Amid virus, effort to avoid Asian bias
Some students of Asian descent at Arizona State University felt a chill in the campus atmosphere soon after the disclosure last month that a person connected to the school tested positive for the novel coronavirus. It struck them that a routine cough or sneeze might draw sidelong looks from classmates worried about getting infected from a virus believed to have originated in China.
It struck them that the mere act of sitting down at a crowded table might prompt others to stand up and leave. It struck them that they might be targets of racial discrimination, said Tevinh Nguyen, a senior at Arizona State who is president of the Asian/ Asian Pacific American Students’ Coalition.
Nguyen said he and others are worried about those who are “using this public health rhetoric to justify xenophobia.”
Across the country, colleges and universities in recent days have accelerated efforts to guard against a virus that causes respiratory illness and in some cases death. It poses a major public health challenge worldwide. But educators also are seeking to prevent outbreaks of hysteria and racism.
“This has been an intense learning moment for us, for our students, for everybody,” Arizona State President Michael Crow said Friday. He said the university has focused on disseminating accurate health information and making sure international and domestic students know the school upholds values of tolerance and diversity.
Arizona State kept its normal academic schedule despite a widely publicized online petition that urged the university to cancel classes because students were worried about coronavirus. Crow said the university is following its protocols for dealing with public health scares and keeping student groups informed.
“We’ve been working really hard to keep the environment on track,” Crow said.
Some schools have made missteps. Officials at the University of California at Berkeley apologized last month after the campus health center shared a handout in which xenophobia was listed as a “normal reaction” that some people might experience during the health crisis. The handout sparked widespread outrage.
“Stop normalizing racism,” a molecular virologist named Dustin Glasner, who is Asian American, wrote on Twitter. Glasner’s résumé notes he earned a doctorate at UC-Berkeley and is now a scholar at UC-San Francisco. “It is not normal, and racist reactions to the current coronavirus outbreak are NOT OKAY.” University officials swiftly revised the handout and said they regretted “any misunderstanding it may have caused.”
Coronavirus fears weigh heavily on college campuses because they are major hubs of international academic exchange. Students and faculty travel frequently to all corners of the world — including China.
There were more than 360,000 Chinese students in the U.S. higher education system in the last school year, according to the Institute of International Education, and tens of thousands more from other East Asian countries.
By Sunday, more than 37,000 coronavirus cases had been confirmed in China, the hardest-hit country. Of the more than 800 people who have died, nearly all are Chinese. The virus is spreading globally, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported just 12 cases and no deaths in the United States as of Friday.
At Arizona State, university officials disclosed Jan. 26 that a person connected to the community had been diagnosed with the coronavirus. The person does not live in university housing, was not severely ill and was remaining in isolation to keep from spreading the illness, officials said.
Another case emerged at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. There, officials disclosed Feb. 1 that a young male student who had recently been in Wuhan — the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak — had been diagnosed with the coronavirus and was under observation.
Katherine Newman, the university’s interim chancellor, praised the campus response as restrained and empathetic.
“I try to remind everyone that a virus can happen anywhere, to anyone,” Newman said.