Don’t blame the students
After being told it was safe to come, why are students being blamed for returning to university campuses?
Before Freshers’ Week, I joked about “the Murano cluster” being a phrase we’d all hear a few weeks into the term. I say joked because I had hoped that there would be some measures in place to limit the ability of such a cluster to form, but form it did and now those words are anything but a joke. In the wake of outbreaks at universities and rising case numbers among those in our early 20s, the finger was quickly pointed towards students as the cause of the oft predicted second wave. I want to set the record straight. This piece focuses on the situation in Glasgow, but the principles within are applicable to most universities.
In the space of two weeks, our lives went from dancing the night away in the Union with our friends to sitting alone in our childhood bedrooms or our student flats, prohibited by law from interacting with anybody outside our household (and even restricted to one bit of exercise a day!). This was an unimaginable change to our way of life, but compliance was overwhelming - to quote the old WWII motto, we kept calm and carried on because we wanted to protect our friends, our family, and our communities. Many volunteered and provided shopping for elderly and vulnerable neighbours, some took up placements in the NHS, and that’s not to mention the students for whom their part-time supermarket job took on a huge new significance in feeding the nation. We all stuck to the rules, even when they went on longer than all of us anticipated back in March, and even when they took an immense toll on us all.
So, when the Government told us it was okay to go back to pubs and restaurants - indeed, that we should Eat Out to Help Out - many of us took them up on that offer. After months alone people believed the Government’s assurances of safety and took the chance to see our friends again. Life was still far from normal, but the chance to socialise was well received - and people largely behaved responsibly in those summer months - of course parties happened, but they were the outlier and far from the norm. All of this was done while keeping an eye on the official communications from the University - which promised a “blended approach” to learning and teaching and said we should try to return to Glasgow come September. This promise caused people to apply for halls, pay their deposits, and make plans to move.
It was late on in the summer when the University admitted that the blended approach was not what people had perceived and we would instead be receiving a Zoomiversity model - I was disappointed by that, but I understood the reasons. As much as I would have liked to have had in-person learning, the requirement for social distancing decimates room capacities across campus and many members of staff have valid and legitimate concerns about their safety. The frustration is that this announcement did not come earlier and in time for students to make a fully informed choice about moving to Glasgow for the upcoming semester. The University promised students one model that had a good reason for us to be in Glasgow and then swapped it at the last minute to a model that made physical attendance in Glasgow wholly optional for the vast majority.
The lateness of this announcement meant students were locked into accommodation contracts and weren’t made adequately aware of their rights to terminate these agreements. If students had been told earlier and been allowed to make a fully informed choice there’s every reason to believe many students - particularly first-years who are the most affected by the halls outbreaks - would have delayed their move until next semester. Instead, the promise of face-to-face teaching led to the largest mass movement of people since the pandemic began.
This movement brought together groups of up to 12 people from all across the country and the world together into single flats, living in close proximity to many other 12 person flats. In this environment, a single positive case mixing was likely to create chaos, but yet next to no precautions were in place for what was almost an inevitability. The Government’s rules meant most international students had to isolate for two weeks, but there was no planning put in place for students coming from across different parts of the country - including many from areas under significant additional local restrictions.
Now, it is of course the case that some students had parties, and of course, that was wrong in the circumstances. However, these parties definitely weren’t attended by all students, and all the freshers I saw out and about - at Freshers Week events and in the Unions seemed to stick to the rules and sought to socialise safely while making the most of their unusual Freshers’ Week. I certainly won’t let the narrative of blame turn on them. They were encouraged to be here after all.
After being told to work through the peak; after being told to Eat Out to Help Out; and after being encouraged to move across the country to attend Zoomiversity, I find it abjectly wrong that the same people who failed to predict the obvious and put precautions in place are now pointing the finger at students who have done nothing wrong, rather than admitting their mistakes and working to set them right.
