A handful of colleges around the country are clinging to COVID-19-related protocols, including mask mandates for indoor areas and vaccine mandates for students and staff.
Pandemic-related restrictions on some college campuses persist as most public health guidelines have relaxed and mask and vaccine mandates have receded from most areas of daily life.
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But in some cases, the mandates are going beyond COVID-19. At the University of California, Berkeley, students are mandated to get vaccinated against coronavirus, as well as the flu. The university’s guidance says students who are not vaccinated against the flu will be required to wear a mask during flu season.
The most common remaining COVID-19 requirement is that all students be vaccinated. Thousands of college students nationwide are facing vaccination requirements extending from the entire University of California and California State University systems to the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Illinois, and others.
Colleges have long mandated student vaccinations for other diseases in order to attend school. Mandating the COVID-19 vaccine has been a subject of controversy for the past year. A court ruling last year ruled against a group of students challenging a mandate at Indiana University.
“Recognizing the students’ significant liberty to refuse unwanted medical treatment, the Fourteenth Amendment permits Indiana University to pursue a reasonable and due process of vaccination in the legitimate interest of public health for its students, faculty, and staff,” federal district Judge Damon Leichty wrote in an opinion last year. “No case to date has decided the constitutionality of whether a public university, such as Indiana University, may mandate that its students receive a COVID-19 vaccine.”
Mask mandates, while still persisting in some places, are far less common as students begin the 2022-2023 school year and often include significant caveats.
Wearing a mask is “currently optional” at the University of California, San Diego, according to the university’s website, which also says masks are “required” in a number of areas, including within residential buildings and “indoor classroom/instructional settings, clinical areas, and on … university transportation.”
The only places in residential buildings where students are not required to wear a mask are in the shower and in their “personal bedrooms.”
Indoor mask mandates also persist in some form at California State University, San Bernardino, George Washington and Georgetown universities in Washington, D.C., and the University of Hawaii system.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Kara Zupkus, a spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation, a conservative student activist organization, said that university administrators should “wake up and actually follow the science.”
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“Continuing to push fearful narratives through COVID hysteria does a disservice to university students trying to have a normal college experience,” Zupkus said. “Colleges should trust students to make their own educated decisions regarding masking and vaccines––rather than enforcing liberals’ worldview on their everyday lives.”
