BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER AND BILL V. MULLEN

As US colleges and universities were preparing to reopen their doors in August, we wrote in our fall 2020 Academe article, “The Necroliberal University,” that the reopening reflected a “necroliberal” consensus among university administrators that the benefits of a return to normalcy—and fiscal solvency—outweighed the risks of the inevitable spread of COVID-19 cases and related deaths.

Since we wrote that piece, more than 200,000 university students, faculty, and staff have contracted the COVID-19 virus in a period of about eight weeks. At least seventy-five have died, including eighteen-year-old freshman Michael Lang at the University of Dayton. University of Notre Dame president John I. Jenkins, quoted in our original article as arguing that universities should be “willing to take on ourselves or impose on others risks—even lethal risks—for the good of society,” has himself contracted COVID-19. Jenkins became ill after attending (unmasked) a White House ceremony in honor of Notre Dame faculty member Amy Coney Barrett, who has just been confirmed as Donald Trump’s appointee to the Supreme Court.

These numbers belie a deeper tale yet untold: college reopenings across the United States are a significant contributor to what media are calling the current “third wave” of COVID-19 cases.  Data graphs shows a steady, incremental rise in cases coinciding with campus reopenings in August. New US cases are now averaging close to 60,000 per day.

Aside from the rather shocking impunity and speed with which this has affected faculty, students, and campus workers, there lies an even more sinister implication to these pandemic numbers. Universities themselves have kept diligent “dashboard” counts of their own personnel falling ill, while completely ignoring, indeed burying their super-spreader function in infections of restaurant workers, barkeeps, bus drivers, shop clerks, service workers, and others in campus communities subjected to the reopening wave. Their illnesses and death, a “red wave” across COVID-19 maps, have gone entirely unmarked and unattended to by university administrators.

For example, Tippecanoe County, home to Purdue University, has set several single-day records for COVID-19 cases since Purdue’s return to classes. On October 22, the county recorded a single-day high of 110 new cases, the same day the state of Indiana recorded a single-day high of 2,880 cases. This is not surprising. Purdue’s student body equals by itself about one quarter of the population of the entire county. Local officials referred to the one-day record as a “community spread” rather than clusters of new cases, indicating the viral impact of forcing a 25 percent population increase on a geographically compact community.

This data allows us to return to Notre Dame president John Jenkins with fresh eyes. Jenkins’s urging that universities “take on ourselves or impose on others risks—even lethal risks—for the good of society” casts the necroliberal university as both arbiter and sovereign of life and death, a Socratic grim reaper redefining the “social good” as a biopolitical terrain of mortal risk and demographic precarity administered from the ivory tower. South Bend, Indiana, residents have died so that Notre Dame can live.

This moment demands from those who care about higher education and its place in the social order a brisk set of responses both philosophical and tactical:

• For universities to become again life-giving rather than death-making institutions they must be shut down again in their entirety until the pandemic has passed. We have learned enough from the reopening experiment. Last spring, universities discovered that remote learning was not only possible but also a public health–protecting alternative to returning to campus
• AAUP chapters across the country must take a lead in campaigning for campus closures. The power of faculty organizations to shut down schools for remote learning has already been demonstrated by our brothers and sisters in K–12 education: the United Teachers Los Angeles faculty union successfully forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to go entirely online this fall. Closing campuses until the threat of the coronavirus passes should be goal number one of AAUP campus chapters.
• COVID-19 continues to expose the rampant inequalities of life and death in higher education. In our article we cited geographer Ruthie Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” We have known from the start that COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting indigenous people and people of color in the United States. In higher education, this has been reflected in declining enrollment rates for students of color and low-income students since the pandemic began and delayed rates of graduation. Yet university reopenings proceeded on a “color-blind” basis without regard or provisions for racial disparities in reopening plans.

Necroliberal logic for reopening has also occurred in a broader context in which “herd immunity” has been embraced by the White House and given academic credibility by the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which argues for the epidemiological necessity of immunity through community spread. Much of the emphasis of the Great Barrington Declaration is on reopening schools and universities for in-person instruction, on the logic that young people are most likely to survive COVID-19, while the elderly and the poor are least likely. While there are numerous flaws with this analysis, as university workers, one seems most salient: universities are imagined in the Great Barrington statement as places removed from their social context, self-contained universes in which well-to-do young people live lives entirely separate from their communities and their families.

It is this construction that we most fervently oppose. Universities, especially public universities, are not removed from their communities, and the spread of COVID-19, especially among the low-wage workers in bars and restaurants in college towns, is a testament to that.  But we would also offer that it is this imaginary of the university, separate from the community it serves and in which it operates, that has allowed such thinking to flourish. Indeed, it is precisely this logic—that the university should act less like a public trust and more like a gated community—that has not only exacerbated the pandemic but also fueled the defunding of the public university. If universities were imagined as servants of the public good, then this deadly calculation—this playing with the lives of its workers, students, and community members—would not be the grim reality we live under. If universities were truly public, we could ask the question “What is the best social outcome during a pandemic?” and challenge the necroliberal ultimatum that drives most campuses now: the community dies, or the university does. While we oppose the reopening of our campuses during the pandemic, we must also oppose and overturn the neoliberal, now necroliberal, logic of austerity and privatization that brought us here.

Guest blogger Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multiethnic literature at Indiana University South Bend. He is the author, most recently, of Anti-imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, and he is the secretary-treasurer of his campus AAUP chapter. Guest blogger Bill V. Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and a member of the Purdue AAUP chapter. His books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, and Afro-Orientalism.

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