If you turn on a college football game these days, you might notice something rather strange in the middle of a raging pandemic: tens of thousands of densely packed, screaming fans who are often, but not always, wearing masks (and less often wearing them properly). As other countries continue to flow in and out of economic lockdowns and government-imposed gathering limits, American college fans are streaming into colossal stadiums across the country, filled up to a quarter of capacity.

On its own, this blatant violation of public health common sense is a disaster; unfortunately, it’s just another data point in the larger nightmare we’ve collectively shared for the better part of a year. But fans are not the problem. To blame fans for the incredible danger they are contributing to is to fall into the neoliberal trap of blaming the victim for the harm that befalls them in a society fundamentally shaped by far larger forces.

Nowhere has this been more apparent this summer and fall than in the context of US higher education. We have watched colleges and universities invite their students and workers onto campus for face-to-face interaction in order to grab students’ tuition dollars, desperately needed to patch up long–standing fissures in the political economy of higher education. Rather than demanding additional federal and state funding, universities have turned to students as cash cows to stay afloat. When the inevitable has occurred, and coronavirus outbreaks have exploded, schools have shirked responsibility for producing dangerous learning conditions and instead blamed students every time there is a campus outbreak.