More than 400 colleges now require Covid vaccinations, a total that’s nearly doubled over the last month. Some require only that students get inoculated; others insist that employees do as well. Many of the rest “strongly encourage” vaccination and, in some cases, offer hefty incentives (Purdue is giving away 10 one-year scholarships). Mandate or no, the message is clear: Get the jab.
At the same time, a number of colleges are also discouraging discussion of vaccination status. For instance, at the University of Iowa, which doesn’t require the shot, a recent memo sent to faculty and staff members in the liberal-arts college spells out formal “guidance” — rules, really — regarding vaccination conversations. After reading it, you might conclude that any mention of the vaccine at all is verboten.
Here’s what the guidance says: Faculty and staff members can’t ask students if they are vaccinated or if they plan to get vaccinated because doing so “may prompt disclosure of disability-related information.” The memo says instructors shouldn’t discuss vaccination status “during class, in emails, or in other communication to the class.” It warns instructors against participating in conversations among students about vaccination and tells them to be “alert to any coercive or pressuring behavior among students.”
Left unsaid is what exactly qualifies as “pressuring” behavior. How does that differ from the “strong encouragement” that is the university’s public stance? What should an alert instructor do if he or she decides that one student is pressuring another student to get vaccinated? The memo doesn’t say, beyond encouraging instructors to “remind everyone that the university is committed to a voluntary approach to vaccination.” When asked for clarification, a university spokeswoman declined an interview and referred to an FAQ about the policy.
That guidance has been a topic of conversation among faculty members at Iowa who are worried about the message it sends. Christine Petersen, the director of the university’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, points to situations, like working closely together in a lab or riding in a car, where vaccination status would be entirely reasonable to discuss. She’s in favor of mandatory vaccines for students, but since that is now apparently off the table at Iowa, she thinks talk about vaccination should be encouraged. “Policies like this one stifle thoughtful, research-based conversation,” Petersen says.
Other universities have issued similar, if some what less proscriptive, edicts. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, for example, an email from the provost’s office says that faculty members can’t ask about a student’s vaccination status and refers to a law passed by the state legislature that forbids state agencies, including public universities, from requiring vaccination. (That law doesn’t actually say whether it’s OK to ask about vaccination status.)
At some institutions it’s not obvious what is and isn’t permitted. Like Tennessee, the state of Texas forbids public universities from requiring vaccinations, but whether discussion of vaccination status is acceptable is uncertain. A recent campuswide email from the president of the University of Texas at Austin notes only that for those who are not fully vaccinated, wearing masks and social distancing is “optional but recommended.” A university spokesman said he wasn’t sure whether conversations about vaccination status are allowed.
To flat-out forbid conversations about vaccination could be seen as an infringement on academic freedom, according to Craig Klugman, a bioethicist at DePaul University. He’s heard the notion that asking students about vaccination status might be a violation of health-care privacy rules, known by the acronym Hipaa. But those rules wouldn’t apply to professors. “It’s really a lot of fear over a misunderstanding,” he says. “This is happening at the crossroads of law and ethics, and that makes for a turbulent space.”
At DePaul, students will be required to be vaccinated before returning in the fall, a policy that Klugman pushed the administration to adopt.
It matters how the topic of vaccination status is raised, argues Jeffrey Brosco, director of population health ethics at the University of Miami. A professor aggressively quizzing a student about whether he or she is vaccinated is inappropriate. And yet Brosco’s bothered by what appear to be administrative bans on an important discussion. “It’s those kinds of conversations that help people make good decisions,” he says. “That’s different from pointing a finger at someone during a class. We can and should be able to make those distinctions.”
