O

n Tuesday of Wel-

come Week this 

year, I had dinner 

alone on my porch. The house I 

had moved into just a few days 

earlier was still uncomfortably 

hot, so I fled to the cool breeze 

and quiet murmur of the street. 

Settling into a chair, I watched 

the world go by in front of me 

as dusk faded into night.

Usually, when I sit still in 

such a bustling environment, 

I like to imagine where people 

are coming from, where they 

are going, who they are talk-

ing to on the phone and other 

mildly 
entertaining 
things. 

This time, though, I was fo-

cused on whether or not peo-

ple were wearing masks. 

Since Gov. Gretchen Whit-

mer signed Executive Order 

2020-153, Michiganders have 

been required to wear face cov-

erings in public spaces — both 

indoors and outdoors — to 

stop the spread of COVID-19. 

Adherence to these and other 

guidelines 
represents 
cru-

cial public health measures for the state of 

Michigan, which has suffered more than 

6,700 of the approximately 180,000 corona-

virus deaths in the United States thus far. By 

my count, it seemed that less than half of the 

people who walked past my house that eve-

ning were wearing masks.

In addition to inadequate mask compli-

ance, the return of students this fall has also 

increased the probability of super-spreader 

events. Large universities like ours, such as 

the University of North Carolina at Chapel 

Hill, Notre Dame University and the Uni-

versity of Alabama, have already succumbed 

to spikes in cases that have been traced back 

to bars and off-campus parties. With each 

new day, another university learns the same 

lesson about trusting its entire student body 

to restrain itself during one of the biggest 

party seasons of the year.

Over the course of the past week, I con-

ducted interviews collecting people’s per-

ceptions about our campus community’s 

response to the pandemic, as well as our 

chances of maintaining in-person instruc-

tion. How likely was it that our campus 

would experience similar outbreaks to those 

at other colleges? While there were differ-

ences in opinion on many issues, one par-

ticular prediction proved unanimous: the 

University of Michigan is next.

To me, this was cause for alarm. Practi-

cally everyone I asked predicted the Univer-

sity would be completely online within one 

or two weeks, and that the freshmen would 

likely be sent home before they even got a 

taste of the much-advertised “First Year Ex-

perience.” It was quite confusing to watch 

other people, especially my peers, go about 

their daily lives as if nothing especially odd 

was happening.

At the outset of my investigation, I want-

ed to explore the fatalism that had taken 

hold of our campus community. Operating 

under the assumption that a move to all-

online instruction was a litmus test for our 

ability to contain the virus, I struggled with 

the question: Is the closure of campus inevi-

table? Or, in metaphorical terms: Are we liv-

ing through the calm before the storm?
T

he belief in the likely failure of 

the University’s reopening plan 

was certainly widespread, but I 

still questioned the prevailing wisdom that 

there was nothing I could do to stop it. As 

a senior, the social connections and experi-

ences I have built here over the years give 

me a relatively small, but relevant sphere of 

influence. I could still choose not to attend 

social gatherings that might endanger my 

health or the health of others, and encour-

age my friends to do the same.

But what if I had just arrived on cam-

pus, desperate to make friends and wriggle 

my way into the fabric of college social life? 

This is the plight of the current freshmen, 

who since March have had major coming-

of-age events such as prom, graduation and 

now Welcome Week canceled or severely 

limited to virtual equivalents. I remember 

when I was a freshman; the first few weeks 

were a mad dash to attain the sense of feel-

ing established and comfortable in my own 

skin. 

My intuition is that most upperclassmen 

like me have probably not thought much 

about this year’s freshman class, let alone 

interacted with them in any meaningful 

way. To better understand their perspective, 

I talked with a few freshmen who decided to 

study on campus for the fall term this year.

The first freshman I spoke with was David 

Welch, a student in the School of Engineer-

ing and an Ann Arbor townie. In our phone 

conversation, I asked David why, even with 

the pandemic still raging, he would still opt 

for the perennial college experience of liv-

ing in the dorms rather than at home just a 

few miles away.

“What I want to do is meet new people,” 

Welch said. “I feel like that’s the most im-

portant thing that I could potentially miss 

out on if I didn’t, you know, live in a dorm.”

For the majority of undergraduates, re-

turning to campus offers the opportunity of 

connecting with their peers. There is noth-

ing wrong with that, though I did find it 

unfortunate that the parties thrown by the 

elder undergraduates would likely lead the 

first-year experience to be more of a first-

few-weeks experience.

Bea Brockey is another freshman who 

will be starting her first semester in the 

LSA Residential College, a living-learning 

program especially geared toward under-

classmen. RC students have the privilege of 

living and taking classes in East Quad Resi-

dence Hall for their first two years, though 

the uncertainty of the pandemic has made 

students like Bea wary of getting too com-

fortable.

“I really hope we get to stay as long as 

possible but I think we’re gonna get sent 

home in, like, two weeks or a month,” Bea 

said during our phone conversation. 

I then asked Bea whether she thought 

campus closure was inevitable. “College stu-

dents aren’t necessarily notorious for their 

ability to follow the rules, and I think people 

are going to party. They have been partying 

at other colleges that have reopened. And if 

they do that, I think it’s likely that we will be 

sent home.”

I felt empathy for the freshmen I inter-

viewed about the upcoming semester, if only 

in the sense that I also felt I had very little 

control over how things would play out. I 

wondered: Is there any evidence out there 

that Michigan will be able to stop the spread 

of the virus and deliver a quality in-person 

education at the same time?
T

he first data source I probed was 

my own lived experience. On two 

consecutive nights, I went out 

late in the evening to scope out the streets, 

and this time not just from my porch.

Donning a face mask, I set off on the first 

night for a walk around campus. I walked 

by a group of guys playing a game of beer 

die, blasting music and shouting as the dice 

plummeted toward a carefully painted ta-

ble. I passed by several restaurants where 

bare-faced diners were wolfing down their 

meals in the outside seating area. Wher-

ever I looked, it seemed like more people 

were wearing their masks around their neck 

than on their actual faces. I even had a few 

minutes completely to myself as I walked 

down an empty State Street, but the rela-

tive solitude was interrupted when a group 

of roughly twenty girls dressed up to go out 

ran past me on the sidewalk.

The next night, I interviewed some of 

the late-night revelers. The prevailing senti-

ment among the people I talked to was that 

they were just having a good time (all spoke 

on the condition of anonymity). They did 

not believe what they were doing was harm-

ful, and many said they felt poorly informed 

about the consequences of getting in trouble 

anyway.

This lack of awareness was not surpris-

ing. In fact, the University has largely avoid-

ed addressing disciplinary action in its COV-

ID-19 messaging but instead has appealed to 

students’ sense of responsibility. In an inter-

view with The Daily, University President 

Mark Schlissel complained that “I get a lit-

tle insulted when everybody says there’s no 

way that students are going to wear masks, 

and there’s no way that they’re not going to 

party in dangerous fashions, and there’s no 

way they’re mature enough to recognize the 

importance of the moment and behave like 

the adults that you all are.”

But students disagree, and for good rea-

son.

In an episode characteristic of mature 

adults, a Twitter user captured a photo of a 

social gathering that featured a banner with 

the words, “You can’t eat ASS with a mask 

on.” The photo also featured another banner 

that seemed to have “Rush Phi Psi” written 

across it in red letters, referring to the fra-

ternity Phi Kappa Psi.

The University’s public response was one 

of mild displeasure toward the students in 

the photo. In an email to The Daily, Univer-

sity spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen wrote 

that even though the banner was “embar-

rassing,” it constituted protected speech 

under the first amendment. She also main-

tained that Phi Kappa Psi was not affiliated 

with the gathering and that the people in the 

photo were not breaking any public health 

guidelines. On the other hand, she wrote 

that she “thoroughly condemns” those who 

were harassing or threatening the residents 

on social media.

Jeff Lockhart, a sixth-year Ph.D. student 

in sociology and complex systems who is 

also involved in the Graduate 

Employees’ 
Organization’s 

COVID Caucus, pointed out 

the irony in Broekhuizen’s 

statement during our phone 

conversation.

“It seems to me like what 

the University is already do-

ing is letting people off the 

hook and assigning no sort of 

criticism at all for that kind of 

behavior, while actively criti-

cizing the people who call it a 

potential problem.”

When I asked Lockhart for 

his opinion on the Universi-

ty’s reopening plan more gen-

erally, his response caught 

my attention.

“We know that this Uni-

versity administration is liv-

ing in fantasy land, right?” 

He then referred to an argu-

ment Schlissel made during a 

“Virtual Faculty Town Hall” 

in mid-August about testing; 

namely, that students who 

tested negative for COVID-19 

would be emboldened to take 

greater risks, just as gay men 

supposedly did during the HIV/AIDs epi-

demic. As Greg Gonsalves wrote in his ar-

ticle for The Nation, Schlissel’s statement 

was “a fabricated tale, stigmatizing gay men 

all over again as vectors of disease and infec-

tion.”

Lockhart further criticized Schlissel’s 

statement as a justification for not carrying 

out regular asymptomatic testing on-cam-

pus: “Anyone who knows anything about 

HIV public health knows that regular as-

ymptomatic testing is crucial … so for him to 

say that HIV testing is an example of why we 

shouldn’t have asymptomatic widespread 

testing; it is the most backward, nonsensical 

thing.”

In fairness to Schlissel, he has since made 

several apologies for this statement in the 

wake of criticism from U-M’s Queer Advo-

cacy Coalition. Nevertheless, his slip of the 

tongue was not merely a mistake; it was a 

window, an invitation to discover a wealth 

of unsettling evidence regarding potential 

corruption in the University’s reopening 

scheme.

Lockhart shared with me two key docu-

ments that reveal a suspicious misalignment 

between expert knowledge and University 

policy: The Report of the Ethics and Privacy 

Committee that Schlissel himself charged 

with investigating the University’s options 

for reopening, and a more recent document 

titled “Update on the current situation and 

planning for the Fall Term” by the same com-

mittee. The Report assesses the ethical im-

plications of a return to in-person instruction 

“from a diverse array of standpoints,” taking 

into account the moral obligations the Uni-

versity has to its students, faculty, staff and 

surrounding communities. Its publication on 

June 8 preceded the announcement of the 

University’s Maize & Blueprint plan for what 

Schlissel called, “a public health-informed 

in-residence semester this fall.”

However, the Update memo, originally 

sent on July 31 according to the memo’s 

header, was not made public until Dr. Silke-

Maria Weineck — a professor at the Universi-

ty — shared it on her Twitter account on Aug. 

24. The main assertion of its authors is that 

we, as a University, would likely turn Ann Ar-

bor into a COVID-19 “hot spot” that placed 

members of the campus community as well 

as all members of adjacent communities in 

serious danger. 

The publication of the document was just 

one of a series of actions by University em-

ployees demanding greater accountability 

and transparency from the University. On the 

Friday before classes began, the Faculty Sen-

ate considered a vote of no confidence in the 

administration, one day after an anonymous 

staff member published a scathing Op-Ed in 

The Daily.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
12 — Wednesday, September 2, 2020 
statement

The calm before the storm: Michigan and the ethics 
of uninformed reopening 

BY ALEXANDER SATOLA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR SCHOTT 

Read more at 
 
MichiganDaily.com

Statement Contributor & Man-

