Welcome to campus! Whether it’s your first time living on campus, or you’re back for another quarter, the move to Evanston is an exciting time, particularly after quite an unprecedented year. Yet, the administration’s decision to bring back students comes at the serious cost of potentially infecting the numerous staff members employed to keep Northwestern functioning.

While considering whether or not to invite students back for Winter Quarter, the administration noted, “there have been few documented cases of on-campus transmission among students, and none among students and faculty or staff.” However, during Fall Quarter, over 150 staff members tested positive for COVID-19. This quarter, the on-campus staff are required to serve substantially more students on campus, increasing the risks of contracting COVID-19. While the return of students to campus may have opened up opportunities for employment during a national economic crisis, this additional risk to workers cannot be ignored.

Though the university employs a diverse population of faculty and staff, Black and brown people disproportionately make up the majority of service positions, including working in dining halls and cleaning our facilities. These positions require close interaction in spaces where large amounts of students congregate on a daily basis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted that individuals who work in these settings have a higher chance of being exposed to COVID-19.

While subjecting Black and brown workers to dangerous working conditions, the staff members that have the opportunity to work virtually are disproportionately White, including tenure-line and instructional faculty. Studies have shown that COVID-19 disproportionately impacts people of color in a number of ways including occupation, housing, wealth gaps and access to healthcare. The decision to bring back students worsens these disparities by greatly increasing the BIPOC staff’s risk of exposure to COVID-19.

When confronted about this risk disparity, administrators in a Feb. 3 ASG Senate meeting indicated that vaccination for these essential campus workers was not under the control of the university. Administrators insisted that local and state vaccination programs prioritized food service workers. However, they failed to produce an answer when asked about cleaning and maintenance workers that were not prioritized in vaccination guidelines. While recognizing the significant risk these workers were put at, administrators came short of providing meaningful answers of how they would best protect these staff members.

Observing these implications of students’ return to campus is not to take a position on whether or not it was the right decision by the administration. Rather, it serves as an opportunity to recognize the inherent inequities in our society that have led to these circumstances and led to the success of a predominantly white institution’s on-campus experience being solely dependent on putting minorities at serious risk of illness.

Given the dangerous position that essential staff members are put in, these times call for an even greater adherence to campus COVID-19 guidelines. Ignoring these protocols not only poses a risk to yourself and others, but seriously endangers the staff employed to make this quarter possible. In exchange for the opportunity to study on campus, students should grant them the safest working conditions possible.

Aidan Ocampo is a Weinberg freshman. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.