In the days before North Carolina State University announced they would be pivoting to online learning for the remainder of the fall semester, a graduate student friend at NCSU and I frantically texted back and forth, trying to predict when the decision would be made to close classroom doors in response to more and more COVID-19 clusters. This closure came only days after the UNC system’s flagship school, UNC-Chapel Hill, shuttered its doors in a too-little, too-late effort to stop the spread of coronavirus through the ranks of unprepared faculty and undergraduates.

My friend and I were not the only ones peering into our crystal balls to predict an entirely predictable outcome. UNC-Chapel Hill’s student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, made waves across the country for its headline calling the reopening of the university a “clusterfuck.” The editorial points out that UNC-Chapel Hill flat-out ignored recommendations from both the county health department and the CDC, and went along with their plans to reopen anyway, knowing full well the risk to the lives of students and faculty. The university administration then tried to pass the blame off to the Board of Governors, the decision-making body of the UNC system as a whole, rather than acknowledge their own complicity in the ongoing calamity.

The college administrators doth protest too much. It was the hubris of helming a nationally recognized university, the “public ivy” of the South, that made these administrators think they could make the impossible possible, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the Daily Tar Heel writes, “the chancellor of a public university with a multi-billion dollar endowment is hardly powerless — not now, not ever.”