Teaching Without Mask and Vaccine Mandates

Over the past several weeks, teachers and students across the country have returned to in-person learning under a variety of health-and-safety protocols. At the University of Iowa, and at other institutions in more conservative states, there is no vaccination mandate in place, nor are instructors allowed to require masks in their classrooms. Though the university’s administration encourages vaccinations and masks, teachers are banned from discussing students’ vaccination status, organizing classroom seating according to mask usage, or otherwise providing “tangible incentives” for wearing masks.

I recently spoke by phone with Silvia Secchi, a professor of geographical and sustainability sciences who has taught courses on subjects like climate change and environmental economics at the university since 2017. We spoke about her experiences in the classroom, and the challenges of teaching in an environment with so few protections against COVID-19 infection. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

What classes are you teaching now, and what safety protocols are there in those classes?

At the moment, I am teaching two classes. One has four hundred students, and I’m responsible for the lecture part, which is online, but I’m also responsible for coördinating the discussion sections. There are seventeen of them, with six teaching assistants, and they’re all face to face. And then I also teach a class that has about fifty-five students, which is also face to face.

In terms of the safety protocols, we don’t have any mask or vaccine mandates. We also are really limited in our online options if something happens—so if I get COVID and I have to quarantine, I can only teach online for one or two classes. If I want to keep teaching online, I have to have somebody in the classroom with the students while I Zoom from my home, essentially to proctor. So we have another person in my classroom just to make sure the students are there, potentially exposing another person.

You’re allowed to tell people what the school’s recommendations are and say that you support those guidelines, but without requiring them. Is that accurate? And are you allowed to ask any questions of your students?

No, we are not allowed to ask any questions regarding their COVID vaccination status, why they are or are not wearing masks. So everything is geared toward protecting their feelings. I would say it goes beyond confidentiality. We don’t have equivalent measures to protect the health and feelings of those who decide they want to be masked, who are vaccinated, and who may feel uncomfortable in a classroom where their classmates are not. [In an e-mail, a spokesperson for the University of Iowa said that it “strongly encourages students, faculty, and staff to get vaccinated and wear a mask, particularly in all classroom settings and during in-person office hours,” and added that these guidelines have been created “with input from members of the Faculty Senate.”]

What was most striking to me about the rules is that, for anyone who’s ever been in school, your professor or your teacher usually has a fair amount of leeway in what they tell you to do, whether it’s not to put your feet up on the desk or not to show up without a shirt on, or not to interrupt people. The idea that a teacher should have some control over his or her own classroom is generally, I think, pretty universally agreed upon.

We cannot even ask for them to wear masks during office hours, in our own offices. That’s where we’re at. And what you’re pointing out, too, is how this is actually really troubling to me as an instructor because I feel like my agency is being restricted, in ways that negatively impact my pedagogy in ways that go beyond COVID.

What do you mean by that?

I mean that I am being forced to behave in ways that are contrary to the best science and the best public-health advice. And I cannot even discuss this with my students. My students and I talk about power and power structures and how progress is impeded by powerful interests who prefer to have things the way they are, when we talk about climate change. And I feel the same thing is happening to us now with classrooms, but I am being gagged and I cannot discuss this with my students.

Would you be allowed to say that you chose to get vaccinated, and you chose to get vaccinated because it’s the best thing to do for your health and the health of your students?

Yes, we can do that, but when we do that we’re bringing it back to individual responsibility, when this is a collective problem. So, again, I’m drawing parallels with how I teach climate change to my students. You know, you can do the best you can in terms of not driving to campus, not eating a certain kind of food, and being very mindful about how much you recycle, but the pandemic is not a problem that we’re going to solve at an individual level. It requires collective action. It requires mask mandates. It requires vaccine mandates. And I cannot use this critical example in the way I teach. So I feel like they’re clipping my wings, not just in terms of whether they’re protecting everybody’s health but also in what we can or cannot say about things really germane to the subjects we study.

What would you say to people who think, You are vaccinated. Your health is probably going to be O.K. We know people who are vaccinated can get it, but the rates for hospitalizations and deaths, especially for people who are not over the age of seventy-five, are quite good. So then why are you so concerned with what others do?

Several things. I would say we all are mandated to wear seat belts. Everybody’s supposed to wear a seat belt for collectively reducing risk. I have lots of colleagues at the hospital. The hospital is almost full again, and these people’s lives have been essentially hell for a year and a half, and I’m concerned about them. I have colleagues with small children who are really, really afraid of what is going on, and we’re having breakthrough cases. And, by the way, we’re having trouble getting tested as well. We have to officially say we are symptomatic if we want to get tested.

So this is a collective problem. Bringing this back to individual responsibility is actually a very good example of the failures of conversations in the United States about what the social contract is and what it’s about. It’s not about me for me. I’m vaccinated. That’s not how society works. That’s not how we implement policies for the collective. The talk is all about freedom. It really is irrelevant to those of us who study how policy is made for the greater good and think about trade-offs and things like that.