This, from @tressiemcphd, is like a decoder ring for understanding the fall optimism at state schools, and maybe even more broadly. Accept it and all the confusing rhetoric suddenly makes sense. (thread)
In a vacuum, the plans are kind of baffling. Bring back thousands of students and play football, when both of those things are especially dangerous? Why default to a version of business as usual when business as usual will kill people?
But when you imagine the plans not as intended to minimize infection but instead as intended to satisfy and keep customers, suddenly it clicks. Students (customers) want to be on campus, parents (customers) want their money to pay for an in-person experience...
...and many state lawmakers (customers) want to open up and watch college football. The plans, at least for now, signal that the customers' priorities are driving the outcomes. In this framework, public-health considerations aren't the priority, they're applied after the fact.
Many of these plans will not be realized, as @rkelchen points out here: chronicle.com/article/This-W… Some will call off in-person instruction (even with the ICE curveball) as it becomes clear that it would cost lives.
But some might not, at least initially. The obvious and gravest risk here is to public health, people getting sick and dying. But I think there's also a risk to (what's left of) colleges' moral credibility.
Colleges aren't corporations; more is expected of them. But if it becomes clear that universities strove to satisfy customers at the expense of their most vulnerable workers (custodians, athletes, contingent faculty), what separates academia from, say, the meat industry?
