At the start of the 2021-2022 school year, Katie Trumpener’s colleagues in the Yale English Department were preparing to welcome students back to the classroom after more than a year on Zoom. But Trumpener, an immunocompromised professor, would be staying home. As she witnessed the return of in-person college life, Trumpener worried that the university was sacrificing the health and safety of its immunocompromised students and faculty in its rush to return to normalcy.
“The general push was to get everybody back,” Trumpener said. “I have a fundamental philosophical difference.” To her, “The top priority would be everybody getting through the pandemic alive. That’s the bottom line.”
Trumpener was not alone. After hundreds of Yale students went into COVID-19 isolation at the beginning of second semester, Julia Miranda ’24 and Priya V. ’23 drafted a letter to Yale administrators, calling on them to provide hybrid learning options for students. They called their campaign “Yale Hybridize Now.” Since February, their letter has received over 600 signatures from Yale community members and supporters from other universities. While the campaign has not yet elicited substantial changes from the administration, advocacy for immunocompromised students continues at Yale and across the country as pandemic restrictions relax. This advocacy adds to work at Yale that began even before the pandemic to make learning more accessible.
On March 21, Yale joined a growing list of schools that partially lifted their indoor mask mandates. University Provost Scott Strobel announced that students must continue to wear masks in the classroom and instructional settings, healthcare facilities such as Yale Health, and campus transit vehicles, but not in gyms, libraries, or dining halls. Miranda, who is at high-risk for contracting severe symptoms from COVID-19, said these changes were “scary” for high-risk and immunocompromised students, as it makes it harder to go about daily activities like going to the library.
To Abby Parish ’25, another immunocompromised student, the partial removal of the mask mandate after spring break represented a betrayal of Yale’s most vulnerable. The university capitulated to “healthy people clamoring for it to be lifted,” with a disregard for the “voices who did not feel ready.”
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As it navigates the return to in-person classes, Yale has adapted its policies on masking, quarantining, and virtual learning throughout the school year as case counts and variants have risen and fallen. “We’re going to have to reinstitute masking or different testing strategies and responses every time there’s a variant that is going to cause substantial clinical disease,” Yale Assistant Professor of Medicine Sheela Shenoi told The Politic.
Shenoi predicted that Yale and other universities will move away from universal surveillance testing, and will soon move to a symptom-based testing plan. Still, she expects the infrastructure for testing to remain in place at Yale in order to “ramp down” and “ramp up” Yale’s testing capacity as needed based on case levels, new variants, and their severity.
However, Miranda said the uncertainty of constantly adapting public health measures to the pandemic’s feels “tumultuous,” and Parrish said that Yale’s current bi-weekly testing regime provides a huge comfort, given her at-risk status.
“I don’t like the idea of them lowering the number of times that people have to get tested,” Parrish said. “I understand that it’s an inconvenience; no one enjoys having to go get tested. But for the peace of mind that it provides, I think it is far more than worth it.”
Shenoi said she can “absolutely” understand why immunocompromised individuals are afraid given the loosened restrictions that Yale has already implemented. She emphasized that with Yale’s move to a mask-optional policy, it is important to cultivate spaces where a culture of mask-wearing is respected which can be accomplished by using language such as “mask-optional” in new policies.
Still, the partial removal of the mask mandate caused Parrish to revert back to some of her precautionary measures from the height of the pandemic. While Parish never felt safe in Yale’s dining halls to begin with as an immunocompromised student, she now actively avoids the most crowded dining halls because of the lack of masking in the crowded servery areas.
While there are still efforts from advocates to improve air filters and enforce high mask quality to make students feel safer in classrooms and other spaces, Miranda said the main focus of the current advocacy is bringing together faculty and student support for providing hybrid options for attending classes. In particular, advocates are working to provide a centralized system for students to request virtual accommodations.
“A more transparent policy that more clearly outlines the steps that immunocompromised students can take would [help] make sure that it’s not something that is up to their personal discretion,” Miranda told The Politic. “[It should be] part of a larger struggle for accessibility and disability justice.”
