Earlier this month, a student at one of the country’s most eminent law schools received an email announcing that a fellow classmate had anonymously lodged a complaint against him. The allegation: that he had violated University policy by engaging in prohibited behaviors, such as momentarily lowering his face mask to take a drink of water during a 90-minute lecture.

Ironically for a top tier law school — at which vaccination had already been mandated, and where basic precepts of due process are presumably taught — the student was denied any opportunity to be apprised of his accuser’s identity. Nor was he advised of any adjudicatory process to contest the allegations. So the complaint just hangs there, in a kind of creepy administrative limbo, and there’s apparently nothing he can do about it.

I would love to provide more specifics — including the name of the law school, and the exact obnoxious quotes emailed by the Dean in question — but I cannot. Because the person who gave me these emails is extremely worried, probably for good reason, that going on-record could jeopardize his life in all manner of ways. Including social ostracization, compromising future employment prospects, and perhaps even inviting additional retribution from what I’ve been told is a highly ‘assertive’ crew of official disciplinarians.

It’s far from an unusual situation. As you may be aware, since I began reporting on colleges and universities that continue to enforce outlandishly stringent COVID measures well into this current Fall semester, I’ve received a torrent of messages from students across the country with stories of the latest bizarre administrative dictates they’ve been subjected to. Almost invariably, the students are adamant that their names not be divulged — thanks in large part to a formal and informal snitch culture which now pervades these institutions, including the aforementioned “elite” law school.

And so students are hindered from publicly criticizing policies that to outsiders increasingly appear beyond ridiculous. To review just a sampling: At Stanford and University of Pennsylvania, vaccinated students are required to wear face masks while playing pickup basketball. At Georgetown and the University of Southern California, students are expressly forbidden from removing their masks in class even for a few seconds to “hydrate.” At Columbia and Brown, decrees have been issued barring students from hosting guests or going to restaurants. And just this past Monday, Harvard Business School canceled in-person classes, citing an allegedly “distressing” spate of “cases” amongst a population of students who — as is uniformly true at these institutions — are already near-universally vaccinated. 

To justify such intrusive measures, administrators seem to need only incant the word “Delta,” as though it’s some kind of magical spell — and then all prior assurances that mandatory vaccine uptake would enable a return to “normalcy” disappear in a poof of smoke.

As you might expect, the messages keep pouring in. I’m almost not sure if it’ll do any good to continue reporting them, because at a certain point the whole routine may become repetitive. But, you play with the cards you’ve been dealt I suppose. George Mason University just sent out a directive demanding that masks be worn in cubicles, “even if you are alone within the cubicle and even if there is no one occupying the cubicles and spaces around you.”

Here’s a notice to University of Oregon law students that campus security will be diligently monitoring the outdoor basketball court, to ensure that masks are worn while students are shootin’ hoops.

At UC San Diego, wearing a mask in perpetuity is now deemed necessary as a “psychological” safeguard:

At the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill this semester, course syllabi contain a clause that threatens swift and decisive disciplinary intervention for even the smallest infractions. “If you choose not to wear a mask,” the clause reads, “or wear it improperly, I will ask you to leave immediately, and I will submit a report to the Office of Student Conduct. At that point you will be disenrolled from this course.”

Summary disenrollment for improper mask-wearing practices? Yep — that’s the threat, anyway. Hassan Melehy, a professor of French at UNC, confirmed to me that his syllabus contains such language. Per usual, these unwieldy threats tend to be made at the supposed behest of some imagined “community,” such as an “educational community,” which seems a convenient public-spirited pretext for the individual paranoias of instructors.

Read full story on Substack (Michael Tracey)