MU vs. COVID-19

As of today, the University of Missouri at Columbia (MU) is:

  • Forcing everyone back to in-person work on May 17
  • “lifting COVID-19 restrictions for the fall semester” (begins August 23) — this may not apply to the hospital
  • Not requiring faculty, staff, or students to be vaccinated — even if they work in the hospital

Back to In-person Work on May 17

To be fair, many MU employees really never stopped going to work in-person, but a great many jobs at the university can be done from anywhere on earth thanks to modern technology.

May 17 is the first day of summer intersession (the first business day after spring semester ends), so it is an organic moment for a change in policy to take effect. Unfortunately, COVID-19 doesn’t care about what is convenient on your calendar, and thanks to the world’s conservatives completely sabotaging the response to the pandemic, the infection rate is likely to be extremely high at that time, so MU isn’t sending people back to in-person work because the pandemic is over.

Once MU employees had worked out the kinks in working from home, people began to realize that the policy allowed for increases in efficiency such as reducing the amount of office space and parking required. Departments are under constant pressure to reduce and justify their office space, and are charged for that space by central MU administration. Clearly, MU isn’t sending people back to in-person work for the sake of efficiency.

If they aren’t sending people back to in-person work because the pandemic is over and they aren’t doing it to regain lost efficiency, then why are they doing it? The answer is a combination of conservative and neoliberal anxiety that requires the asses of office workers to be planted firmly in their office chairs, in their work offices (as opposed to their home offices), where they can be dominated and monitored by the management class.

The pressure from conservatives is largely about funding from the Missouri legislature. MU must participate in denying that COVID-19 is a significant problem or else it will lose funding. They would rather kill off a significant number of Americans (and keep in mind that it is conservatives who are refusing to get vaccinated) than admit that COVID-19 is a real problem (rather than just a conspiracy where China releases an insignificant virus and then convinces the entire world that it is dangerous in order to make Donald Trump look bad).

The neoliberal push is all about management class anxiety and keeping capitalism growing. Both of those issues involve bean counters. In short, if they can’t be sure you are working all the time (and not, for example, talking to your child), then they can’t confirm (through bean counting) that they are getting their maximum value out of your labor and because you are basically self-directed, the uselessness of managers is laid bare.

In a world where bean counting means everything, the beanlessness of working from home is an existential threat to everything. For example, if they don’t really know how many hours you worked, then how can they determine your wage hour value? And if they don’t know your wage hour value, then what is your supervisor’s wage hour value? And then how can we increase efficiency if we don’t really know anything about what you are actually doing? You might be peeing right now, and your supervisor has no idea!

MU is, as a matter of fact, one of those places where there are way too many managers, in multiple layers, but they are the ones making the decisions, so naturally they’re not going to be cut. It’s a microcosm of the whole of American capitalism. These layers of management are needed to maintain the idea that you can be promoted in your job and to allow those at the top of the management hierarchy to achieve the (real) American dream: Not working.

So that’s why MU is forcing employees back to in-person work on May 17. Not coincidentally, we expect Columbia Public Schools to return to all in-person teaching for fall as well.

Lifting all COVID-19 Restrictions on August 23

This one is directly caused by Qanon conservatives and really illustrates the kind of people at the higher levels of MU administration — they are neoliberal, conservative, and very misinformed. I’m hoping that the hospital will continue to mostly enforce masks and social distancing, but it’s really hard to say whether they will or not.

This wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world — if we knew that all faculty, staff, and students were vaccinated.

Not Requiring Anyone to be Vaccinated

MU is not requiring any faculty, staff or students to be vaccinated for COVID-19. This is true even of hospital employees.

Up until now, it didn’t seem odd at all that MU wasn’t requiring vaccinations. There wasn’t enough vaccine to go around, people were encouraged to work from home, and there were all these half-measures (social distancing, masks) in place to slow down the spread of the virus. They simply made the vaccine available and let people self-select as to whether they receive the vaccine.

I realized from the start that we would never have Bill Gates’s encryption-based vaccination certificates — and I really didn’t want that — but I hoped people would want to save their own asses enough to get vaccinated. And, if not that, I hoped we would have enough employers require vaccination that it would be normalized and we could achieve herd immunity. Apparently not.

Conclusion

The combination of these three policies is a perfect storm. As I’ve said previously, it looks like the continued failure of conservatives will result in a continuously mutating virus that will allow it to remain a problem for humanity. It’s sad because we knew how to stop it — but they made a choice for everyone not to. MU isn’t the only place you’re going to see this. Look at any conservative-leaning place in this country, and I bet you’ll see the same bad ideas being put into practice. Certainly some of it is just fatigue — both the fatigue of dealing with pandemic protocols and the fatigue of fighting against the unrelenting conservative death cult — but the sheer force of conservative madness is the main cause.

Get ready to sign up for your booster shot — you’re going to need it.