Lack of Transparency is a Disservice to the BUSPH Community

On the lead web page of BU's Learn from Anywhere (LfA) initiative, it states:

"Our top priority, at all times, is to provide a safe and healthy work environment for BU faculty, staff, and students."

Given the decision that the School of Public Health made back in April to hold in-person classes using a hybrid format, the safety and health of the full community is clearly not the priority. Nor is the priority to provide a safe and healthy work environment for all BU faculty, staff, and students.

Were that the case, the School would have either: (1) waited until later in the summer when it had a clearer idea what the situation would be in the fall to make any decision; or (2) followed the lead of both Tufts and Harvard's MPH programs which announced in June that they would be online-only in order to most effectively protect the health of their entire communities.

I would respect the decision a lot more if we were simply honest with ourselves and admitted that it was made for financial reasons. But deceiving ourselves into thinking that this was first and foremost a public health decision is a disservice to our entire community. And it teaches just the wrong lesson to our incoming students.

The reality is that we made a decision to place our finances above the health of the community. In doing so, it really undermined the basis for our credibility in encouraging others to take actions that promote public health. In almost every public health issue, it comes down to a trade-off between financial concerns and health concerns. How can we as a School or members of this School community now go out into the field and tell other institutions that they have to place health above financial concerns when we ourselves have done the opposite?

The bottom line is that the decision to hold in-person classes this fall not only undermines public health principles, but it also takes us far from our mission as a School and makes it impossible to have credibility when trying to carry out this mission. It is essential that we rescind the decision and transition immediately to online classes, not merely to protect the health of the community and the public, but to restore our ability to carry out our mission as a school of public health.

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