As the Spring 2022 semester gets underway—and as the Omicron variant has led to record-high rates of COVID-19 that continue to increase exponentially, and are predicted to overwhelm already overburdened hospitals—SMU continues to make mask-wearing optional on campus. This policy is prudentially unwise and unethical.

1. Staff do not have the power to require masks in their workspaces in the same way. Throughout the pandemic, SMU has consistently offered fewer accommodations to staff, who were required to work in person even when many faculty were permitted to teach online. This treats staff as second-class citizens and is seriously unjust.

2. This approach misunderstands the moral stakes of mask-wearing. Masking up during a viral pandemic is matter of public health rather than individual choice. Wearing a high-quality mask helps protect you from being infected by others. But it also helps protect others from being infected by you, which is especially important because the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has high rates of asymptomatic transmission.

3. The public health guidelines are unambiguous: there is no room for reasonable debate about whether we ought to be wearing masks in indoor public spaces on campus. Recommendations from the CDC unambiguously state that unvaccinated people should wear a mask—ideally an N95 or equivalent—indoors in all public settings, and that vaccinated people should wear a mask indoors in areas of substantial or high transmission. Nearly all counties in the U.S. currently meet this standard, and Dallas County is currently in a red alert for “high risk of transmission.” SMU is following CDC guidelines about reducing isolation and quarantine periods to 5 days. Why are we not also following CDC guidelines about mask-wearing?

4. All of the most influential frameworks for thinking about ethics - consequentialism, Kantianism, a human rights approach, virtue ethics, and care ethics - agree that universities should require masks on campus.

As a private university with record-high enrollments and a robust financial outlook, SMU has the resources to be a leader in protecting public health and combatting the spread of COVID-19 on campus. Yet we are doing significantly less than other schools and universities in our region, and less than other R1 universities that we are striving to emulate.

Implementing a campus-wide indoor mask requirement is legal, advised by the CDC, and imposes little cost to no cost on the university. It’s also the morally right thing, and the bare minimum that SMU can do to protect not only our own community and the most vulnerable among us but also the greater public good that we should serve. We strongly urge SMU to reinstate our campus mask requirement.

(Please see this op-ed in The Daily Campus for a further articulation of this reasoning: https://www.smudailycampus.com/opinion/open-letter-reinstate-the-mask-mandate )