from The Atlantic
In Michigan, a small liberal-arts college is requiring students to install an app called Aura, which tracks their location in real time, before they come to campus. Oakland University, also in Michigan, announced a mandatory wearable that would track symptoms, but, facing a student-led petition, then said it would be optional. The University of Missouri, too, has an app that tracks when students enter and exit classrooms. This practice is spreading: In an attempt to open during the pandemic, many universities and colleges around the country are forcing students to download location-tracking apps, sometimes as a condition of enrollment. Many of these apps function via Bluetooth sensors or Wi-Fi networks. When students enter a classroom, their phone informs a sensor that’s been installed in the room, or the app checks the Wi-Fi networks nearby to determine the phone’s location.
As a university professor, I’ve seen surveillance like this before. Many of these apps replicate the tracking system sometimes installed on the phones of student athletes, for whom it is often mandatory. That system tells us a lot about what we can expect with these apps.
There is a widespread charade in the United States that university athletes, especially those who play high-profile sports such as football and basketball, are just students who happen to be playing sports as amateurs “in their free time.” The reality is that these college athletes in high-level sports, who are aggressively recruited by schools, bring prestige and financial resources to universities, under a regime that requires them to train like professional athletes despite their lack of salary. However, making the most of one’s college education and training at that level are virtually incompatible, simply because the day is 24 hours long and the body, even that of a young, healthy athlete, can only take so much when training so hard. Worse, many of these athletes are minority students, specifically Black men, who were underserved during their whole K–12 education and faced the same challenge then as they do now: Train hard in hopes of a scholarship and try to study with what little time is left, often despite being enrolled in schools with mediocre resources. Many of them arrive at college with an athletic scholarship but not enough academic preparation compared with their peers who went to better schools and could also concentrate on schooling.
It’s no secret that many universities go to great lengths to let these “amateurs” in demanding athletic fields do as little as possible academically so that they can keep training hard. But it’s supposed to be a wink-wink-nudge-nudge process, not outright fraud. A few years ago, my own university, the University of North Carolina, breached this unspoken rule. The school became embroiled in a high-profile scandal after a professor provided fake classes aimed at athletes that gave them the grades required to keep their eligibility in return for little to no attendance or work. That, of course, made the charade uncomfortably explicit, and UNC faced national attention and some minor sanctions.
More here.
Having students attend college in person in the fall of 2020 was a very difficult task for colleges and universities around the world. A balancing act had to occur. Does the college or university promote the health and safety of their students, or do they think about the social lives of their enrolled students? Having a strict Covid-19 policy could deter students from enrolling in a college or university, while helping to keep faculty and administration safe from the side effects of the Coronavirus. A weak Covid-19 policy would allow enrolled students to fully experience college life, and to have a very rich social life. However, the health and safety of all students, faulty, and administration would be in danger. Managing the spread of Covid-19 is very difficult as Covid-19 social distancing policies might not always be followed to the extent they are supposed to by students, and students will find ways to avoid being held responsible for breaking these policies. Given this delicate situation, how do higher education institutions create Covid-19 polices which encourage social distancing and masking, while still allowing for students to party responsibly as no school policy will stop these parties anyway.
An effective Covid-19 policy will not include tracking students though electronic devices. This method of monitoring the spread of the Coronavirus, is extremely invasive to the privacy of students. Furthermore, it breaches students’ natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Monitoring someone’s actions and locations violates their God-given rights inscribed in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. Someone’s right to privacy is a fundamental part of their personal liberties, which should be protected under the law. Data privacy laws are weak in the USA, and their absence allows for student’s natural rights to be violated.
Unfortunately, some colleges and universities have began to track their students. They justify their invasive actions as a strategy to combat the pandemic. However, this strategy is very ineffective as students have found loopholes to avoid being tracked by their higher education institution. Students have left their phones in their dorms, when they have gone out partying, and they have had a friend bring both their phones with them to class, if one student wants to skip class. These examples show how mandatory tracking apps and electronic devices are ineffective at achieving their goals.
