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People have lost their jobs over less.
Decisions by UW System President Tommy Thompson and UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank to open campuses this fall were reckless and irresponsible. They knew better and they did it anyway to get the tuition revenue. The result is thousands of unnecessary COVID-19 cases and, no doubt, some number of deaths. It’s the kind of serious lapse in judgement that honorable people resign over.
Now, just to add insult to injury, Blank is going along with the boneheaded decision by the Big Ten to restart football this fall. She’s been wagging her finger at students for ignoring the unrealistic COVID-19 restrictions she’s put in place and then shown herself to be a hypocrite by joining all the other Big Ten presidents in yielding to pressure to play football now. If you sense a theme here you’d be right. It’s being done to get the television revenues.
The evidence that the campus reopenings contributed to a spike in COVID-19 cases is irrefutable. The New York Times has been doing extensive daily data crunching on the pandemic and recently declared college towns as the new COVID-19 hot spots. As of Sept. 22, nine of the 20 metro areas in the United States seeing the fastest rise in cases on a population-adjusted basis are in Wisconsin, including college towns Oshkosh at No.1, La Crosse at No. 3 and Platteville at No. 5.
The whole idea that you could get young adults, who feel immortal and who have a strong desire to socialize, to follow social distancing guidelines was fanciful to begin with. As The Daily Cardinal put it so perfectly in an editorial headline, “What did you expect?”
And what do you do now? If Thompson closes the campuses and sends the students home, they’ll just carry the virus back to their families and communities. Thompson and Blank have put the entire state in a no-win situation.
I like Tommy Thompson and I was excited when he was picked to be president. But opening the campuses was a dishonest mistake. He knew the risks, he had to know the odds that the reopening plan would work were slim to none, and he did it anyway to help save his budget. He prioritized the bottom line over public health, not just on the campuses but all over the state.
Blank has been a competent, if low-key, chancellor. The worst thing she has done up until this point has been to stand up for the discredited idea of the “student athlete” and the exploitive system that keeps them from being fairly paid for their work. But her “smart start” for the campus reopening was really dumb and her endorsement of football while she was scolding students for their COVID-19 misbehavior has, with justification, destroyed any credibility she had with students and faculty.
Thompson and Blank need to come clean. They need to fess up that the decision to open in-person campus learning was a monumental mistake that should have been obvious even to a college freshman. And the decision to restart football in the face of a campus COVID-19 outbreak just underscored the fact that they are putting revenues way ahead of the health of their students, faculty and staff, and the entire state.
Honest people would acknowledge that and honorable people would resign for it.
[Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect the latest COVID-19 statistics compiled by The New York Times.]
