Life in the midst of a pandemic is hard for everyone. Students, professors and Baylor as a whole have spent nearly every day for the last year and a half struggling to make life seem as “normal” as possible.
While some of us got a taste of what ”normal” feels like over the summer, the emergence of the delta variant threatens to take that feeling away.
This fall, Baylor has reinstated many of the protocols that were put in place last spring in response to a rapidly rising number of COVID-19 cases in McLennan County. These restrictions include temporarily wearing masks in designated areas and having unvaccinated members of the Baylor community take two COVID-19 tests a week.
However, this editorial is not about whether or not Baylor should enforce COVID-19 restrictions whenever they see fit. That is another discussion for another day. This is about Baylor’s commitment to the protocols that they’ve put into place.
While the university is asking students to do their part in curbing the impact of the pandemic within the Baylor community, they’re not providing accommodations to students who contract the virus like they have in past semesters.
Instead of providing students with quarters for self-isolation and in-class support, Baylor has urged its student’s to “have a plan.” This means that the student is responsible for most, if not all, of the aspects of their quarantine, even if they live in campus housing. Unlike last semester, when the university gave on-campus students the option to quarantine in a hotel on Baylor’s dime, those resources are now limited and students are seemingly left in the dust. The school’s large freshman class has been cited as the main reason for their lack of quarantine resources. In short, Baylor is requiring students to play a part in protecting the more vulnerable members of our community without giving students the tools or support necessary to do so.
In addition to a lack of resources, there are also no steadfast rules in terms of academic accommodations that professors should give to students who are COVID-19 positive. In past semesters, things like Zoom links for live streams of classes, lecture recordings, attendance policies and late work policies were readily available to students. For reference, there are 85 “type 1” classrooms across campus, meaning that they are outfitted with the technology necessary for live streaming capabilities. Up to this point, the extent of similar protocols for this semester are at the very least unclear.
If Baylor decided to have very limited COVID-19 protocols similar to those at institutions like Texas Tech or The University of Texas, then a lack of accommodations would be fair. However, for the time being, Baylor has more stringent guidelines than these two institutions, so it’s reasonable to expect that they provide equal support in regards to the issue.
We acknowledge that Baylor is facing a flurry of unique problems at this time, and it is understandable that this year’s massive freshman class limits some of the resources that the university can provide. Just because the university has more mouths to feed does not mean that they are absolved of their responsibility to feed those mouths. They spent millions of dollars outfitting the campus to be pandemic friendly just over a year ago. That makes it hard to believe that this is simply an issue of time, space or money.
If we are going to have COVID-19 protocols we must go all in. What is the point of trying to prevent a disaster if you’re not going to protect us when disaster strikes?
