Administrators say their hands are tied by state laws and political realities. But a South Carolina court on Tuesday issued a ruling that may allow for mask mandates at the state’s public universities.
At Pennsylvania State University, the faculty senate passed a resolution expressing “no confidence” in the school’s plan to bring back students without requiring them to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
At Mississippi’s public universities, the pleas of hundreds of professors to require vaccinations have been drowned out by a politically conservative drumbeat against mandates.
And at Clemson University, the faculty plans to stage a protest on Wednesday, the first day of classes, to call for mandatory masks.
As thousands of students begin returning to campuses around the United States for the fall, more than 500 universities have said they will require coronavirus vaccination this year.
But at dozens of universities with less stringent health requirements, from Ohio to Iowa to North Carolina, professors are using protests, petitions and even resignations to press their demands for tighter coronavirus prevention methods. Much of the protest is coming in states where politicians, virtually all Republicans, have fiercely opposed vaccine or mask requirements, leaving universities with few tools to combat the spread of the virus.
A vast majority of counties across the United States are experiencing either “substantial” or “high” transmission rates that call for indoor mask-wearing even among the vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Orientation at Clemson University prompted the faculty protest. The university asked students to protect themselves from the Delta variant by wearing masks, but few students did so at a convocation for freshmen last week, judging by a photo of the event that circulated online.
“When I see hundreds of students packed together, and you can’t find a mask, I thought, ‘we are in trouble,’” said Kim Paul, a biologist at Clemson, a public land-grant university in South Carolina with about 20,000 undergraduates.
“I think the university needs to show real leadership and push back against the governor and say, ‘No, we are an institution of higher learning,’” Dr. Paul said. “We need to follow the science.”
A spokesman for Clemson, Joe Galbraith, said that after seeing unmasked students at the last freshman convocation on Friday, the university placed masks at every seat on Monday during a similar meeting of transfer students. “Participation was quite different,” Mr. Galbraith noted.
Clemson and other universities had interpreted South Carolina law as banning both vaccine and mask mandates, but a ruling on Tuesday by the South Carolina Supreme Court might change that, at least as it applies to masks.
In a case involving the University of South Carolina, the court ruled that nothing in state law prohibits universities from requiring masks. The University of South Carolina had imposed a mask mandate, then rescinded it, after Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general, said it was a violation of state budget rules.
The ruling on Tuesday applies to all public colleges in the state, including Clemson, said Dick Harpootlian, a lawyer and Democratic state senator who filed on behalf of a professor at University of South Carolina.
After the ruling, Clemson announced it would require masks.
In Mississippi, hundreds of faculty members signed a petition demanding that the university system require vaccination.
The petition was started at Mississippi State University, where classes are set to begin this week.
Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, has encouraged the state’s residents to get vaccinated, but the state has declined to require vaccines on university campuses.
A spokesman for Mississippi State, Sid Salter, said that about 52 percent of the student body has reported being vaccinated, a rate higher than the state population as a whole. The figure, however, is based on responses from a subset of students, just over a third of the student body, who self-reported their vaccine status to the university.
Penn State, with 40,000 undergraduates at its main campus in State College, Pa., decided not to require vaccination, even though Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have banned vaccine requirements. The school has imposed a mask mandate.
In a letter to the Penn State community last week, Eric J. Barron, the university’s president, blamed the decision on “political realities.”
“State funding of our university requires a two-thirds vote of the Pennsylvania legislature, meaning that our funding relies on strong bipartisan support,” Dr. Barron wrote.
As if to reinforce that concern, the president pro tempore of the Pennsylvania State Senate, Jake Corman, a Republican whose district includes State College, expressed concern on Monday that state lawmakers might retaliate against the university if it mandated vaccines. Mr. Corman said he would not support funding cuts.
A survey of Penn State undergraduates in State College found that 83 percent were fully vaccinated, a rate the university called “promising.” The university said, however, that only 71 percent of students responded, a fact that raises questions about the results because unvaccinated students may be less likely to respond.
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