BY MATTHEW BOEDY

Fall classes started for me on Monday. Since then I have done several media interviews about the first days amid our scary COVID-19 surge here in Georgia.

The reporters have asked me about the COVID-deafness of our state and university system leaders. Faculty and local administrators have pleaded with those in charge to return to a mask mandate, which was removed over the summer before Delta started to rage.

Petitions, protests, and those pleas have been ignored.

And in a non-collective bargaining state like Georgia, there is little someone in my position as state conference president can do other than to keep public pressure on the decision-makers.

I continue to think that media coverage of Georgia last summer pushed the university system to mandate masks.

I don’t have high hopes—really any hope—it will do the trick again.

So I toggle between advocacy and apathy because leading up to the start of this semester our state university system made clear that it will follow the governor’s leadership and not retreat in the face of the new surge.

Throughout the pandemic I have been tracking COVID-19 case counts across the state on private and public campuses. This Fall residence hall move-in and first week of classes have spiked cases. Not to mention the party locales in Athens, Statesboro, and other college towns. Football season is coming and don’t even get me started about universities promoting large group events.

It will get worse. By my data, most schools didn’t spike until Weeks 2-4 in fall 2020. And it has been made clear over the last few weeks that there is no number of cases too high for the state board of regents to reverse course.

They and the governor have let a fourth wave come for the children.

I have used the word “hellscape” a few times. I don’t want to compare our situation to the ones at our hospitals where COVID-19 is seen in the faces under ventilators. On campus, it is more of a terror you can’t see. Sure, the state’s college campuses are alive with students, energy, and learning. But there is also the exhaustion, the anger, the empty feeling of watching it happen all over again. This time without the support of our employers.

And so the questions swirl.

Can you trust students who are not wearing masks? Can you trust colleagues without one?

And people want more tenured folks to speak up. I have. Where has it gotten us?

What bothers me the most is that the peak of January 2021 was followed by a semester mandated by our Board of Regents to be 50 percent in person, 50 percent online, with a mask mandate and social distancing. They saw the effects of those policies and then erased them knowing Delta was changing the situation in late July.

Statewide, we are already at that last peak in cases and hospitalizations. Those aged 18-29 lead in cases by a long shot. As I told my students in our full classroom on the first day: “COVID is out there, but it is also in here.”

And yet one college administrator in our state noted to their faculty that students are not filling up the hospitals.

That is one depressing silver lining. And sadly the lone justification for not closing down the school.

It is also not any justification for lacking a mask mandate.

Local school districts with mask mandates are pleading with university leaders who share their community to mandate. Local doctors are echoing those pleas.

And we have heard silence in return from those in charge. Our state’s leaders—from the governor to the chair of the board of regents to our acting chancellor – all bear the responsibility of a wave now coming for the children.

I have heard from faculty around the state. Faculty who are primary caregivers to spouses or grandparents with cancer. Immunocompromised spouses. Faculty with children in maskless schools. Faculty with moral and ethical arguments clearly opposing the state’s “back to normal” approach. All have been denied what would have been no brainer accommodations to teach online or hybrid last spring. Colleagues have quit and some refused to work and were fired. Others are angry but also burned out.

And so I try to speak for them. As a rhetoric professor, I am learning again the hard lesson that even with logic, doctors, and data on my side, persuasion is not guaranteed.

And yet that is all we have—our pleas.

Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia state AAUP conference and associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia.