With the support of Truman State University’s student government, we, the undersigned, call upon the Administration of Truman State University to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all members of its community, barring those with medical or religious exemptions.
Click here to sign the petition to endorse the vaccine mandate. Continue reading for the full statement from the Truman AAUP chapter, endorsed by student government on September 6.
University administrators have to balance multiple, sometimes-competing aims: to provide the right conditions for good education, to protect the health and safety of all members of the campus community, and to preserve the financial security of the institution to ensure its survival. In the context of a global pandemic, many institutions of higher education have found these three charges at odds.
The in-person pedagogy that many of us treasure offers an opportunity for the virus to spread, threatening the physical security of faculty, students, and staff alike; the practices best suited to prevent the spread of the virus elicit politicized resistance which in turn could impact enrollment and the long-term financial well-being of the institution. Evaluating risks and benefits is integral to the task of administration: how much health risk is acceptable? How much threat to enrollment do health measures constitute? All of these calculations are matters of probability: when students are in proximity, how many will fall ill? Of those infected, how many will be seriously impacted? How many students will leave, taking their tuition dollars with them, if they are asked to follow public health best practices?
Universities and colleges across the nation have engaged these questions and answered them variously. Some have remained at drastically reduced levels of in-person instruction, preferring to err on the side of caution. Some, by contrast, have returned to pre-pandemic levels of proximity, at best recommending that students elect to be vaccinated. Some, like Truman State, have chosen a middle ground—neither requiring universal vacations nor maintaining the social distancing of the previous academic year, yet urging vaccination and requiring masks.
The executive committee of TSU’s AAUP commends the Administration’s renewal of a mask mandate as a responsible step toward preventing the spread of the highly infectious delta variant. However, we assert that this is insufficient precaution in light of a) low levels of vaccination in the surrounding community with the consequent rapid rise in infections and increasing burden on local public health resources (e.g. hospital beds), b) recent full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine, thereby protecting the institution from any legal accusations of “recklessly” requiring a vaccine inadequately proven, c) the lack of any clear, empirical evidence suggesting that a vaccine mandate would adversely impact levels of enrollment.
On July 13, 2021, President Sue Thomas met with the AAUP executive committee and discussed these concerns. At that time, she cited the Emergency Authorization status of the vaccines and asserted that the possibility of a campus vaccine would depend upon a change in that status. That change has now taken place.
In the meantime, campus COVID cases are on the rise, vaccinated students are sharing dorm rooms with unvaccinated students, and classrooms—while masked—are at pre-COVID levels of personal proximity. All of this, while in the larger context, delta-COVID is burning brightly across wide swathes of the region. A failure to mandate full vaccination at such a time is not respectful of individual liberties; rather it is an unwarranted danger–placing the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike at preventable risk.
What good is solid enrollment if members of our student body are falling sick to a virus with still largely-unknown long-term consequences? How many “long haul” COVID survivors are worth maintaining levels of enrollment? How reassuring will the financial health of the institution be to the parents of a desperately ill undergraduate? How fair a trade-off will this be from the perspective of the professor in her 50s, the grounds crew member in his 60s, who may join the ranks of the disabled, perhaps forever? And how much worse the sense of betrayal, if these outcomes could so easily have been avoided by a simple, responsible, evidence-based administrative decision.