Does UCL want students in masks forever?
UCL’s guidance on social distancing threatens to rob a generation of the true uni experience.
Image from Flickr
University College London (UCL) has told students that a return to campus next year does not mean a return to normality. Unless exempt, masks are still required in all indoor spaces, and students are being asked to test twice a week.
I am not here to offer medical expertise. I don’t care to comment on sciencey stuff that I don’t know a lot about: I was very happy to leave that aspect of my education well alone after sixteen. However, my heart cannot help but break for us as we feel key milestones slip away without fully being able to appreciate and experience them.
So much of the quintessential ‘university experience’ that is sold to students is based on spontaneity. It’s a time for us to appreciate our first years of independence alongside our final years of minimal responsibility. We’ve spent our entire lives in a prescriptive education, and now finally we chose to be here, to be able to pursue the one thing that we decided on, yet it’s difficult to not feel as though you have been stripped of some of that autonomy when you can’t even just pop into the Student Centre without booking first.
I am not saying all the safety measures should be completely scrapped and we can snog every stranger on the street, but I’m really struggling to not feel like students have been hit with the short end of the stick. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask for some compassion.
We’re sold the line that we’re finally not going to be treated as children, yet now we feel completely excluded from these decision-making processes in our own institution. It’s not clear to us how, when, or why decisions are made, nor by whom. We don’t know when they will be reviewed, or the conditions we’re looking for that would lead to taking steps closer to the experiences we want back, before it’s too late. Students who are entering the third and final year of their degrees will now have had every year’s ‘university experience’ majorly impacted by the pandemic, and are being offered no sign of a chance to get some normality back before they leave.
UCL has offered support to students in getting fully vaccinated, but – as someone who was already willing and eager to get the vaccine – I am struggling to see the substance in these promises. Surely the primary focus should be on making vaccine-hesitant students want the vaccine, rather than just highlighting the availability of the opportunity. We know that under-30s are the most vaccine-hesitant, and it’s hard to see why those who are hesitant would be persuaded away if they don’t know what freedom looks like.
While restrictions in theory have been lifted, it still feels impossible to plan even weeks into the future. It’s so hard to imagine a time when we’ll be past this, yet we can see the end of our time at university coming closer and closer to its end, and, with it, a sharp kick into the ‘real world’ with all its responsibilities and obligations. We’ll even be without the ritualistic farewell that we were promised as the culmination of our ‘university experience’. Nevertheless, as we are pushed towards this ‘real world’, it seems we are kept out of step with it. Society is being encouraged to return to relative normality, yet universities are being kept under a contradictorily high level of vigilance.
Students right now are worth more compassion than they can find. Not only are we facing the same adjustments and accommodations to the pandemic as everyone else, but we are having to part with the picture we’ve held of how many of our journeys through education will conclude. The experiences we are now missing out on have paused and many of them will not be postponed. Time is too quickly passing us by.
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