Opinion: Why isn’t Penn State doing the right thing to get to ‘normal’?

As president of the American Association of University Professors, Penn State, I am concerned about the health and accessibility of campus to our students, staff, faculty and surrounding communities as the highly contagious delta variant spreads and COVID cases soar. Most of us want to teach in-person, and I am concerned about our ability to keep doing so.

That’s why I participated in a Friday unity rally, joining my faculty colleagues, my students, and my friends in the Coalition for a Just University who organized this event. We Are continuing to stand together to encourage Penn State to follow the majority of Big 10 schools requiring a COVID vaccination to work and study on campus. Now that the FDA has fully approved Pfizer’s vaccine, Penn State should require it immediately.

Furthermore, we should hold vaccination clinics on campuses across the commonwealth. We should re-institute ventilation and social distance standards that protected us last year. We should re-institute surveillance testing regardless of vaccination status. We should provide all Penn Staters with high-quality masks that are better at blocking out the delta variant than were earlier masks. As faculty, we support all instructors who have determined that their or their families’ health demands that they teach remotely. We support all staff with similar work needs. We will ensure all of our students are fully accommodated during the pandemic, as we have throughout our careers.

Science shows these measures — not the “magical thinking” that one State College Borough Council member found in PSU administrative discourse — slow the spread as people infected with the delta variant carry 1,000 times more viral load than those stricken with the original COVID-19 virus. Faculty, students, staff, and parents know this. That’s why thousands of us have signed petitions calling for more stringent COVID safety measures and are taking further actions to demand these basic safety precautions so we can welcome a “return to normal,” an aspiration defining President Barron’s last year in office. “Normal” return is slipping further away as COVID hospitalizations at Mount Nittany Medical Center have more than doubled since last month, resulting in rescheduled procedures and restricted visitation.

Why isn’t Penn State doing the right thing?

We can afford to. Given Penn State’s $4 billion dollars in unrestricted reserves, $1.5 billion in bonds, and steady enrollment last year, we stand strong against whispers of threatened funding cuts from Harrisburg should we require vaccination (which we already do for measles, mumps and rubella). Why not financially incentivize vaccination in addition to requiring it?

Also blocking our “return to normal” is an administrative aversion to Zoom as a means to provide accessible accommodation to students and faculty as delta rages. Remote course delivery, along with masking and vaccination, saves lives when cases rise. Furthermore, Penn State professors were so proficient at using Zoom and attendant technologies last year that President Barron awarded the entire faculty the Teaching with Technology Award. Faculty know how to support our COVID positive and quarantining students with remote access to lectures and course material. Faculty and students are also concerned about spreading and contracting the virus in crowded, non-distanced lecture halls of hundreds and in small seminar rooms with inadequate ventilation. Most faculty want to teach in person and therefore want the vaccine requirement. We also understand that Zoom can help us survive until then. We cannot afford to surrender the vaccine requirement and remote teaching.

Standing with my students, colleagues, friends, and neighbors at Friday’s rally, I wondered how many more days, how many more actions it will take for President Barron, Provost Jones, Board of Trustees Chair Schuyler, and trustees to listen to the science, to us, and to the needs of everyone enrolled in and teaching in-person classes? Until we require a vaccine and take these precautions, “normal” will elude us.