If by some miracle you haven’t heard, UNC-Chapel Hill moved all classes online Monday, just an hour before tuition was due. In completely unrelated news, NC State announced a whopping 28 new cases all at once, but you probably knew that too. Did you also know it was a day after tuition was due?

Those two particular pieces of news seem quite curious to me. For one thing, the timing is certainly strange. What’s more is that I know very few people who do not think that, within two weeks, we will be exactly where UNC-CH is now, which raises a few questions.

For one thing, it makes me wonder what NC State seriously thinks will happen, other than a larger outbreak within our community in the near future. Nothing we are doing is appreciably better than what UNC-CH did, in fact much of it is appreciably worse. Students were unaware of the location of cases until yesterday, and a simple look at our dashboard, compared to UNC-CH’s, tells you all you need to know about how seriously our administration is taking our safety.

At first, I thought NC State must be better somehow because, after all, as far as I and the rest of the student body knew, we had only had 20 cases since March. Well, until we didn’t, all of a sudden. Now our cases count looks a lot more similar to UNC-CH, who also experienced a massive jump in the last week.

So if an impending outbreak on our campus seems likely, then why the hell is NC State continuing with in-person classes? What possible reason could they have to gather students up, get them sick and then send them back to their families?

First, I’m just going to be blunt and say the University is probably continuing classes for one reason: They are desperate for funding through sports and tuition. There, I said it. With the UNC-CH decision and NC State’s announcement of its first cluster, it seems clear to me that UNC System schools are following a playbook, and their hand is bleeding pretty badly right now.

They probably think they can get away with it too. So far as they care, once they have secured funding in the form of tuition and done everything they can for sports revenue — did I also forget to mention that UNC-CH is still having football — the next biggest issue is to get away with it looking the best they can.

By sitting on the fence twiddling their thumbs in regard to the issue of responsibility and enforcing safety guidelines, NC State’s administration probably figures they can make it out of this by placing the blame on students. Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, even said so much in their Atlantic article “Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students.”

I imagine NC State sees inaction as an effective strategy simply because they fear the responsibility that would come with actually trying to keep students safe. Instead, whether truly intentional or not, NC State has effectively chosen a strategy of sitting on their hands until after tuition is due, and then doing the bare minimum so that they won’t face the consequences that come with having a truly flawed plan to running a university during a pandemic. It’s a decent strategy if you’re okay with being a scumbag; it increases revenue and subverts responsibility.

So what are students to do?

Practically nothing. The real decision for cancelling all in-person classes lies with the UNC Board of Governors (BOG), a group of people put in place by politicians elected through gerrymandering. The original idea is that the actions, or inaction, of the BOG is supposed to reflect on the politicians who appointed them, and if the BOG messes up, the politician isn’t reelected, so politicians choose a good board. 

But when you live in a state like North Carolina, the problem starts with gerrymandering. From there, politicians don’t have to fear responsibility. Add a little bit of big money into local elections, and politicians get a supermajority in the general assembly, from there they add people to the BOG who funded their campaigns, increasing their reach into the education system. Don’t believe me? How about you believe the fact that Art Pope, often called the “Koch” and the “Sugar Daddy” of NC, was just appointed to the BOG. Oh, did I forget his role in the 2010 REDMAP project, a project aimed at politically gerrymandering states like North Carolina by funding local elections during a census year?

But never mind that. If the solution to safe higher education during a crisis relies on the resolution of gerrymandering in North Carolina, our best bet is trying some other state. A more realistic approach would be reforming the BOG so that they, oh, I don’t know, are an actual representative body. Crazy how, in 2018, I wrote about this exact issue — though, truthfully, I did not expect a pandemic — and argued that currently “there is no democratic check on their power.” I suggested that the president of the BOG should be a position that is elected by the people. Imagine what the call would have been in July had that been the case. Does any serious person think the same people running higher education should be running it next year, after this year’s disaster?

For this year’s tuition, it could very well be too late; the con is quite nearly complete. It is ruled by three defunct groups: the school administration, the BOG and the North Carolina General Assembly. The system students are currently subjected to provides no real leverage whatsoever. So, when crises happen, it seems we have no choice other than to beg, write snarky opinion pieces and protest. In the past, that last one has been taboo. Though taboo to an extent on NC State’s campus, it seems that, if students actually want any sort of change, they need to learn how to make their voices heard, immediately.