While colleges consider reopening plans, a coalition is calling on Congress to expand liability protections to educational institutions in light of the COVID-19 public health emergency.
“As colleges and universities contemplate whether and how to safely reopen this fall, their overriding concern is keeping students, faculty, staff, and local communities safe,” Luis Maldonado, vice president for Government Relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), told the Northern California Record by email.
The AASCU is one of the letter’s signatories.
“The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic poses unique challenges for all colleges and universities across the country, which, unlike most traditional businesses, must consider the best way to address safety concerns across multiple operational settings, with practical limits on an institution’s ability to monitor and control community members’ compliance with shared expectations and obligations toward each other,” Maldonado said.
The nation’s more than 4,000 colleges and universities educate nearly 24.5 million students, employ nearly 4 million people, and generate an estimated $650 billion in economic impact — roughly 3% of the U.S. GDP, Maldonado said.
“The catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on campus operations and revenues has had a terrible ripple effect on the institutions themselves and the economies of their surrounding communities,” he added.
Still, it’s important that liability protections don’t provide blanket immunity, which could unintentionally keep people away, professor Gregory Keating of the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law told the Record by email.
“People need to know that it’s reasonably safe for them to go to school,” Keating said.
“How to manage [the] risks is far from clear at present,” Keating said. “The message is, you need to be as safe as other places that students might be. At least until there is either a widely available, effective vaccine or herd immunity, we won’t be back in a pre-pandemic world.”
“Our overriding concern is keeping everyone in the academic and surrounding communities safe,” Maldonado of the AASCU said.
“Despite their best efforts to prevent community transmission, colleges and universities cannot guarantee against COVID-19 exposure despite their best and honest efforts. The higher education sector needs timely, temporary, and targeted liability protections,” Maldonado said.