SAFETY FIRST — ESPECIALLY NOW
U.S. colleges’ sickness will be revealed if they prioritize football, says Sally Jenkins.
In about five more minutes, the self-obsessed operators in the Power Five conferences will argue that we’ve got to get students off campuses to keep football safe. That’s the collective kind of sickness we’re dealing with in the pandemic.
Watch. As the inevitable outbreaks sweep across quadrangles, college coaches, commissioners and their deep-pocketed donors will suggest ever more strenuously that we should get those infectious book readers out of the way so we can sequester the young studs whose health counts most, and play a season. They’ve been half-saying it already, with North Carolina coach Mack Brown saying that a campus without students “helps us create a better seal and a better bubble around our program.”
Understand what an extensive football-sequester model would mean: cheating the vast majority of college students out of in-person classes and the broadening perspective that comes from living with diverse others. All so that Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Florida State’s Mike Norvell can have the campus to themselves as their personal team isolation tanks.
“What are universities about, football or educating students?” asks Dr. Carlos del Rio, a coronavirus medical adviser to the NCAA. “It seems to me we’re twisting everything to accommodate football instead of doing what we need to do to control the pandemic.”
There’s no legitimate argument for prioritizing football while jilting students in other disciplines, students whose fees keep these campuses alive and whose campuses, in turn, are bringing their minds alive. The primary sources of revenue for degree-granting institutions are the tuitions paid by families and government money. So where do these football people get off?
Reopening for fall classes is vital for these debt-saddled students, and many universities are trying with admirable innovation to bring them back in the face of massive complexities: How do you sanitize a whole campus, how do you keep airflow healthy in halls, how do you ensure quick turnaround testing? And how do you deal with the outbreaks when at-liberty kids do as they have ever done, and engage in risky exploratory and overly emancipated behaviour?
It’s not in the least bit surprising that, despite careful plans, a campus such as the University of North Carolina’s has rashes of cases in dorms and frat houses, or that Notre Dame has gone to online learning temporarily, after a similar spike. It’s something every campus will have to go through.
But it’s worth it: Without undergrad presence, these campuses will collapse, and the enrolled will suffer irrevocable losses.
The issue is not whether 85 varsity football players are “safer” on empty campuses built for 30,000 — yes, they probably are. The issue is whether you try to serve the 30,000 the school was built for, or whether you prioritize football over every other facet of your university.
The Big Ten and Pac-12 made the commendable decision to postpone until January. Wholesale carve-outs for football while reopening was unfeasible. But their critics and coaches continue to caterwaul like spoiled brats. Bleacher-baying parents demand the Big Ten reverse its decision, and coaches plot to play behind the backs of their presidents. Their only thoughts are for the prodigies they live through.
Football is supposed to teach teamwork. But what’s coming out of the Power Five is selfishness. There’s no recognition that in a pandemic, no person’s well-being is separable from another’s. There’s no recognition that football complicates the already problematic exercise of reopening and may act as an infection accelerant.
Instead, the return-to-play debate in college football blots out all common sense. Critics of postponement want to know why it’s OK to hold an English class at Michigan but it’s not OK to play a game. Because football is an exercise in heavy-breathing piles of large men of immense body mass who trade sweat, blood, spit, phlegm, and other spraying droplets, and commandeer precious testing resources, that’s why.
Big Ten players and parents say they’re willing to assume the risk. But Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields shouldn’t get a waiver to unintentionally sicken somebody, any more than some undergrad in Georgia should go unmasked into a pub. Fields seems like a very nice guy — who shows not an inkling that there’s a world of interdependence larger than his friends and teammates.
“We believe we should have the right to make decisions about what is best for our health and our future,” Fields wrote in his petition to the Big Ten.
Sure, but he doesn’t have the right to make decisions about what is best for the health and futures of others.
The truest words spoken about this whole deal were uttered by a former first lady on Monday night, with a hammer-on-thenail sentence. The return-to-play debate at the Power Five universities is merely reflective of selfish policies throughout the U.S.
But it’s especially angering to see it at so many of these schools, which, as Michelle Obama said of the nation, are “underperforming not simply on matters of policy, but on matters of character.”