What do colleges and meat-packing plants have in common? Is being described as a “textbook case” a good or bad thing? Is it true that there is no such thing as bad publicity?
I’ve been contemplating those questions for the past month as college campuses have become the nation’s newest coronavirus hotspots. (That’s the meat-packing connection). A report issued earlier this week by researchers from Davidson, Indiana University, UNC-Greensboro, and the University of Washington estimated that re-opening campuses for face-to-face instruction produced approximately 3000 new COVID cases per day.
There have been numerous news stories about coronavirus outbreaks on lots of different college campuses. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had to shut down after its first week of classes because of a spike in cases, and several campuses, including the University of Alabama, have had more than 2000 cases. More than twenty college football games have been cancelled or postponed, including this weekend’s Notre Dame-Wake Forest game. Last Saturday the Baylor-Houston game was cancelled six days after it was scheduled as a last-minute replacement after both teams’ scheduled opponents cancelled for COVID reasons. Perhaps the most outlandish story involved students at Miami of Ohio who threw a party in the house where some of them were supposed to be in quarantine after testing positive.
The college coronavirus story that caught my attention, though, occurred at the State University of New York campus at Oneonta. More that 10% of the students at SUNY—Oneonta have been infected, and a New York Times article described it as a “textbook example” of a college outbreak. Another NYT article called it New York state’s “worst campus outbreak” and included details such as a man in a hazmat suit leading a student who had tested positive away from her dorm as well as students in an isolation dorm partying and posing for selfies.
SUNY-Oneonta did not require students to test negative for COVID-19 before returning to campus, and also didn’t test students once they returned for the fall. Both Oneonta and the SUNY system have been criticized for the lack of monitoring and oversight, but I am interested in the Oneonta outbreak for two other reasons.
The first is personal. I went to high school in a small town 20 miles from Oneonta. Oneonta was the closest thing to civilization for my one-stoplight town. That was where we went to shop, to go to the movies, or to go to a bar.
In the 1970s SUNY-Oneonta was a college, referred to either as Oneonta State or SUCO (State University College at Oneonta), with the acronym often mispronounced. I never spent much time on its campus, but it was the location for two formative experiences for me.
One was the highlight of my otherwise unimpressive athletic career. I played #1 for my high school tennis team on a day that we defeated Oneonta High School, ending a home win streak that stretched back more than ten years and had just been featured in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd.” The match was at two different locations, including the college campus, so we didn’t realize what we had accomplished until the team was reunited after the match. When as team captain I called in the score to the Oneonta Daily Star and asked the guy on the sports desk when was the last time the high school had lost a home tennis match, I heard him tell one of the other reporters, “I think they just lost one.”
It was also at SUCO that I was introduced to the world of modern art while participating in a choral festival. In the student union building was an exhibit of modern art, and in one corner of the gallery feed bags were piled up. When I went over to examine them, I realized they were part of the exhibit, part of a work titled “Feed Bags.” At that moment I recognized that both my artistic sensibility and my entrepreneurial spirit were lacking.
My second interest in SUNY-Oneonta’s COVID woes is more generic, tied to the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
That sentiment is sometimes credited to the 19th century showman and self-promoter P.T. Barnum, more famous for saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Barnum supposedly claimed that he didn’t care what the newspapers wrote about him, as long as they spelled his name right.
The assumption that all publicity is good has been the foundation of the public relations industry. But if that was ever true, is it still valid today when there are multiple sources of news and publicity? Barnum lived in a time before 24-hour news cycles and social media influencers. Do those technological “improvements” make the claim less true today when “all the news” has turned into “all the noise”? Today public relations firms spend as much time managing and rehabilitating their clients’ reputations as they do putting them in the public eye.
I also wonder whether publicity that is less than positive impacts some institutions more than others. Early in my career I spent a short stint as the interim public relations director at a small college. We were desperate for recognition and free publicity and miffed when the local media didn’t find our press releases newsworthy. What happens when you make the news, but not for the reasons you want?
One of my pet peeves as a college counselor is that media attention of college admission is almost universally focused on a small group of “elite” colleges and universities. The focus on hyper-selective institutions fuels the hype about the college admissions process and public anxiety. It ignores the colleges that educate the vast majority of American kids.
I’m sure SUNY-Oneonta has dreamed about coverage from The New York Times, and now it has it, but the coverage is of the institution’s failure to contain the virus. It’s another reminder of the truth of the quote from Oscar Wilde, that there are two tragedies in life, not getting what you want—and getting it. I hope all colleges will survive the pandemic, but I especially hope that the negative publicity won’t harm SUNY-Oneonta.
ECA is always interested in deeper questions, even if it is rarely able to answer them. The outbreaks at Oneonta and on other college campuses raise deeper questions about our ability as a country to get control of the disease. Should we blame college students for acting like college students? Should we be surprised when they act like children, and is it reasonable to expect them to act like adults? Are we suffering from national COVID fatigue, and what does our failure to deal with the disease say about the strength of our country? Can we solve a national crisis when so many of us deny there is even a problem? Do we as a people still have the strength of character, discipline, and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good?