UNC faculty are pushing for vaccine mandate in special meeting — as they should be
As the beginning of the semester draws closer, UNC-Chapel Hill faculty will meet to discuss COVID-19 safety on campus and push for the authority to implement a vaccine mandate for students, faculty and staff.
The Faculty Executive Committee will hold a special virtual meeting Wednesday at 3 p.m., UNC announced Monday. In an email to committee members, faculty chair Mimi Chapman expressed the need for “delegated authority to deal with COVID-19 on our campus,” pointing to concerning trends in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations caused by the highly infectious delta variant. Currently, there is no vaccine mandate in place for UNC System students, faculty or staff. The UNC System has previously said it will not implement such a mandate, citing a lack of “clear legal authority.”
“In sum, we are entering the fall semester with a much more infectious variant on the loose, no knowledge as to the full rate of vaccination on campus, and no vaccine mandate for our campus community,” Chapman wrote in the email.
However, other public universities have so far managed to overcome legal obstacles to implementing vaccine mandates for students. A unanimous 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld a lower court’s ruling Monday, saying that Indiana University’s vaccine mandate did not violate any constitutional right.
Now, faculty are starting to put pressure on the UNC System — and they should be. As the Editorial Board said earlier this week, a vaccine mandate is the best way to ensure the safety of students, faculty and staff in light of a return to “normal” campus operations in the fall. If the UNC System is unwilling to do what is necessary to protect public health, it should give individual campuses the authority to do so themselves.
