and they are responsible for what happens here in the Fall. They have staked their own credibility on a relatively smooth and safe semester. If they prove to have been right, they will deserve to be celebrated. But if they are wrong we can expect to experience much chaos and suffering, and for this they should be held accountable. With power comes responsibility. University administrators must acknowledge that they made a choice for everyone else, and that they are responsible for its consequences.