In the state with the country’s highest coronavirus infection rates, faculty and staff members at the public flagship are sounding the alarm about returning to in-person learning.
Classes begin in less than two weeks at Louisiana State University. Dorms and most classrooms will be filled to normal capacity. As of Monday, only 36 percent of students had reported being vaccinated against Covid-19, while 88 percent of employees had said the same. A vaccination requirement will not go into effect until at least one injection receives full approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
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In the state with the country’s highest coronavirus infection rates, faculty and staff members at the public flagship are sounding the alarm about returning to in-person learning.
Classes begin in less than two weeks at Louisiana State University. Dorms and most classrooms will be filled to normal capacity. As of Monday, only 36 percent of students had reported being vaccinated against Covid-19, while 88 percent of employees had said the same. A vaccination requirement will not go into effect until at least one injection receives full approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
After calling for a vaccine mandate for students for months, faculty and staff members are now pushing for remote-work options, to keep them away from classrooms and offices full of people of uncertain vaccination status. Some faculty members, and the campus worker union, say they’ve messaged the administration, with one faculty petition garnering more than 300 signatures.
“I feel like the least the university can do is extend some respect for our personal need to not risk infection for myself and my immunocompromised son during the global pandemic,” said Rosemary A. Peters-Hill, an associate professor of French studies at LSU. Peters-Hill says she’s fully vaccinated but fears a breakthrough infection, which is possible but rare. Her son, 5, is too young to get a Covid shot. She has applied to teach remotely in the fall but hasn’t heard back about it yet.
Louisiana State’s new president, William F. Tate IV, defended the safety of the university’s plans for the fall of 2021, which include a universal indoor mask mandate and testing requirements for unvaccinated students. “The system that we have put into place is really outstanding,” he said. “This is as good a surveillance system as you possibly could have.” He said his administration has been clear that faculty members who fear bringing the virus home can work with their department chairs on solutions.
William F. Tate IV, president of Louisiana State U. since July, defended the institution’s Covid-19 mitigation plans.Katherine Seghers
Employees’ worries at Louisiana State are reflected at colleges across the country, where plans for this fall may not meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for testing and mask-wearing. For a time, in the early summer, prospects for the start of the 2021-22 academic year looked promising. Covid-19 vaccines became more widely available, and infection rates fell. But then vaccine uptake slowed, and the more-contagious Delta variant began spreading across the United States. Cases and hospitalizations rose again, making strict Covid-prevention protocols seem more critical. Since last month, The Chronicle has received numerous tips from higher-ed employees about what they see as gaps in their institutions’ fall plans.
Louisiana State is a poignant example. As of Thursday, Louisiana had the country’s highest coronavirus transmission and death rates, and hospitals were overrun. LSU’s fall plan has multiple Covid-safety components that follow guidelines from organizations like the CDC and the American College Health Association, including the indoor mask mandate. Some universities are blocked from doing even that. But LSU’s plan lacks a few major measures mentioned in these guides.
One is the frequent testing of unvaccinated people in the campus community. Unvaccinated LSU students are required to get tested only monthly. “It’s clearly not enough,” said Susanne Straif-Bourgeois, an associate professor of epidemiology at LSU’s health-sciences campus, in New Orleans, who specializes in infectious disease. In areas of high viral transmission — like New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where LSU’s main campus is located — the CDC recommends twice-weekly testing.
“A month is a long time,” Straif-Bourgeois said. In that time, “you can actually get exposed, get sick, have mild symptoms, and recover. Then, four weeks later, if you test positive, you’ve already probably exposed a lot of other students.”
Tate said he thought monthly testing was enough. During an interview, he repeatedly mentioned that he is an epidemiologist. He has a master’s degree in the field, which is what’s required to practice in a health department, for example. “Scientists can agree to to disagree,” he said.
“I think it boils down to finances,” Straif-Bourgeois said, “because it’s also very expensive to do that for the whole population there.”
The price tag for testing at LSU would plummet if more students were vaccinated. However, the administration holds the position that it could get into legal trouble for mandating a vaccine now, while the shots are still under emergency-use authorization from the FDA. The Louisiana attorney general’s office said so in May. In addition, university leaders feel such a mandate would “encroach” on “constitutionally protected fundamental liberties,” according to a written statement from Ernie Ballard III, a university spokesman. Administrators have readied a vaccine mandate that will go into effect the moment full FDA approval comes through, Tate said. The requirement will apply to employees as well as students, he said.
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Although he had long known a vaccine mandate would be a good idea, this was the best Tate thought he could do. “What I decided to do was to actually work with our state agency more carefully to come up with a solution that would allow us to get to a mandate,” he said, “and ultimately, this is the outcome.”
Some faculty members disagree. Edward P. Richards, a professor of law, has sent a memo to LSU’s Board of Supervisors, arguing that a mandate would be legal now.
Either way, a delay of even a few weeks in vaccinating worsens the situation. “The more the virus is circulating, meaning the more cases you have of people being infected with Covid, the more likely it is that the virus can mutate and evolve in a new variant, which might be even more transmissible or more deadly,” Straif-Bourgeois said. “We are already fairly late in the game, but no matter, even if it’s late, the sooner the better.”
LSU’s communications team recently circulated a video that explains this dynamic, in an effort to encourage students to be vaccinated before they’re required to.
Despite his background in epidemiology, in an interview, Tate made statements that suggested a lack of familiarity with the range of Covid protocols that American colleges tried in the 2020-21 school year. Louisiana State is requiring unvaccinated students to provide proof of either a negative coronavirus test within five days of arriving on campus, or of a coronavirus infection within the last 90 days, which would provide some natural immune protection against reinfection. “We didn’t do that last year during the pandemic at any university I know of,” Tate said. In reality, numerous colleges entry-tested their students before their winter/spring terms, and some before the fall of 2020.
Tate also touted Louisiana State’s monthly testing of unvaccinated students. “That did not exist anywhere last year in any regular fashion, as far as I know,” he said. In the fall of 2020, 6 percent of four-year colleges with in-person instruction and at least 5,000 students were testing their entire student body regularly, according to an NPR analysis of data collected by researchers at Davidson College. Several institutions tested their student bodies multiple timesa week.
Despite their fears about the fall, many instructors said they felt hopeful about Tate, who joined the university just last month. LSU has recently undergone sharp criticism for how it dealt with sexual-misconduct complaints against football players. F. King Alexander, who was president at the time, then accused the Board of Supervisors of inappropriately pressuring him about hiring someone they desired as athletics director. Tate was supposed to be a fresh start for the university, a president who, in his first conference with journalists, emphasized scholarship over athletics.
“We understand the pulls and twists and pushes on that office and our system, by the politics of the state,” said Tekeda F. Ferguson, an associate professor of epidemiology and president of the faculty senate at the New Orleans health campus. “We have faith that there will be more decisions made, better decisions, so we can move forward and decrease risk.”
Mandi J. Lopez, a professor of veterinary surgery and president of the faculty senate at the Baton Rouge campus, was sympathetic to the difficult and perhaps unexpected position Tate finds himself in, battling a fourth wave of the coronavirus. But, she said, “Time will tell. If there are consequences to the faculty, that’ll certainly be part of his record. If there’s a huge outbreak at LSU, that, too, will be under his purview.”