Citing Student Privacy, BU Says Faculty Won’t Be Told if Students Test Positive for COVID-19

Photo of Covid-19 testing lab at Kilachand Center. A young person in a red t-shirt in a testing both takes a COVID testing swab out of a tube as a testing site worker looks on.

Boston University, which analyzes COVID-19 tests at the BU Clinical Testing Lab at the Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering, will not inform faculty if students in their classes test positive. Photo by Janice Checchio

Campus Life

Citing Student Privacy, BU Says Faculty Won’t Be Told if Students Test Positive for COVID-19

Distancing protocols in classrooms guard against close contacts, University says

August 25, 2020
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  • University will not notify professors of students in their classes testing positive for COVID-19
  • Protecting student privacy drives decision
  • Distancing, masking precautions lessen chances of in-class close contacts

Citing student privacy and the need to encourage cooperation with contact tracing for COVID-19, the University will not inform faculty if students in their classes test positive for the virus.

“The efficacy of contact tracing is entirely dependent on the accuracy of the data shared by the individual who has tested positive,” Jean Morrison, University provost, wrote in an email sent to faculty Monday. “If students do not feel their privacy is protected, they may be less likely to fully and honestly participate in contact tracing, putting us all at higher risk.…I know this decision will be a disappointment to some of you, but I hope that you understand that we have made this decision with the ultimate goal of keeping all faculty, staff, and students as safe as possible.”

“We know that for our students, if we cannot ensure that their privacy and confidentiality are being safeguarded, then they’re not going to tell us the information that we need to know in order to keep them safe, or keep the campus safe,” says Judy Platt, director of Student Health Services (SHS). During Orientation and in other student forums, she says, “one question that always comes up is around privacy, and are we going to alert administrators or are we going to alert their faculty advisor—who are we going to tell?

“We’ve always held the line that unless there is an immediate threat to someone’s safety, we are not going to disclose health-related information,” Platt says. “To do something differently for this, when we’ve always had a standard practice of confidentiality and privacy guarantees, I think would significantly undermine the efforts of contact tracing.” 

Even if students were assured professors wouldn’t disclose their identity in class, she says, in smaller courses, with “the remote, hybrid approach that we have going on now, it can be a little more difficult to actually guarantee that anonymity will be preserved.”

Social distancing and masking protocols in classrooms this fall are designed to prevent close contacts and reduce the chances of viral spread, Platt adds. “I’m not going to say that the risk is zero in a classroom. But if the class is physically distanced, everyone is wearing a mask, everyone is doing their daily symptom attestation, everyone’s complying with testing—that should make the risk of transmission in the classroom very low.”

The University will share positive COVID-19 test results with local public health authorities in the municipality where the tested person resides, which is “what we do for any highly communicable healthcare illness,” Platt says. Also, students may disclose their own health care information. “We often tell students, if you need to miss a class, proactively reach out to your professors,” she says. “Let them know you’re not going to be in class.”

Eileen O’Keefe, chair of the Faculty Council and a Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences clinical professor of health sciences, says the council discussed notification with the University’s leadership. College of Arts & Sciences faculty “advocated strongly for notification,” she says, while instructors at other schools have told her they’re less concerned.

“I can appreciate the complexities that went into this decision and know the anxiety that some faculty feel around this issue,” as an epidemiologist who is teaching this semester, O’Keefe says. “Some faculty will be disappointed. Looking at this more broadly, our combined efforts across all sectors of the University this summer has been to prepare the campus for the safe return of students, faculty, and staff.

“If there were the option of maintaining contact tracing compliance and informing class instructors, then I believe the administration could have honored this request,” she says. “But given that we are in the midst of a pandemic and infection control is the priority, I think the administration had to opt for infection control and what is best for the entire community.”

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Citing Student Privacy, BU Says Faculty Won’t Be Told if Students Test Positive for COVID-19

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  • Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Rich Barlow, an older white man with dark grey hair and wearing a grey shirt and grey-blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 44 comments on Citing Student Privacy, BU Says Faculty Won’t Be Told if Students Test Positive for COVID-19

  1. From a scientific standpoint, I do not think that this is the right thing to do. I understand that not being in your 6-feet perimeter doesn’t make someone a “close contact” but this should not apply inside the classroom as the air circulation and ventilation systems are different and can contribute to airborne spread (especially in a classroom with the door closed, despite AC and windows being open). You can still tell professors and students and Graduate teaching fellows that they came in contact with a person who tested positive WITHOUT mentioning names or identifying details (like Princeton did last spring) without jeopardizing any person’s identity. Or is it that it would be easy to identify who is sick because they’ll be gone from class (along with many other students possibly) if they’re sick? This is so unfair to faculty and graduate TFs, and unnecessarily risks their lives and turns them into transmission devices (no matter how good our HVACs are).

