In mid-March—aka spring break season—the coronavirus was a disaster in Europe, but hadn’t fully taken hold in the US. Many students cancelled their plans. Some did not! This turned out to be a very bad idea for a number of reasons.... https://www.cosmopolitan.com/college/a32958991/university-of-texas-spring-break-mexico-covid-19-cabo211-scandal/

@JusCollege, a travel company specializing in spring break trips to Mexico & elsewhere, refused to give students refunds, even as Trump was threatening to close the US/Mex border. So some students still went. They told me they didn’t want to lose their money.

In Cabo, it was easy enough to ignore the virus; the economy depends heavily on tourism, & people working there were incentivized to downplay this looming threat so everyone had a good time. JusCollege sponsored party boats, pool parties, concerts. There was no social distancing.

211 students from @UTAustin went on the trip. ~70 ended up testing positive for COVID19 when they returned. When the news arrived on Twitter, all hell broke loose. The story was covered in the NYT, CNN, etc.; Matthew McConnaughey made a statement about it!!

UT has a VERY active Twitter contingent (Hi #UTTwitter!!). They took it upon themselves to discover who had gone on this trip. Through adept social media sleuthing, they identified & called out a number of students who went on the trip, who got dragged, HARD.

The blame was directed at one particular set of sorority girls, many of whom hadn’t even gone on the trip. They got misogynistic hate mail. Plenty of frat guys had also gone to Cabo, but their names weren’t publicized, and as far as I could tell, none of them received hate mail.

The anger was about coronavirus, but it was also about a larger frustration with Greek culture at UT. Many students, including those in Greek life, told me the school has a problem — frats/sororities have a lot of power, and have a history of seriously problematic behavior.

So were the #Cabo211 foolish? Yes. Should we be blaming @juscollege just as much (or more!) than these individuals? Probably! Was some of the backlash disproportionate? Sure. But was the underlying frustration with UT Greek life and its role on campus legitimate? YES.

This story made me think a lot about so-called cancel culture, & how anger with institutions gets directed at individuals, which can make those individuals feel like victims even as they participate in/benefit from problematic institutions...

also, it should be said that @UTAustin has been pretty transparent throughout this process. Students from other schools (Syracuse, Maryland) were on the same JusCollege trip. Odds are, they also had student outbreaks, but they didn't make them public...