The best Covid-19 policy, for the fall of 2020, which a higher education institution can enforce, is one which has mandatory masking, suggested social distancing, and an optional recommended app which tracks symptoms and does not have data aggregated in a central data base with access for university administration.
Like many other current college students, starting to attend or continuing to attend college during the COVID-19 pandemic was very difficult. These difficulties and challenges were also relevant to professors, faculty members, as well as anybody who works on a college campus. In the above article, some colleges and universities adapted the use of apps that would install trackers so they could monitor where you are and where you go. Some colleges and universities even made these apps mandatory to download on our devices, which infringes upon students and faculty members rights to privacy. For colleges and universities to properly develop an effective COVID-19 policy, it is important to keep the privacy of students, athletes, and faculty members in mind when doing so. This mandatory tracker violated several constitutional rights including the students’ fourth amendment rights, fourteenth amendment rights, as well as their natural rights to life and liberty. The fourth amendment was put in place to to prevent unwanted searches and seizers and it can be argued that this new updated COVID-19 policy violates that. In regard to the fourteenth amendment, the new tracker requirements/polices violates students rights to privacy as well. With the policies and requirements that were set by some colleges and universities being brought to our attention, we clearly saw what changes to policy needed to be made. Even when these polices were in place, students found ways around having the university tracking them. Some of these work arounds included leaving their phones in one place while they went wherever they needed to go, as well as, turning off location settings within their phone, in which some cases it would not alert the app if location tracking was switched to off. Some feel as if an acceptable solution or amendment to these polices would be an optional tracker, if that makes the individual feel safer, to an apps that require an upload of your latest COVID test. With the policies that most colleges and universities already have in place such as social distancing, mandatory masking, switching the virtual classes, and regular COVID tests, having a software or app tracking your every move seems overboard and extremely unnecessary.
The pandemic has taken a major toll on every part of our country, including the education systems. Teachers have had a major strain put onto them by trying to keep their classrooms covid free. It was very hard in the beginning, with teachers being forced to turn to the remote for their classrooms, and put their whole curriculum on an online setting. This was all also out of nowhere, giving teachers no time to prepare for any of this. Eventually, schools opened back up, but many guidelines were put in place to mitigate the spread of covid, some of which were unethical. The article from “The Atlantic” states, “In Michigan, a small liberal-arts college is requiring students to install an app called Aura, which tracks their location in real time, before they come to campus. Oakland University, also in Michigan, announced a mandatory wearable that would track symptoms, but, facing a student-led petition, then said it would be optional.” I think that schools trying to track their students makes sense in a way, but is simply unacceptable. I understand that teachers want to be able to know where the kids are, so that they can get everything in order before they get to school, but forcing them to get an app that tracks them is not okay. It goes against students’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and it also breaks other laws as well. The pandemic is a very stressful time for everybody, but tracking students and breaching their privacy is not the way to go about it. The best solutions are to keep enforcing mask mandates, require vaccinations to be able to attend school, and to encourage students to practice social distancing as much as possible. Thankfully, many students have signed petitions to end the tracking policy and it has worked, as quoted from “The Atlantic”, many colleges and universities are changing the tracking app “Aura” to be optional for students, as it should be. I think we all need to work together as a country to get past this pandemic because it simply is not going away anytime soon, and we have to be mindful of the laws we are putting in place to help stop it.
In the current wave of the pandemic, it is easy to forget the struggles and hardships that we first encountered when attending college for the first time. After reading the article it is clear to sympathize with the students of the university of Michigan and Oakland university. The actions of the school putting in trackers and seeing where these students are going is highly invasive against the rights of these students. It is understandable for the school to want to limit the spread of the virus but in violating the students fourth amendment rights it gives a motif for many to sue. To many the right of privacy is a very important constitutional right especially during college. Often it is hard for many to find time to themselves and be in solitary during college and by tracking their phones the school has given students more of a reason to feel like there is no privacy. To amend this situation the school should instead delete the app from everyone’s phone and instead require students to sign in and out of their buildings during school hours. The school can also enforce mandatory masking and social distancing to their students to make sure their school is safer. However, by digitally tracking them it gives a reason for many to leave the institution and give a bad reputation.