Incarceration not education: university Covid restrictions are turning students into second-class citizens

Scottish university students were banned from socialising outside their households, and told not to enter restaurants, bars, and pubs last week. The Scottish rules for non-students state that as many as six people from two different households may socialise outdoors or anywhere except in each other’s houses. 

This came into force less than a week after students at St Andrew’s University were asked to go into “voluntary lockdown” for the weekend as a result of four positive Covid-19 tests linked to a freshers’ week party. Students across all years at the university were asked to refrain from socialising and to “remain in [their] rooms as much as possible”. All university-organised events and fixtures were postponed, while non-students in St Andrews experienced no such restrictions. A third-year student at the university who left their flat on Saturday afternoon told me that they had expected to see the town empty, but instead saw the restaurants, pubs, and beaches busy with families.

Matt Hancock recently announced that he could not rule out a Christmas “student lockdown” with thousands of students stuck in university rooms far away from their families. And, in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, students are prohibited from socialising with other households within their accommodation – even when mixing households would not breach the rule of six. 

The common thread here is that students are being placed under far more authoritarian restrictions than the general population. Students are being threatened with expulsion for breaking rules which are not laws, and that the rest of the population is not asked to abide by. While families can mix, socialise, and support each other, many students, some of whom are in household “bubbles” of one, cannot do so much as drink a cup of tea in each other’s rooms. 

Students are demonised by politicians, university governing bodies, and the press, just for spreading the virus just by moving back to university – a decision that many students had no choice over. Residency requirements have been reinstated at many universities, and at others, students have not yet been told whether teaching will be online or in-person, or were told teaching would be online days after signing tenancy agreements.

Now that many students are back at university, they are treated as little more than “rent-paying children”, trapped inside a near-dystopian Malory Towers with police and porters checking on every movement. Student life has become almost incomparably bleak.

At St Andrews, some students have described the frustrations of online learning. A small number of St Andrews freshers share a double room and have described the experience of having simultaneous tutorials in which two have to speak over each other and struggle to hear or think. Although, there may be a silver lining here: the university has combined its online courses with face-to-face teaching and is introducing more in-person teaching for all students from this week. 

Elsewhere, students are not so fortunate. An international fresher from Hong Kong at the University of Leeds noted the horror of a fully-online freshers week: nearly every event consisted of being muted on Zoom and simply being talked at. 

The students I spoke to both in England and Scotland all mentioned a “duty” to follow the national guidelines, but thought that the extra impositions on students were harmful and misguided. Why make one section of society – including isolated freshers, homesick international students who did not make it home all lockdown, and those living in tiny shared accommodation with no outside space – suffer more than everyone else?

In one Scottish student’s words: “it’s too cold to meet outside, I live with someone I don’t even know, and I’m so lonely.”

The argument could be made that these rules are in place for a purpose: to halt the rising numbers of cases in 20-29 year olds. Figures such as the 172 positive cases registered at Glasgow University do little to allay these fears. But the most recent Public Health England report states that there were almost four times as many confirmed outbreaks in secondary schools than universities. Even in primary schools, the figure is nearly three times as high. The case statistics for people in their twenties are worrying, but so few of them are hospitalised, and it cannot just be students spreading the virus.

These extra rules have been allowed to proceed not just because of concern about how the virus spreads among universities, but because students are not seen as fully adult human beings. There’s a common perception that they are little more than heavy-drinking annoyances. Last week, I pointed out on Twitter that students “do more than just drink and cause trouble” and received a reply telling me that they “take drugs and surf porn too”. While many are concerned about the nation’s civil liberties, the restrictions on students are seen as fair punishment for their supposed lifestyle.

But students are, in almost all cases, adults. They pay rent and bills, have jobs and, most importantly, have lives which are just as full, fragile, and complex as every other member of society. A person’s early twenties, whether spent working or studying, is a period of incredibly intense emotions and vulnerability – to be denied the chance to experience this, or to be forced to experience it all alone and with no support is undeniably cruel. 

And students are not just a dead weight on the cities they live in: many work in the pubs they have been banned from attending, volunteer in their communities, and spend their loans in local shops. A university degree is now far more expensive than it ever was a generation ago and, as a result, it is far harder to find anyone wholly committed to drinking it away. 

Perhaps more use should be made of students’ greater capacity for risk – to have groups of young people whose danger of death is so relatively low, and their desire for normal life so high, could be a blessing. If students are to be kept apart from their families and from their professors and tutors through online teaching, then at least let them socialise with each other with Covid-19 measures in place – this could be a chance to test ways of limiting the virus, and understand how immunity might work. 

Many have said that the latest rules callously infantilise students, but the sad truth is that – at least in Scotland – children have more freedom. The fact that governments and institutions can so easily enforce rules that discriminate against whole sections of society should anger everyone, not just the students who are living through the hell of online education and extreme isolation.

In Zadie Smith’s new book of essays about lockdown, she describes the horror of youth’s style being “radically interrupted”. She describes how: “the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility.” 

It is heart-breaking, devastating, but ultimately understandable that this had to be interrupted many months ago – but for it to be re-interrupted, whilst others enjoy more freedoms, is simply inhumane.

Correction: An earlier version of this article reported that all teaching has been moved online at St Andrews and that many freshers at the university share bedrooms.

These statements have since been changed – St Andrews is combining online teaching with a range of in-person classes and only a small number of the university’s students are sharing bedrooms.