    I recommend checking out what professors Daniel Star and Nathan Phillips have to say about why this is a very dangerous idea that risks the health of everyone at BU.

    Disclaimer: these are my personal thoughts and opinions, which do not represent my employer

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    1. There should be a low likelihood of identifying who’s sick because, as soon as the positive test result comes in, the university should contact the instructor, who should cancel in-person class for two weeks while all the students quarantine.

      There’s no good-faith way to justify nixing instructors and classmates as “close contacts” when science no longer supports the idea that six-foot distance is effective indoors, particularly in the many BU classrooms that are still ventilated inadequately or not at all.

      The university is simply declining to trace contact effectively because observing health protocols designed for safety rather than optics would force campus to close.

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      1. EXACTLY !!

        Thanks to those who have commented here about this unfortunate and unjustified decision, which is unnecessarily endangering faculty and students at BU and further eroding trust in the administration. I hope that this will be reconsidered.

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  2. Morrison’s email reads like an article from The Onion. “In order to protect the health and safety of everyone in the BU community, we have decided not to disclose to faculty when their health and safety may be in danger. We acknowledge that this may disappoint some, but we feel that it will be more difficult to coerce faculty members into unsafe situations if they understand the extent and severity of the dangers they face.”

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  3. This administration grows more sickeningly disingenuous by the day. I am a faculty member who has remained silent for fear of retribution by administrators. I am teaching in person in the fall, and did not try to dodge out of doing so, in the hopes that our provost would show leadership, honesty, and care for those of us who care for the education and well-being of our students (our undergraduates in particular).

    Our provost has willfully misconstrued a desire on the part of in-person teaching staff to be made aware of seropositivity in our classrooms so that we can be informed about the risks that we may be courting, particularly as the numbers crammed into those classrooms has creeped up over the summer (even above the 25-person state maximum, from which BU is magically exempt). No one I know has the slightest desire to know the individual identity of students who have contracted the coronavirus. But we would like to know whether our classrooms are dangerous or safe places. The fiction that six feet of distance indoors will magically protect us, like a talisman, against contracting an illness with potentially lifelong consequences, is just that, and it is increasingly being refuted by the best science about airborne transmission, now being widely reported.

    Kudos to Cathie Klapperich for amazing work creating a strong testing regime. She deserves all credit. But bully to our administrators who lie to us beyond the realm of plausibility and put us in harm’s way time and again. Don’t be surprised when BU’s reputation sinks to levels even more subterranean than those of the Silber years, when faculty with choices leave BU for schools which have shown greater care and transparency, and students remember how they were seduced by the promise of an in-person experience as pleasant as a root canal, as expensive as a Tesla, and as effective pedagogically as the University of Phoenix on dial-up. All I can hope at this point is that this plan unravels like the farce that it has quickly become.

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  4. Yet another example of BU prioritizing undergraduate students over their faculty and graduate students. I understand that the undergrads provide the most revenue to the university, but it is disappointing to see the school prioritizing their lives at the cost of others. People deserve to know if they have been in contact with somebody with covid, and breathing the same air in the same classroom as a positive student for 3 hours is certainly a contact.

    Between this and BU’s intentional placement of potentially positive students in graduate housing, it is clear where the university’s priorities lie.

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  5. Such a shame, and such a mistake.

    “If students do not feel their privacy is protected, they may be less likely to fully and honestly participate in contact tracing, putting us all at higher risk.…the ultimate goal of keeping all faculty, staff, and students as safe as possible.”

    As many have stated before, no one is asking for any personal details from the students that test positive, only that they know one of their students has tested positive. Or better yet, that “one of their close contacts” has tested positive – that opens the possibilities to anyone! This is what contact tracing means!! You are not worried about their privacy being protected when you contact trace the other people that they report (roommates, friends, SOs, etc) – just the faculty/TAs/etc that have no choice but to come into the classroom and teach in-person.

