COVID Rhetoric Can Tear This Campus Apart. Don’t Let it.

Swaths of the country will become division zones. Grove City College doesn’t have to be one of them.

The Biden administration’s sweeping vaccine legislation has sparked all manner of backlash, with companies promising legal battles and pledging to take on the new mandates, even as protests break out in American cities. To many Americans, it seems like the nation is once again dividing into two camps: those “far too accepting” of continued COVID restrictions and those “far too ready” to move past the current crisis.

Large swaths of the country will inevitably become such division zones. But Grove City College doesn’t have to be one of them. The political debate we’re having on the national front is not the same debate we’re having on campus.

On the political front, we’re dealing with the administration’s willingness to forward public health mandates that will affect (in the president’s own estimation) 80 million American workers. This strategy is unwise on several levels. On the rhetorical level, it cuts against the administration’s public health narrative; vaccine-hesitant Americans are not more likely to change their minds on vaccines simply because the federal government tells them to get the shot. On the practical side, according to an initial Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, it’s not polling well with the majority of Americans, notably among the politically independent.

Although wildly unpopular presidents who cut against their own public narrative are par for the course, let’s be realistic: Biden’s move is not going to bring unity to a country shredded by partisanship and set ablaze by the current pandemic.

We need to be equally realistic, however, about the difference between dictates from Washington and the situation our campus is in. Being asked to wear a mask is not the infringement upon personal liberty that some make it out to be. Is it less than ideal? Few, if any, view a masked campus as an ideal situation. We all wish the situation was such that masks aren’t even on the policy horizon. But it is not so, and making overblown arguments about sheep, personal liberty, and what Edmund Burke would or wouldn’t have said is unlikely to achieve a desired effect.

To be perfectly clear on the other side, I don’t generally care what Washington thinks I should do. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not worthy of Americans’ trust in the realm of crafting effective policy. This is a drum everyone is tired of beating.

We would, however, do well to think carefully about how our discussions on the current crisis build up the campus community we’ve voluntarily associated with. Are we sowing division where building connection and accepting an imperfect reality would be more appropriate? As a Christian, I’ve certainly been guilty of this. Repenting of this involves one of my least favorite things — having to admit that I’ve been caustic when winsomeness and charity would have been the wiser choice. It’s an uncomfortable process, but nonetheless an essential one to living in Christian community.

As a diehard Presbyterian, I’d be remiss to not sneak in a quote from one of the founders of my denomination to close this column out. J. Gresham Machen wrote in 1913 that “[w]hat is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.” The current crisis isn’t merely a policy question or an abstract discussion for virologists and lawmakers. Its ramifications have the potential to pull Americans away from each other, and have done so in truly disturbing ways. Just as with America, the current crisis has the potential to tear Grove City College apart through polarizing rhetoric, strife, and the age-old trap of division. Dear Grovers: don’t let it.