Miranda said a transparent policy to define the steps that students should take could have two components. First, undergraduate students seeking accommodations could request them through Student Accessibility Services (SAS), and graduate students could go through the Office of Institutional Access and Equity. There could also be a “governing structure” to notify professors of the need for accommodations for students who contract COVID-19 or are otherwise afraid of going to class, despite not being especially high-risk.
Parrish said that chronically ill and immunocompromised students are used to self-advocacy, and so most students would not see registering with SAS would not be seen as a huge barrier. However, Joaquin Lara Midkiff ’23, former president of Disability Empowerment for Yale (DEFY), told The Politic that registering through SAS would be “really hard on students.” Instead, Midkiff said the conversation should focus on a “university consensus” around what learning looks like, rather than an individual-based approach in response to the needs of immunocompromised students. Trumpener identified another flaw with these policies: as many immunocompromised people, including herself, do not see themselves as disabled, so they might not think to go through SAS to get accommodations as it is usually a resource used by disabled students.
“Faculty and teachers would benefit from a university-wide policy that encourages negotiating learning between faculty and students in a more open way,” Midkiff said.
Parrish told The Politic that at the beginning of this semester, many of her professors offered remote options or recorded lectures, but now many of those options are being removed. Parrish feels these remote options provide peace of mind for immunocompromised students who do not feel safe in large classroom settings. Without them, it can be difficult for students to gauge how a professor may respond to requests for accommodations under the current vague, individualized system.
Trumpener pointed out that university guidelines have also limited choices for professors. Even when faculty want to teach online, they may not be able to.
Late in the summer of 2021, about a week before classes began, Trumpener received an email notifying her that she could fill out a form and obtain a doctor’s note to get permission to teach remotely. However, she was “astonished” to find that with classes coming up, there was no medical committee formed to process her application. While Trumpener ultimately received approval to teach online, she said she knew other faculty members who lived with immunocompromised family members yet were not approved to teach remotely.
According to Trumpener, there are numerous faculty members who teach using a hybrid model without formal approval from Yale, with some professors resorting to Zoom when a student gets sick.
For Trumpener, the hybrid environment has been “pretty bumpy,” but that has not dissuaded her from teaching remotely. However, she worries about what the future looks like if she is not able to return in-person in future semesters.
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To Parrish, Miranda, and Midkiff, their advocacy work in the context of the pandemic is part of a larger conversation about Yale’s treatment of disabled and chronically ill students as a whole.
Before the pandemic, Midkiff said DEFY fought for flexible learning options for situations such as students who needed recovery from surgeries. These ideas were “summarily rejected,” but when the pandemic began, Yale quickly switched to online and hybrid options when they were needed for both non-disabled and disabled people. “All of a sudden [providing online learning] matters,” said Midkiff. “This is an illustration of Yale not being particularly intelligent and proactive as an institution.”
“I feel like the university has an opportunity as we look toward moving out of the pandemic to really center disabled and chronically ill voices and implement policies going forward as a whole that will benefit those groups,” Parrish said.
Last summer, Midkiff pushed for the university to formalize hybrid learning options that included posting lecture recordings and having online office hours alternatives. To him, these options benefit all students. “Accessible education and access to spaces and places, benefits everybody, not just the people who they’re ostensibly most directly serving, in this case, students with disabilities,” Midkiff said.
DEFY was founded in 2016, but Midkiff pointed out that the membership has exploded in the last few years, occurring simultaneously with a “consciousness shift” at Yale where DEFY has led the conversation with a “large activism portfolio.” As DEFY has expanded the conversation about accessible learning at Yale, Midkiff told The Politic he is hopeful that accessibility around learning can change, despite a lack of progress that resulted from advocates’ efforts last summer. Especially as there is a new generation of faculty members and graduate students “intimately acquainted” with online learning, Midkiff and Miranda agreed there is reason to believe the many years of activism will finally provide accessibility in learning at Yale.