University of Idaho doctoral student urges all-online teaching during coronavirus

An Open Letter To University of Idaho President C. Scott Green and Dean of Students Dr. Eckles:

I am now a University of Idaho PhD candidate but was previously a combat medic in the U.S. Army. During my service, I served a year in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I spent months recovering from injuries in a warrior transition unit. I learned a great deal about leadership, suffering and death during that time.

Beyond a reasonable doubt, the University of Idaho’s decision to hold in-person classes until November will contribute to unnecessary suffering and death. Over 300 staff members signed their names in agreement, among them epidemiologists, statistical modelers and microbiologists. Your failure to heed these educated warnings demonstrates ignorance and moral decadence.

What sort of leadership ignores the plea for health and life from the very members who make the organization possible? How are world-class scholars, educators and subject matter experts so poorly led by those who choose willful ignorance? You both have the power of leadership and influence to go online immediately. Your failure to do so leaves you responsible.

It’s impossible to distinguish how the risk factors for coronavirus at the University of Idaho differ from a comparable institute, Washington State University, that is a bike ride away. WSU has demonstrated its first concern is the physical health and safety of students and staff by canceling in-person instruction. In comparison, the physical safety and health of Vandals is demonstrably your second concern.

While I appreciate the University’s mitigation strategies, the mitigation of risk is a poor substitute to the readily available option to eliminate risk. You simply cannot gather tens, hundreds or thousands of people on a campus during a once-in-100-year pandemic. People will die and it will be your fault. I want to articulate that point now, before the first Vandal death, so it is pinned to you both from the beginning.

We see neighboring Whitman County spiking to 158 afflicted since Saturday, and we see the opening of the University of Alabama greeted with 500-plus infections.

A decade after barely surviving two wars, I never in my wildest fantasies imagined my life would again be at risk, much less that it would be endangered by academic administrators.

Like you, I have experienced the feeling of responsibility for the health and safety of irreplaceable human lives in difficult times. I differ from you in that I have already experienced the needless suffering and death of my colleagues and friends. I’ve had a decade to begin processing it, and every person differs, but I can promise you whatever perspective you hold now will differ in hindsight. It is not too late to put human life first and reverse the mistake of in-person instruction. I call on you to redeem yourselves in the eyes of the Vandal community by canceling in-person classes, now, not after the withdrawal date.

Don’t wait for the spike in infections. Don’t wait to see if the ICU’s can hold. Don’t wait to see the first death, and then the second, and then the third. The only time to cancel is before, not after, a Vandal death. This is not a battle, and you are not generals. There is no acceptable body count at a state university.

Take this advice from someone forever haunted by needless death: End this now, or it very well may haunt you, too.

This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 1:27 PM.