School of Public Health Has a Responsibility to the Local Community: Bringing Hundreds of Students On Campus Unnecessarily is Inconsistent with that Duty

In a Boston Globe article in late July, new Boston City Councillor Kenzie Bok expressed her concern about BU students returning to campus this fall, saying: "We can’t let institutional financial priorities endanger the health and safety of our neighborhoods. I’m going to keep hammering that point home to them because...I’m speaking up for constituents who are deathly afraid."

While at the undergraduate level, there is at least an argument that the college experience is a residential one and eliminating this component is unacceptably disrupting, that same argument does not hold for our graduate program in public health. In the first place, we have an executive MPH program that is entirely online. So we know it is possible to teach public health courses online.

Moreover, since the choice does not allow a return to normal classes, we have to understand that the choice is between online classes and a mixed system where some students attend online and some attend in the classroom. However, this is not classic in-person instruction. The students will be in fixed seating six feet apart, wearing masks, and listening to a professor who is also masked. There is little doubt in my mind that under such conditions, teaching all online is actually preferable didactically to hybrid classes. So essentially, it is not necessary for SPH students to be in the classroom.

With that backdrop, how does bringing hundreds of students a day onto the BUSPH campus, which is tightly intertwined with the South End community, make any sense? More importantly, what kind of risk does it pose for the local community? I'm afraid that we are doing exactly what Councilor Bok fears: letting institutional financial priorities endanger the health and safety of the local neighborhood, and beyond.

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