This past week saw hundreds of thousands of college students, faculty, dining workers and more return to campus, despite the risk of rising COVID-19 cases. For institutions like Indiana University, which crowds over 48,000 students on its Bloomington campus into a small city only twice that size—a situation repeated across the country in many other small college towns—there is potential for a real medical disaster. As one veteran political science professor at IU bluntly put it: “I do not intend to set foot on campus in the fall.”

For Christopher J. Lee at Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College, it’s a move all faculty members should be considering. In a blistering critique of the marginalization of staff input when it comes to COVID-19 decisions, he argues that one reasonable response is the right not to work. “It is imperative that we reaffirm our commitment to our teaching mission,” he writes, “but faculty should have certain rights with regard to our health and safety.” 

Other essays in today’s reading list also look at the state of pandemic higher education. From the ways in which distance learning may restrict faculty autonomy to the consequences of COVID-19 budgets on staff diversity, what all of the essays below share is the conviction that these issues aren’t unique to the age of coronavirus; they are part and parcel of neoliberal institutions and have simply been exacerbated—and won’t disappear once we have a vaccine. As an interview with the Rutgers faculty union president makes clear, the university must not only be saved, but transformed.