Tommy Thompson interim president UW System
UW System Interim President Tommy Thompson told the New York Times that he thinks mandatory vaccinations are on legal "thin ice."
Over 400 colleges and universities now require their students, staff or both to be vaccinated before they can show up on campus in the fall. The UW System should join that list, but Tommy Thompson, interim president, isn’t budging.
In Wisconsin, Lawrence University and Beloit College have been the first schools to require vaccinations, but they are likely to be joined by others. The pace for requiring vaccinations is picking up. At the beginning of April only a dozen schools were requiring it.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the schools opting to require vaccinations are mostly in blue states. Only 8 percent of them are in states that voted for Donald Trump last year. But there are exceptions, most notably Indiana University and its satellite campuses, and some prestigious private schools, like Duke, Tulane and Notre Dame.
“Less than 50 percent of the university population has been vaccinated,” Michael A. McRobbie, the president of Indiana University, told the New York Times. “The medical advisers who were involved in this don’t see how we can return to a normal state of affairs without the mandate.”
Other Big Ten schools now requiring vaccinations are Northwestern and Rutgers. And nationwide, big systems, like the California state system, are requiring them as are Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown, Stanford and Yale.
But that’s not good enough for Thompson. Quoted last week in the New York Times, Tommy said, “I think that those that are in the blue states are not following the law. All those individuals that have mandated it are really on thin ice.”
It’s telling that Thompson said “blue states.” It suggests that he’s thinking about this in partisan political terms. And does he mean that Indiana is on solid legal ground just because it’s in a red state?
At his core, Tommy is a partisan Republican. In 2016 he dove in with both feet for Donald Trump as soon as Trump secured his party’s nomination, and you’ll search in vain for any criticism from him, even of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
It’s pretty clear to me that Thompson is just hiding behind the thin legal reed that none of the vaccines have yet gotten final approval from the FDA. That’s not stopping some of the biggest systems and some of the most respected schools in the country. And, when they do get the final nod from the FDA, then what? Will Thompson mandate the shots in that case?
Probably not because what’s really behind this is Tommy’s unwillingness to upset Republican legislators. It’s an article of Republican dogma that the pandemic that killed almost 600,000 people in the United States was overblown. Thompson knows that if he does the right thing on a mandate he’ll cause a flare-up in the Republican caucus.
If there was any hope that pandering to GOP paranoia would actually result in a better deal for the UW out of the Republicans, maybe I could better accept what he’s up to. Trading the health of students and staff for more funding is not an even deal, but at least it would be something. But, just as former UW System President Ray Cross learned, the Republicans will stick it to the UW no matter how obsequious you are.
A responsible UW System president would go ahead with the mandate and let the chips fall where they may with the Legislature. Tommy may genuinely care about his alma mater, but he cares more about his party.