    Not telling people who have spent up to 3-4hrs in a classroom with someone who tests positive that they too might now be positive is not keeping anyone “as safe as possible.” It is finding excuses to keep this LfA model working for as long as possible.

    This isn’t about privacy. This is about not wanting to admit that if you do the right thing and include classes in the contact tracing, soon enough everyone will be quarantined and we will end up in a fully remote semester after all.

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  7. This is a betrayal to all faculty and staff. The Faculty Council has been asking the administration for months now about their policies regarding anyone who tests positive and the administration has refused to disclose them until one week before classes start and well after the point in time that staff and faculty could ask to go fully online because of personal medical issues or medical issues of someone they live with. Faculty and staff needed to know this policy back in June to make an informed decision about what we were going to ask with regard to coming to campus. The university has screwed those of us who could have gotten a dispensation to be fully online by springing this decision on us all last minute. How very Trumpian of them.

    Yale did the right thing by telling students to emotionally prepare for deaths in their university community when students returned to campus. Northeastern did the right thing when they told students that their admissions status would be revoked if they attended parties. BU has basically said to students, staff, and faculty, good luck to y’all. It’s appalling, especially for a university has its history steeped in Methodist traditions.

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  9. On my blog later today, I’ll be commenting on the university’s morally wrong-headed decision, and the motivated, specious reasoning behind it, but I just wanted to quickly respond to one issue raised in the BU Today article that wasn’t raised in the Provost’s statement. ‘College of Arts & Sciences faculty “advocated strongly for notification,” [Prof. O’Keefe] says, while instructors at other schools have told her they’re less concerned.’ It may well be that pushback on Faculty Council has been coming more from CAS faculty than others (perhaps because many faculty in other colleges do not have tenure). That shouldn’t be taken as revealing people’s moral views. Here is a constructive proposal: provide a single question, anonymous survey to all instructors who will be teaching their classes in person. Simply ask everyone, “Do you think you should be notified by the university whenever someone tests positive in your class, with no student names ever being provided?” I predict that an overwhelmingly high percentage of instructors will respond that they do think they should be notified in this way in such circumstances.

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  10. This is the same BU that demanded faculty and PhD students disclose their personal medical information as justification for workplace adjustment requests, right?

    Glad to know they care so much about privacy. PLEASE.

    Is BU at all aware how much of its community’s faith and goodwill it has lost? Does it even care at this point?

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  11. This reasoning is specious and morally wrong, to paraphrase Daniel Star’s comment. Dr. Platt, are you claiming that if students are asked to disclose which classes they are in (information which the university already has, incidentally, based on registration), they will not be honest because… they don’t want their faculty advisor to know they are sick? How is their faculty advisor at all relevant to informing me, their TF, that someone in my classroom tested positive? I simply don’t understand how privacy would be a concern if teaching staff (and fellow students!) are informed. As students will likely be coming to class in shifts (the logistics of this have still not been clarified, one week before the semester begins), there will be lots of changes in terms of which students are attending remotely vs. in-person week-to-week. If students start attending class remotely, that could be for many reasons: they are no longer comfortable in the classroom, they have been rotated out by whatever policy is dictating who can come to class, they are in quarantine. Being informed that someone in my class tested positive would not make it obvious which of these scenarios is in play. But it will help me, and my students, stay safer.

    And just to clarify: when teaching staff inevitably become sick, will our students be informed? Or does the farce of maintaining privacy only extend in one direction?

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  13. Astounding hypocrisy from an institution that demanded medical documentation from instructors, and in some cases, their families or housemates (who have no affiliation with BU) in order to be granted the option to teach online. Where was the concern for privacy then?

    This university has determined that campus deaths are an acceptable trade-off for preservation of “residential education.” Not being informed that someone who you have shared space with has tested positive for a virus that can cause lifelong consequences or death is a major breach of trust, among many breaches of trust that have occurred over the last three months.

    We won’t forget these refusals to keep us safe. The university has permanently damaged its relationship with faculty and staff.

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  14. In the absence of actual leadership on these issues, faculty (and staff) are going to be forced to make decisions on their own, and I support them. The administration’s unwillingness to address some fundamental issues about safety in a truly transparent way will be its own downfall — without information, people will assume the worst in all cases. For instance, if I stay home from class because of a toothache, people will think that it’s COVID, and panic unnecessarily.

