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Covid-19 Can’t Be an Excuse for Back-to-School Surveillance
‘Students are already one of the most surveilled demographics in the country’
This op-ed was written by Albert Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a New York–based civil rights and police accountability organization.
For American colleges, Covid-19 has brought an existential crisis. They have wrestled for months with the question of reopening in the fall, balancing the benefits of in-person instruction against the deadly threat of the pandemic. But for many, the hemming and hawing may be for naught: The Trump administration has said it will pressure schools to reopen, and a heartless new ruling from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Monday may strip international students of their visas if they attend only online classes. For students, this means the choice between campus Covid-19 exposure and deportation. For colleges and universities, it means the choice between protecting student and staff safety and potential bankruptcy.
College campuses have always been microcosms of the larger societies they serve. At their best, universities create new frameworks for inclusion, equity, and integration. But at their worst, they amplify many of the inequalities that define American life. For universities in the age of Covid-19, the pandemic will push these two visions of higher education even farther apart, as universities face unprecedented pressures to protect their campuses and quickly return to the business of teaching. And for those institutions that do choose to reopen, it means that they will have to decide between evidence-based public health responses, like manual contact tracing, and new, untested, and highly invasive technology solutions.
Even before the ICE decision, many American universities saw the return to in-person instruction not as a matter of pedagogy or students’ quality of life, but as an existential requirement. American universities are a multibillion dollar industry, but while a small number of schools boast exorbitant endowments, those institutions are far from the norm. Even for those with hundreds of millions in reserves, that isn’t simply cash in a savings account. University endowments are a tangled web of illiquid assets…
