Dear Donde Plowman and the University of Tennessee Knoxville Board of Trustees,

I’m angry about a lot of things right now. On one level there’s the general frustration so many of us are feeling about the state of the world. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of it, in trying to do the difficult job of guiding a large university through a lethal global pandemic.

However, there’s another level to my anger. The specific anger at the myriad violations of trust that was placed in you as the UTK leadership in response to Covid 19. You, specifically, let down a community of hundreds, and your actions will have life-or-death impacts on thousands of people.

Sensible schools closed their doors, invested in reasonable online options, and prioritized life and health. But so many campuses have allowed students to return that I’m not even angry about that part. Because the problem isn’t that you opened. It’s that you apparently looked at the long list of ways opening could go wrong and decided to aspire to them all.

No, the final straws for me were how you conducted the week of September 6th, when you looked at a campus with underground parties raging, infection spreading, contract tracing failing, and decided that it wasn’t enough to shut down campus.

Instead, you decided to take a leaf from 1347 and move the afflicted into dedicated “quarantine” housing. Housing with ineffective safety measures. Housing with shared bathrooms. Housing that was already occupied, giving the current occupants only 72 hours to relocate. You claim that moving online-only would be too disruptive to students’ educations, as if this isn’t?

The isolated students are also being provided inadequate meals and medical attention. They’re afraid and alone. And instead of investing resources in the things they need - like healthy meals and effective contact tracing so we can even begin to know how severe the problem in - you’ve instead sent them “get well soon” pumpkin bread, as if this gesture is anything other than a publicity stunt to make it seem as if you care.

If you actually cared, you’d be getting these students what they need. You’d be shutting the school down.

But not only do you not care, you’re threatened by community members who do. Employees of the school have not only been lied to about the numbers, just as the students have, but they have also been gagged. Repeated emails to UTK employees indicate that if they were to share more accurate information, express dissent from the party line as set by the Chancellor, or even offer empathy and support to their students concerned about COVID-19, they face disciplinary action and even firing. Were it not for this ban I would happily be more explicit about who I am, but you’ve made it clear that jobs would be on the line were those concerned to speak their minds.

Instead, both empathy and reason are abandoned in the name of making the school and its leadership look good, or at least remotely competent, while you bury official COVID-19 data in as many links and embarrassingly misleading charts as possible.

As if the Marie Antionette comparison of the pumpkin bread did not suffice, now you’re also emulating the worst failings of the Chernobyl disaster. Truly this multifaceted failing is the real Volunteer Difference!

If you wanted to flagrantly disregard health and safety standards, that’s your own moral failing. But to then lie through your teeth about the numbers is an absolute embarrassment and an offensive sham.

You should be ashamed that the primary reliable resource of concise COVID-19 numbers on campus is coming from a student aggregating data on their own. You should be ashamed that your community members are trusting social media to provide them more accurate information than your addresses. You should be ashamed of the mathematically impossible infection and exposure numbers UTK is attempting to pass off as accurate.

How can you claim only 622 cases as of September 8th, when on that same day there were 10 confirmed and 30 in isolation in a single class of 200, and expect that nobody will notice that your numbers are impossible? You already know that you don’t have sufficient contact tracers - you constantly send emails begging more employees to sign up to do it - so how can you begin to claim accurate numbers?

You’ve claimed that everyone must do their part to conduct the semester on campus. Why is this still your concern, when lives are at stake? A mild inconvenience might gain you more logistical considerations, budget cuts, and miffed students than you’d like. But how is that worse than 100% preventable deaths?

One would think that an institution of learning would have the common sense to follow recommendations grounded in science, and yet I don’t suspect you will. Because the science of the situation, scant as it still is, flies in the face of all of your actions.

If you were following decent science, you’d know that housing all of the infected students together is playing fast and loose with their lives. Reinfection is already a proven possibility, and we don’t know the rates yet. Housing students in cramped conditions, with shared bathrooms, when they were all infected at different times and with different viral loads, is a recipe for reinfection. Even if a healthy immunity is usually built, is that a theory you’d like to test with students’ lives? No ethics board in America would allow such an experiment, so what makes you think it’s appropriate to attempt?

By your own admission in multiple internal employee emails, you know that you don’t have sufficient testing or contact tracing. Are you even testing the presumed “healthy” students before shuffling them?

Dorms, even single dorms, are made to fit as many people as possible into the smallest possible footprint. That is their explicit purpose, and no one can feign ignorance of how dangerous that is with a disease proven to spread from close personal contact and recirculating air.

If you cared about your students, you’d crack down hard by disbanding Greek life - which has been the source of all but two (nice try attempting to downplay the outbreak severity by only posting the most recent clusters) of the known COVID-19 clusters on campus - and suspend any student caught discussing ways to get around the party bans with off-campus parties. You’d move all classes online and focus on expanding testing, contact tracing, and adequate food delivery. You’d formulate a plan to get students home safely, without turning them into plague rats infecting every place they return.

If you cared about the students, you’d at least ensure that their information wouldn’t be shared with careless all-contact emails violating their rights to privacy.

 But I don’t suspect you’ll do any of that. Not when you receive a payout for each student housed on campus. No, you’ll keep UTK in person as long as you can possibly feign ignorance and dance around with ineffective security theatre.

And then someone will die.

You’ll try to move the students off campus at last, and claim that their deaths have nothing to do with UTK. But we know the truth, and so do you. Remember, when you’re signing your name on the card for infected students, when you’re drafting your condolence letters to the families of dead students, when you’re giving your press release on how very unexpected this was, that you could have avoided all of this. At any time, you could have stopped and said this would not continue. You could have done the bare minimum to save lives and protect your campus community. And you failed to do so.

I cannot be more explicit: blood is on your hands. Every person who dies from COVID-19 because of a UTK contact - be they student, employee, or Knoxville community member - is squarely your fault. Not because you’re responsible for all their decisions. But because you had the power to take UTK out of the equation and ensure that, if nothing else, UTK would not be a factor of their sickness, and you chose not to exercise that power.

When things were dire, you explicitly selected money over the lives placed in your care. You have failed in the defining moment of your tenure, and in the defining moment of your life. I sincerely hope you spend the rest of your life attempting to atone for the death that you caused.

Veritatem cognoscetis, et veritas vos liberabit.

And you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Sincerely,

A concerned community member