    The administration knows that even a small number of cases that connect to in-person classes will have a major impact on the willingness of students, faculty, and staff to continue with the in-person model; this seems to me to be a key reason they will not disclose this information.

    That said, and speaking from a position of limited experience, I feel that students will often disclose their COVID status, so faculty, staff and peers will acquire at least some information that way, albeit in a completely haphazard and inconsistent fashion that further undermines trust in leadership.

    Also, can we receive some clarity on why there has been no update to the COVID dashboard in over 24 hours?

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  15. If BU is so confident that the risk of in-classroom transmission is essentially zero, I wonder why they granted any faculty accommodations at all? After all, if we’re all safe in the classroom with masks and social distancing, why give some faculty an exemption? Either there’s essentially no risk, therefore all faculty should be required to teach in person, or there is some risk, and faculty should be given the option to not teach in person. By giving accommodations, BU seems to acknowledge that there is some risk to faculty, but they have prevented many of us from making the choice to protect our health and the health of our families and communities.

    The truth is that there is still so much we don’t know about this virus and how it spreads. But rather than take the safer option of remote-only learning, BU has decided to conduct a giant reopening experiment without giving me and many others the opportunity to opt-out (except by losing our jobs). I have to hope it all works and that no lives are lost and that no one suffers long-term consequences due to this experiment. But any last shred of trust I had in the administration is long gone. I will be looking for a new job this spring.

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  16. I’m sorry, but how is somebody in your class testing positive for COVID-19 not “an immediate threat to someone’s safety?” COVID-19 is somehow deadly enough to kill nearly 180k Americans to date yet also not enough of a threat to be worth mentioning to your faculty when it inevitably shows up in their classrooms? It’s been stated time and time again that the 6-foot social distancing rule does not apply in confined spaces like classrooms. For as much as BU has done to make a solid testing strategy for their student body, it’s disappointing they would stick their heads in the sand for something like this. They’re making all of their own efforts pointless.

    Also, how is contact tracing supposed to work if you’re not notifying the people who are in contact with the COVID-positive person in question? You don’t have to reveal any personal information to tell someone that they have been in contact with somebody else who has tested COVID-positive. You don’t even have to tell faculty it was someone in their class, but they NEED to know.

    This decision doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s reasoning is bad. And that tells me that the administration knows that what they’re doing is shady.

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  17. Incredibly irresponsible. There are ways to get this information across without violating privacy. As if a faculty member would be unable to notice a student was out of class for two to three weeks anyway…

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  18. Glad to know my tuition dollars are worth more than the lives of faculty and their families. Not sure if it occurred to BU administration that we’re going to take this into account when we’re alumni and we’re approached to make donations.

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    1. Pete Seeger’s Vietnam War era song “Big Muddy” is all too appropriate:

      Well, I’m not going to point any moral,
      I’ll leave that for yourself
      Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
      You’d like to keep your health.
      But every time I read the papers
      That old feeling comes on;
      We’re, waist deep in the Big Muddy
      And the big fool says to push on.

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  19. This is so far off the mark. Administrators are talking about preserving the integrity of contact tracing but barely have a clue to its purpose– or are hoping WE barely have a clue to its purpose.

    Part of the reason contact tracing works is because when Person 1 contracts COVID, you then tell Person 2 and Person 3 that they recently were in close contact with someone who had COVID. Now Person 2 and Person 3 can get tested and make informed decisions. If Person 1 contacts COVID, and Person 2 and Person 3 don’t know that they were in close contact with someone with COVID, now they aren’t going to take any steps to further reduce risk of transmission. Faculty live off-campus, and aren’t bound to many of the same risk-reducing measures as students living on-campus. Faculty are still going to go to the grocery store, pick their kids up from school, and spend time with family. They should know if they are at risk.

    But yeah this is probably all to preserve privacy and the integrity of contact tracing and totally unrelated to the fact that 25 students have already tested positive, and they don’t want to have to tell 10+ different professors on the third day of classes that they shared a classroom with a student who tested positive for COVID.

