There are plenty of reasons to be anxious about college students coming back to campus this fall, which is what my university is planning, for better or for worse. We worry about a possible COVID19 outbreak, first and foremost; whether our classroom technology will work, if doing in-person teaching; and the many daily discomforts of trying to do college life while masked and physically distanced. Humming behind all that is the fear that if we have to pull anchor and return to all-online, students (or their tuition-paying parents) will disenroll, the university budget will be strained beyond tenability, and the grim work of culling of jobs and entire programs will begin. 

I dreamt a few nights ago that I was on an ocean freighter in a huge storm, and we were taking on water and beginning an inexorable drowning.

We’re going dowwwwwwnnnn.

Meanwhile, in waking life I’ve been wading through a series of online classes I have to complete in order to return to campus, where I’ll be teaching my first-year seminar as a hybrid—Tuesdays face to face, Thursdays online, in just a few weeks. (My larger class, with up to 80 students, will be entirely online.) As I work through the different modules orienting me to testing and tracing protocol, safe distancing and masking, and all the rest, what’s gotten to me is the reality that this generation of students will, at least for a couple college terms and maybe an entire year of their lives, be surveilled at a level we’ve never seen, at least in the U.S. 

I find this disturbing, and I’m worried about what it’ll do to them. Students who’ve come of age in the past decade are already some of the most surveilled human beings in American history. They are digital natives, so electronic devices have been in their hands, and effectively tracking them, since babyhood. And that’s setting aside the cameras and satellites stationed on every side of us, tracking our presence in space. No need to get into Michel Foucault’s Panopticon right now, but these kids have been eagle-eye watched from all sides all their lives.

Many of the young people I meet come to college more comfortable with device-mediated socializing than the face-to-face version because it’s simply built into their consciousness in this high-tech era. I have lots of experience with my first-year advisees asking me for tips on making friends and meeting new people, as they struggle to build confidence in those social skills. I know young gay men who can easily access sex through Grindr at a moment’s notice, but have never dated a guy their own age because they don’t know how to approach that conversation.

If they are in the middle and upper classes, these kids’ parents have been more involved in their daily activities, with more access to their “private” time and space, than any other generation. The only exception I can think of is families in fundamentalist cultures, who while surveilled by parents and community, at least may not be as dependent on technology for entertainment, learning, and social life. Plenty has been written about overparenting and what that can do to kids’ sense of self-sufficiency and confidence, and I see the effects of that in the massive anxieties so many of my students carry. 

I’m not interested in shaming parents here. It’s just that when I watch these videos directed at the students, about how vigilant they need to be about masking, sterilizing, distancing, testing, staying on their dorm floor, not going to the party (god forbid, any kind of party ever!) if it’s not distanced, becoming diligent about weighing their intimate choices, and on and on, I’m just struck by the additional fear we’re infusing into them about every single thing

Up until now I’ve been in the willing-to-give-it-our-best camp about trying to start this term with some face to face options and students on campus, albeit in a de-densified way. But now I wonder if we’re doing damage by even trying to return to campus until this pandemic has subsided. 

I know the safety protocol is a matter of due diligence. But it’s insidious; how can a kind of paralyzing terror not infiltrate them (and the rest of us) with this new level of constant surveillance, wherein peers and staff, faculty and administrators are enlisted in the constant policing of one another? Even when packaged in upbeat, easy-to-understand instructions, the message is, in no uncertain terms: Everything you do could damage or kill someone else. Nothing you do is really safe, even if you obey all the rules (and they are infinite). If you make a mistake, someone—maybe your teacher, maybe your parents—could die. And it’s not just college students, who are at an age that in some ways makes them quite resilient, but preschool kids, wearing masks in the playground. What do we lose when we can’t see each other’s faces, learning to read their expressions, finding subtle signs of resonance between us, imagining that new face as someone I might become friends with? 

There’s an image on one of these modules that will stick with me, of two people sitting distanced on a bench, in masks, facing forward, with a red heart floating between them. It’s placed inside a unit on “safely socializing” or whatever the authorities are calling it. But picturing myself in their position: How could I start a romance under these conditions? Real students will barely be able to sit on a bench without someone coming over to patrol them. In fact, I’m pretty sure all the benches on my campus will be taped off. Danger: potentially social furniture!

I know it’s possible; I know love stories will come out of this surreal time; I know humans have found ways under the most horrific circumstances. I’ve read a story about a romance that grew between a Tutsi teenager hiding in the marshes of Rwanda during a genocide, and the Hutu teen, her former classmate, who was charged with slaying her with a machete. I also worry about campuses remaining closed and young adults being trapped in bad, or at least developmentally stunting situations, in their own homes. I’m just really worried about what trying to resume normal college life under the hyper-surveillance of this moment is going to do to students’ sense of possibility, of connections and new relationships and the room to make age-appropriate mistakes, in a world that is already fraught enough.