BY JAY M. SMITH

Last summer UNC–Chapel Hill became ground zero for COVID-19, setting off a prolonged exercise in blame-shifting. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences recently convened an emergency meeting of department chairs at which she announced the provost’s “disappointment” in the faculty. Specifically, university administrators are disappointed that so many faculty are planning to teach remotely next semester. Citing students’ need for face-to-face contact and widespread Zoom fatigue, the dean made clear that unless more faculty are willing to return to their classrooms in January, the university will face declining enrollments and severe financial consequences. Left unsaid was the likely financial fallout for the faculty themselves: furloughs, pay cuts, reduced benefits. If the cowardly faculty fail to face the virus, the university has signaled, our jobs and the long-term viability of the institution will be on the line.

This follows an embarrassing effort on the part of UNC’s administrative team to blame students for the disastrous re-opening in August. The chronically “disappointed” provost, Robert Blouin, refused to take responsibility for a widely criticized “roadmap” that disregarded many of the guideposts provided by public health officials and instead pointed the university right over a cliff. “I don’t apologize for trying,” Blouin famously said. He and other officials had “giv[en] this campus the opportunity to return to its mission,” and if that opportunity had been blown, well, students had some explaining to do. Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz insisted he was “proud of what we put in place” in anticipation of students’ return to campus. But before the semester even began, he was scolding members of the Greek system for “reckless actions”—some had attended parties—that called into question their “ability to self-govern.” Responsibility for the appearance of “clusters” of infections less than one week after classes resumed clearly lay at the feet of reckless students. The UNC system president, Peter Hans, concurred. All the planning and hard work of administrators had been undermined “by a very small number of students behaving irresponsibly off campus” and failing to follow safety rules. Student-blaming, it is worth noting, conformed to a national pattern whereby university leaders rebuked college students for behaving like college students.

This is dispiriting and infuriating. University administrators refuse to focus on the two actors responsible for their bungled response to this pandemic: the virus itself and a leadership class in thrall to an ideology hostile to the public good. First, consider the virus. Faculty, students, and staff are rightly alarmed at the course of a deadly virus now spreading like wildfire. It rages “uncontrolled” in forty-seven states. Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has repeatedly said that the country needs fewer than 10,000 new cases per day to have realistic hopes of achieving “some level of control” over COVID-19. We are now averaging over 150,000 new cases per day, more than twice the daily average of just three weeks ago. Cases on college campuses jumped from 214,000 to 321,000 in just one month. Modeling suggests that over half a million Americans will have perished from the virus by the end of winter. To welcome students back to campus in January—to their dorms, to classrooms, and to the social interactions that college life naturally and inevitably encourages—is to invite more death and disease into every community. A vaccine will not be widely available before May. Canceling face-to-face instruction for spring 2021 is the only sane moral and epidemiological choice available given these conditions.

Administrators of course understand that the nation is grappling with a once-in-a-century public health crisis that may yield unspeakable casualty levels. Their reflexive response to the crisis—to proceed in a modified state of normalcy, to keep both eyes focused on the bottom line, to ask the innocent and the vulnerable to buck up and take some risks—only shows the moral bankruptcy of the current business-model approach to public education, and to the management of the public good more generally. Higher education’s leaders should have responded to this existential emergency not by shoring up existing revenue streams but by pleading with state and federal authorities for new funds to preserve a vital public resource, one that has arguably been the principal engine of American greatness ever since the Civil War.

Universities ordinarily cultivate young minds through in-person teaching. We mentor students whose interests have been sparked and enlivened by the insights particular to our disciplines. We advise career paths suited to the talents we have seen blossom under our own eyes. In this uniquely difficult academic year, however, faculty and students have no choice but to adapt and make the best of trying circumstances. The job of administrative leaders and governing boards, meanwhile, is not to scapegoat us but rather to protect our lives and our futures while we navigate the rocky shoals of a health crisis that threatens millions. The auto industry got its bailout in 2008. The airlines and hospitality businesses were saved earlier this year. Federal and state governments now must act to save the golden goose of public education—the public resource that has provided prosperity, innovation, upward mobility and cultural vitality for more than a century. In North Carolina, a coalition of faculty, graduate students, and campus workers has developed an excellent first draft of a survival plan for higher education through 2021 and beyond. It deserves to be emulated. Stop punching down, administrators. It’s time to look up and get creative.

Guest blogger Jay M. Smith is professor of history at UNC–Chapel Hill.