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  20. As a graduate student being sent into the classroom against my will (and yes, it is against my will when my main source of income and my health insurance are being held as ransom during a pandemic and economic recession), I am disappointed but not surprised. This is yet another point in a vast constellation of decisions and statements the university administration has made which make it abundantly clear that we are not valued, that we are disposable as far as campus life is concerned. Graduate students have not consistently received the same communication that undergraduates have with respect to campus policies. Nor have we, graduate students with teaching fellowships, received virtually any of the information regarding classroom and teaching policies/conditions that faculty members have. When we do receive information it is often inconsistent and subject to change. The decision-making process for campus policies that have very real consequences for us has been opaque and our voices have not been included. So, why would the administration decide to share information now? I am angry and hurt and emotionally exhausted. But I am not surprised. The psychological effects of this experience have been horrific and I’m sure they will stay with me, as well as many other graduate students, faculty members, and staff for a long, long time. And that’s on BU.

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  21. In most of the classrooms that will be used, even with LfA reduction of capacity, students would have to essentially not move in order to keep 6 feet distance from each other, and file single person in and out of the rooms. There is no way that proper 6 feet distancing will be kept 100% in a classroom and BU refuses to recognize this.

    They are forcing us to put our lives at risk or lose our income and health insurance. The great ‘workaround’ of enrolling full-time to keep health insurance would be absolutely impossible for most graduate students who would have to work full time in order to pay rent (something we actually cannot do…).

    This is wrong. I am angry.

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  22. This, like so much of BU’s fall plan, is simply bananas. I wish admin would just admit that the reason they won’t notify instructors is because it would send classes online and bring down the house of cards that is Learn from Anywhere. At any rate, I suspect students will figure out quickly that BU has been leading them on for what will ultimately be the worst of both in-person and online learning in the hybrid format.

    This is, and always has been, a public health disaster in the making. As other commenters have noted, good luck regaining any trust or goodwill from your employees after this summer. It’s long gone.

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  23. Absolutely wrong and deceptive. I teach in small classrooms. I don’t care how far apart desks are, if a student in my class tests positive, we are all at high risk. The ventilation systems are terrible–it will spread, and we have every right to know. Since we are being forced to teach in the classroom, the least BU could do would be inform us if a student tests positive. Surely if WE test positive, students will know! Also, yesterday BU suddenly increased the room capacity of a whole bunch of classrooms, with no explanation or announcement to faculty. When I inquired as to why these decisions were made, I got no answers. Making these changes one week before classes start, when students are just understanding that they won’t be able to attend in person every class they want to and are mad, hmmm…I wonder if the changes are based on actual science or, I don’t know, wishful thinking? BU, make better choices. Choose to protect your faculty and students. We may be going along with teaching in the classroom because we have no choice, but the damage done to our trust in BU is irreparable at this point.

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  24. Those of us who signed on to make Learn from Anywhere viable (despite logical doubts that teaching mask-to-mask and at the same time remotely is a good idea) have been betrayed by this decision to leave us in the dark in regard to students in our classes who test positive. How can we, in good faith, leave our classrooms and return to homes and family, feeling good about our participation in the LfA plan? The administration shows us that faculty–at least those who hung on and supported LfA–are equipment rather than people. What’s worse–and this is really, really bad–the administration doesn’t allow us to make the decision about what is more risk than we are willing to take.

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  25. Classrooms aren’t currently set up in such a way that 6ft or more can be maintained at all times — if a student sitting in the front of the room needs to leave partway through class, to get some water or use the restroom, the rooms are not laid out to allow for 6ft between them and the classmates they’ll pass on the way out. The logistics of entering and choosing a seat before class and then exiting after are also not conductive to maintaining 6ft. Then there is the problem of the potential for airborne transmission in a class lasting 1h45m to 3h45m. Instructors don’t want to breach HIPAA — they want an acknowledgement that people in a classroom are close contacts and should be treated as such, even if everyone is masked. To treat classrooms as anything else is not only disingenuous but also endangering the health and lives of students, faculty, their families, and the broader community.

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  26. This is so cowardly. BU is asking its teachers to walk into danger blindfolded, because it knows if we told instructors that they’ve been exposed to Covid, we’d all have to move to remote teaching–which is the ethical thing to do in the first place.

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  27. “The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it…The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him.” Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ from Discipline and Punish.

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  28. As a parent (alum) in the process of dropped their daughter off at BU all ok can say is WHAT THE FUCK? If just “fuck it don’t cut it” then how is this a reasonable policy?

