BY CAROLYN BETENSKY
If you are lucky enough to be working at a college or university that has introduced any protocols to prevent or at least inhibit the transmission of COVID, spare a moment’s thought for your colleagues in Mississippi. They are living in a state that has been vying daily with Florida for the title of the nation’s COVID capital.
Over the summer, as many other institutions cobbled together various forms of virus mitigation, Ole Miss did not even have a broad, mandatory testing regimen in place, let alone a mask or vaccination mandate. Only on August 4 did the chancellor order the wearing of masks indoors on campus.
Last Friday, the Institutes of Higher Learning (the state’s regulatory board for higher education) met to consider the imposition of a vaccination mandate at the university. After a farcical hearing, they ruled against it. Members of the faculty have been circulating a petition demanding a vaccination mandate, but a procedural obstacle disproportionately supported by faculty in the business disciplines prevented a discussion of or vote on the measure. More than two thirds of the faculty voted to move past the obstacle, but the necessary threshold for proceeding was three quarters of the faculty.
To read an excellent first-hand account of the dread and frustration faculty are experiencing at the University of Mississippi, see this essay in 3 Quarks Daily by Deanna K. Kreisel, Associate Professor of English.
Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, an AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.
I read this with sympathy, and cannot imagine the frustration of living in state where the political leadership seems locked in the 18th century. Luckily I live in a state (Colorado), and teach at a community college, where there is more enlightened leadership, though we still have our challenges and pockets of willful ignorance in various school leaders. There is a local charter junior high school that is under threat of being shut down by the county health department because the school principle refuses to comply with simple masking measures due to a Covid outbreak on campus. Fortunately, this kind of questionable leadership is limited to a single charter school — not an entire state school board and legislature.
Florida is not a “COVID capital”; please refer to WorldOfMeters if you want to view the worst states in terms of COVID fatalities per million citizens (it has a handy reordering mechanism to quickly ascertain which states are struggling the most.)
The top 10 are Mississippi (3096 / million), New Jersey (3056 / million), Louisiana (2875 / million), and New York (2864 / million).
Florida is currently 12th (2366 / million).