For the record, I do think the union’s intervention is too late. Students have been told something (in many cases by universities trying to lock in a position before details were fully worked out on the ground), and the OfS consumer protections have kicked in.

In general, most large institutions in this country have moved too slowly on the pandemic, and my personal read on this—as a pessimist and as a disaster historian—is that there was a major misjudgment in March about where we would be with this pandemic in September.

Folks were eye-rolling when I started asking about Sept on day 1 of lockdown, but that’s when we needed to start planning in real detail at all levels of universities. At many places, planning took place without much real input from teaching staff (and probably other staff too).

That said, the union is entirely right about the serious threat to the UK of setting in motion these mass movements across the country, which are more dangerous to the nation overall than the US universities are to the US.

The UK is smaller, people travel around on public transit much more, students and staff crisscross the country on public transit frequently throughout term, dorms might be miles off campus and students take city buses to campus, students live within the community.

That volume of movement has existed at no point since late February, because of the industrial action, so there has never been a point during this pandemic that this many students/staff have moved around the country.

Add to that the fact that the activities all of these students/teaching staff are crisscrossing the country for is sitting indoors in poorly ventilated spaces for hours talking loudly (essentially the most dangerous thing we can be doing), this is not a good idea.

But it is what it is at this point. Getting affairs in order is now an additional task for September.