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  29. This policy is one in a long list of absolutely unacceptable and dangerous decisions that Boston University is making to ensure that the “in person learning component” that was promised to undergraduates (with no input from the affected faculty and graduate students) can be accomplished.

    Essentially, this policy ensures that the faculty and graduate students will continue to (against their better judgement) provide the in-person classroom experience until the last possible moment. If the faculty and graduate students were actually notified that they were a close contact of someone who tested positive, then they would take the proper precautions and self-quarantine for 14 days. However, a faculty in quarantine means that they are unable to provide the “irreplaceable in-person learning” component to students for that two week period. Instead, Boston University will continue to allow us to teach, keeping their fingers crossed that we will not contract COVID19, or if we do, that we provide the in-person teaching until the last possible moment. BU realizes that without the faculty and graduate students, there is no chance for the promised in-person paradigm, so they will shield us from the true dangers of the classroom to pacify our very legitimate fears and prevent us from refusing to teach altogether.

    Does this policy mean that the other students in the classroom, who are also 6 feet apart, will not be notified as well? If the “risk of transmission in the classroom very low” then the other students in the class are also surely not at risk. Using this logic, what is the purpose of contract tracing at all? With this stringent and unreasonable criteria for a “close contact”, no one will be notified when a student is infected.

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  30. LfA was launched with an unnecessary denial of instructors’ freedom of choice, and is now being propped up with disingenuous excuses for keeping instructors in the dark. This is not about privacy; this is about secrecy, in an attempt to keep the fragile house of cards from falling. Please grant us the respect of at least being honest about it; we’re not that dense.

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  31. Dear undergraduates:
    When you arrive here and begin Fall semester, please don’t blame your professors for all the things that suck about LfA. The administration didn’t consult us about any of it, and would rather treat you like cash cows than touch a single cent of the endowment.
    Sincerely,
    “Someone who usually loves his job as a teacher, but now fears for his health and safety, and wonders how he’s supposed to talk through a mask to people in the room and on zoom at the same time.”

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  32. My son will have all his classes online this semester, which came as a surprise. I would be interested to find out what percentage of classes are in person. However, unless classrooms are much larger than I recall, I don’t understand how every one of the people in a student’s classroom are not their close contacts. Being in a classroom with people for an hour, mask or no mask, is not the same as walking past someone in a grocery store. All the teachers need to know if they have been exposed, so they can protect their families.

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  33. BU has been deceptive about many issues regarding their plan. They lied to graduates living in graduate apartments by saying months ago the apt would not be used to house undergrads. Then they send a shady email that they will be using these units to quarantine undergrads. Never gave grad students in these buildings an opportunity to discuss. What about those grad students with underlying health conditions; BU just placed them at unnecessary risk. Also, BU plan has gays that they are scrambling to address. What else did they miss? BU put money and the opinion of whiny undergrads ahead of overall community safety. PR will be bad in coming months. Blowback will be swift and loud. I’m glad I graduated last semester, but I’m embarrassed to be a BU grad right now.

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  34. This is an absolutely abhorrent policy, but can’t say I’m surprised given BU’s stubbornness on sticking to the LfA model at all costs. Rest assured, actions like this one will be the downfall of BU’s reputation in the minds of students, faculty, and the academic community. A faculty colleague at another university forwarded me this article from a colleague of theirs at yet another institution with the caption “what the hell is BU doing”, so you can be sure that word will spread.

    As many others have said, no one is asking for any identifying information of students in their class — no one is even asking for BU to tell us that it’s a student in our class, why not just inform us as someone who has been “contacted”?? I do not see the logic in this, except that it allows BU to control the narrative of the outbreak situation on campus. As someone mentioned recently, “This is not about privacy, this is about secrecy. The lure of secrecy is control.”

    I’ve recently been thinking what it take for BU to shut down its LfA model. Due to their stubborn refusal to listen to concerns of their faculty, staff, or students, I have come to the morbid conclusion that I don’t believe BU will even shut down if a student dies… (definitely not if a faculty/staff member or even a graduate student dies, given that we are clearly thought of as expendable), but even if a (paying) undergraduate student dies due to BU negligence, will campus close? At the rate things are going, I fear this dark outcome seems inevitable..

