Thousands of students and educators are demanding tighter Covid-19 safety measures in response to campus deaths, widespread outbreaks and growing fears of both.
If you are a student in certain red states, your GOP governor and legislature would rather see you die than risk offending the Dear Leader. And yes, people are dying on campus because of COVID-19.
Kirstyn Katherine Ahuero, a 20-year-old Texas A&M student from Fort Worth, died on Sept. 8 from complications related to Covid-19.
A few days later, about 50 A&M students gathered on campus to read her obituary out loud: she studied biomedical science, volunteered for the National Suicide Hotline, aspired to be a psychiatric nurse and left behind parents, siblings, grandparents and great grandparents.
Some states in particular are doing everything possible to make sure your state university gives you COVID-19: Texas (of course), Georgia, Tennessee, Iowa, and Utah quickly come to mind.
Not only are these states fucking over current students, but their actions are letting prospective students from out-of-state know that these states are undesirable and unsafe places to study.
It’s also having an impact on faculty members.
Some professors talked about protecting their children or other more vulnerable family members when pleading with students to wear masks in class, Boedy said. At least four University of Georgia instructors have quit or retired over lax mask-wearing policies — one longtime professor retiring mid-class when a student refused to wear a mask properly.
Who wants to teach in a Petri dish full of deadly viruses?
In all fairness, some red states have adopted public health norms on campus. A vaccine mandate at Indiana University was upheld after a legal challenge.
But if the Republicans who run your state are hell-bent on appeasing Donald Trump and Fox News, there’s not much you can do to protect yourself at state universities they run. They don’t care about your protests because they control all the levers of power in the state and they don’t need to pay attention to you. You can still decide to attend a college in a different state which does respect public health.
If you can afford to, take a year off and work to break the deadly stranglehold which Republicans have on some states. Help Democrats destroy the GOP monopoly of power which has created a zone of death across the South, the western Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain states.
Start by checking to see who represents you in the state legislature.
Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.
If you have Republican varmints representing your district then “do the research” and look up in local media or by contacting the state Democratic Party who is likely to run against these pro-disease Trumpsters. Volunteer your help to these candidates. Boots on the ground do a lot more to win local elections than posting memes on Twitter.
If you are stuck at a state university in a pro-disease state with nowhere else to go, there are still some things you can do which may be useful further down the road. Document instances where university administrators or staff are stifling anti-pandemic measures with more eagerness than is absolutely necessary. Take names, date the instances, and note the circumstances. In the future you can make these hardliners regret their actions.
