Photo by Jenny Yu ‘24
During the spring 2021 semester, Mount Holyoke College brought a limited number of students back to campus, provided that they follow guidelines.
By Allie Brown ’22
Contributing Writer
During the spring 2021 semester, the normally vibrant Mount Holyoke College was a ghost town. Walking across campus, you might’ve seen one or two other students also making the trek to the Dining Commons. We’d exchange our used plastic containers for new ones, get more food and return to our dorm rooms — the only place we were allowed to take off our masks or eat.
With the benefit of hindsight, many rules and guidelines Mount Holyoke enforced were not necessary or efficacious, even though at the time, we put our heads down and quietly accepted them. In times of crisis, this is common, as institutions and governments can defend almost any edict, arguing it is in the pursuit of health and safety and out of an abundance of caution. Of course, many rules that the College instituted were justified, like requiring bi-weekly testing and wearing masks indoors. However, some rules, like enforcing that students stay within a ten mile radius, reducing the Kendall Sports & Dance Complex operating hours and, limiting common room usage to one or two students at a time and assigning amenities in the dorms, went beyond scientific guidance, placing unnecessary restrictions on students and failing to consider the mental and emotional impact they created. There is a fine line between defending community health and creating rules for the sake of rules and exercising authority, and I argue that Mount Holyoke crossed it.
Authoritarian regimes throughout history have relied on shared ideologies to maintain control of their citizens. In North Korea, according to Vox, the Kim dynasty developed juche, or the idea that the country needed to remain completely separate from the rest of the world, lest it go up in smoke. The only way to remain unscathed, they claimed, was to put all trust in their godlike rulers. Last semester, it felt like the Mount Holyoke administration took a page out of the Kim dynasty’s book in terms of fostering a culture of complete adherence and scaring students into following rules, even if they didn’t make sense.
While the school relentlessly ensured that every last rule was for our own good, some Mount Holyoke students took the enforcement of rules into their own hands. An Instagram page, @mhc_payscampoforthis, was created where students could anonymously send in pictures of others breaking the College’s rules. Most pictures were of South Hadley residents taking walks on campus, which was not allowed, but it instilled the idea in students that they, too, might have their face plastered on social media, even if you were alone, outside and therefore scientifically posing zero threat. The page has since been deactivated, but it fanned the fire of already heightened anxieties.
This kind of social control through intragroup denunciations has been a historically popular method of control for authoritarian governments. In the 17th century, Russia was in an extremely tumultuous place, wrought with famine, war and political upheaval. To create some semblance of order, 16-year-old Tsar Michael Romanov instituted the Sovereign’s Word and Deed, a type of voluntary denunciation where citizens were encouraged to report one another’s suspicious activity. There was no direct incentive, but it allowed those struggling during this chaotic time to feel like they were contributing to the safety of the country. At Mount Holyoke, the Instagram page was a side effect of the toxic environment that the administration created, and seemed to offer an outlet for students to gain some semblance of control and latch onto a feeling of order.
Now that we are back on campus for a second time, vaccinated and much better informed about COVID-19, the witch hunt among students seems to have subsided. Because the school insisted on overbearing, draconian rules the first time around, they’ve lost credibility in the eyes of many students, even those who may have bought into last semester’s overreach.
If rules are over the top, people are going to break them. We are seeing that now with the school’s prolongation of the no guest policy. On Oct. 6, students received an email stating that, based on an analysis of COVID-19 cases on campus, the policy would be extended until further notice. Yet, two weeks before the email was sent, the COVID-19 dashboard reported only one positive case out of 4,847 students and staff.
Furthermore, when hundreds of students returned to campus after October break, only four cases came back positive. That’s not to say we should stop wearing masks or that COVID-19 is gone, but it instead speaks to the ability of Mount Holyoke students to make smart and informed decisions about their health and safety and those of their community.
With the rule that is in place, any guest who can pass for a student can still be snuck into dorms. Instead of allowing guests to come onto campus in a safe way, like requiring proof of vaccination or a negative test, the school has chosen to drastically over-dictate, driving students to break this rule and other, perhaps more reasonable, ones.
The biggest challenge that authoritarian regimes face is the constant need to scare people into staying in line. However, this constant pressure eventually de-legitimizes the authorities, like we’ve begun to see at Mount Holyoke. Even supposedly good directives are less likely to be followed by a populace when they’ve been shoved down your throat and declared to be for your own safety.
Reflecting on the time I’ve spent at Mount Holyoke so far, I’m frustrated by the toxic culture that developed and the community policing that emerged as a result. During a time when we’ve needed community most, Mount Holyoke created an environment that resulted in suspicion and divisiveness, driving students apart. The administration might not have realized this, as they were removed from the social impact and mental toll that these rules placed on us. At the end of the day, they either worked from home, or got to return to their families, pets and communities. They had their bubble; we had our dorm room.