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  35. So here are the falsehoods in BU’s policy to not report to others that a student has tested positive for COVID based on protection of that student’s privacy:

    The HIPAA Privacy Rule permits a covered entity to disclose PHI, including psychotherapy notes, when the covered entity has a good faith belief that the disclosure: (1) is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of the patient or others and (2) is to a person(s) reasonably able to prevent or lessen the threat. This may include, depending on the circumstances, disclosure to law enforcement, family members, the target of the threat, or others who the covered entity has a good faith belief can mitigate the threat. The disclosure also must be consistent with applicable law and standards of ethical conduct. See 45 CFR § 164.512(j)(1)(i).

    Clearly a positive case of COVID-19 in a student who has attended class for a period of time lasting between 45 minutes to >3 hours represents a “serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of others”.

    Likewise, FERPA also contains a number of exceptions that allow for the disclosure of education records without consent.[i] Student education records directly related to the student may be disclosed: “subject to regulations of the Secretary, in connection with an emergency, [to] appropriate persons if the knowledge of such information is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other persons;” 20 U.S.C.A. § 1232g(b)(1)(I) (West 2012).

    So in order to protect the health of the faculty member teaching a class in which a student attending is positive for COVID-19 and to also protect the health of all of the other attending students, BU could provide the necessary information for that faculty member and those other students to alter their behavior accordingly.

    Ah, but there’s the rub … if the faculty member and the other students in the class were informed that they were all exposed to a person who was positive for COVID-19, they would, if sensible, all self-quarantine for 14 days, which means that they’d all go online for teaching and learning.

    And that’s the LAST thing that BU wants.

    So, instead, BU is willing to jeopardize the health of a great many persons, have more and more students test positive and potentially acquire life-long damage to various bodily organs, and publish obits in the BU Today of students’ and faculty deaths, all to keep their precious room and board money for as long as they can and to not touch a penny of their >2 billion dollar endowment (according to Wikipedia). Mind you, the administrators making these decisions are not on the front lines of this pandemic — they are sitting in their comfortable houses, meeting by Zoom, and avoiding contact with students and faculty and most staff. It is ever thus.

    Given that the US House and Senate are at a standstill with regard to another COVID-19 relief bill, the universities have not gotten what they asked for … yet. They have not gotten the limited liability that they were hoping would be in such legislation. BU is not acting reasonably here and thus I would hope that parents and the families of staff and faculty would take that into account when their loved ones fall ill and/or die from BU’s negligence in providing important and relevant information to faculty and students concerning exposure to a positive COVID case.

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    1. BINGO!

      It is BU jeopardizing students, faculty and support staff. The on campus “weekly testing” centers will allow more virus spread. If someone In the BU “community” contracts SARS2-COVID how will you contact trace from the testing center/classrooms/labs/admin offices/janitorial/etc. make more outdoor testing sites available and in many more sites.

      BU simply acting as the child “members of our BU Community are ill or dying, so please Congress give us money”. That’s right, if Congress wont provide money to BU then the students must pay and risk their lives and the lives of their families. Political Pawns for Profits! The shame of it does not phase them.
      How dare anyone put dollars and profits above human lives! Really! Grad Students risk your life or give up on your degree and future! “Pay and Play” (risk your life) IF you want a degree and career, you must unnecessarily expose yourself to the deadly virus ON A DAILY BASIS!

      BU should pay attention to and heed the facts/science and ensure safety to the BU community and put much less focus on profit margins. Profits will come again after the Pandemic is fully resolved.

      I am extremely concerned with BU choice of money over safety, money over health, money over scientific facts!
      I consider BU equal to a death camp at this point and really would like to see actions to change my opinion!

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  36. It’s come to my attention that students are not aware of this policy.

    Students are more likely to see policies that are emailed out directly (such as the recent email about discipline, from Dean Elmore).

    Students are less likely to click on a link embedded within the BU Today newsletter.

    BU ADMIN: Please share this policy widely with students. This is ciritcal information, related to everyone’s health, that needs to be a factor when deciding whether to attend class in person.

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  39. Greedy and cynical behavior. I am a BU grad residing in Brookline, where there is sure to be community spread. But the treatment of faculty and graduate students is disgusting. I will never donate a penny to this evil school which is so greedy that it has decided that deaths are just the price of doing business.

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