Remember When College Needed Saving?
A true story of managing a large university’s pandemic hotspot — told with the hope that someone somewhere might be inspired to do the right thing despite resistance.
A column about problems in power.
I was deeply influenced by an interaction I had with the Biden administration’s Covid-19 College Vaccine Challenge program in the summer of 2021. That summer was a turning point in America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The efficacy of the newly approved vaccines and their distribution in June, July, and August would decide, for the Biden administration, whether to encourage another year of quarantines or to allow social activities to resume. During those months, Tennessee’s state lawmakers placed nationally criticized restrictions that barred state-funded universities, including mine, from providing information about vaccines to students.
As I began a year’s rotation as an appointed executive in my university’s student government, I pushed to take as much responsibility for the school’s Covid-19 response as a student was allowed to have, perhaps more than any other student would have been allowed to have. I was briefed by the University President about projected case numbers, the potential for our area of Tennessee to continue its trajectory as a hotspot into the school year, and the difficult decision of whether to cancel in-person classes for another year. We realized that getting many students vaccinated during the summer would make the difference between staying open and facing closure.
The way I saw it, the coronavirus became a death warrant for college students. Not physically — college students had among the lowest mortality percentages of any demographic — but academically. For our low-income students especially, entire semesters were often wiped out by the secondary effects of the pandemic (such as loss of income and decreased study hours). Statistics from 2020 say an estimated thirteen percent of college students delayed graduation due to Covid-19 at that time.
Since Tennessee lawmakers barred vaccine outreach at public universities, we had hundreds of vaccine doses ready to distribute, but we couldn’t tell students about them. My goal became looking for a loophole, and I found one in President Biden’s Covid-19 College Vaccine Challenge.
Because my position in student government allowed me to build relationships with officials on the university’s behalf, I was able to liaise closely between the White House’s guidelines and state decision-makers. We took full advantage of our position as the first Tennessee University to join the White House’s Vaccine Challenge program to make educational materials about the vaccine and display them across campus. Being careful to not anger lawmakers, I remember explaining to one news reporter that my goal was to give students and parents the information they needed to make informed personal decisions about whether to take the vaccine, not to enforce a mandated vaccination recommendation or requirement.
After these initiatives, my school’s case numbers fell far below state averages, allowing for our mask mandate to be dropped and in-person classes to resume immediately, a significant improvement over many of our peer institutions in the University of Tennessee system. I’m grateful for the opportunities I had to improve the lives of my peers, and I learned that braving challenging experiences leads people down a straight path toward discernment, truth, and impact.
