SLU’s Disappointing COVID-19 Response Thus Far

COVID-19 cases are on the rise in the country, but you would not know it here at St. Lawrence University. Other than one email at the end of the second week of school, students are completely in the dark regarding what to do if or when they encounter COVID-19. Students who test positive can go about campus to pick up food, and their roommates are forced to make their own living arrangements if they feel uncomfortable. This carelessness is dangerous and harms the most vulnerable people on our campus.  

This irresponsibility from the administration is as clear as day. COVID-19 never ended, no matter how much we wanted it to. We cannot simply move on from it as it is still affecting many people on campus and off. Am I calling for a campus shutdown or mandatory mask-wearing? Of course not. What I do want is a little more transparency. St. Lawrence is a school so isolated in the North Country that it should be easy to keep infections low, but we must put in the work. As a community, we have a chance to protect ourselves and others from getting sick in very simple ways. For example, regular hand washing. Seriously, if you are in college and still not washing your hands after using the restroom, I would not even know what to say.

Next, not going to class when you get sick and testing for COVID-19. I know we like to think that we can beat the so-called “Slu Flu,” but that ambiguous sickness could very well be COVID-19, and you should be able to test yourself or have access to testing when you do not feel well. This is where the burden lies on the administration. There should be clear and simple ways of finding a test and knowing what resources are available to sick students. A singular email at the beginning of the semester is not helpful in the slightest. I know I receive many emails in a day, let alone an entire semester, so it is easy to lose track of messages, no matter how important it is. I also believe that sick students should not have to leave their rooms to get food if they do not want to. Putting the responsibility on the student is an ineffective way of keeping people from getting sick. I know SLU is incredibly short-staffed, and the fault of which very much lies in the terrible pay and long hours. But one cannot, in good conscience, tell a student who is not feeling well that they basically must fend for themselves. Professors also have a responsibility to set a precedent. Professors should be more flexible to sickness, COVID-19 or not, and should not hold class in person if they themselves do not feel well. There is no reason to try to brush off COVID-19 as just another illness that we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. There is no “toughing it out” we must be proactive instead of reactive.   

The main issue with SLU’s handling of COVID-19-19 is their overall nonchalance about it. When you push an issue like this aside as SLU has, it will not disappear. We can feign ignorance all we want, but the truth is what we are currently doing is harmful. It is harmful to those who are most vulnerable, harmful to those who want to have a somewhat normal college experience, and harmful to the community at large who already do not think very highly of us. We can go back to normal, and the way we do that is not by pretending that we are back to normal now. It may seem beneficial to treat COVID-19 as nothing more than the flu and continue with our lives, but so far this semester, it has proven to be detrimental to students, staff, and professors. This disease is evolving, and we can keep up with it and put it behind us if we evolve as well.