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This is a guest post in response to an open letter published earlier this week.

As a concerned Hillsdale College student, I would like to take a moment to respond to the November 24th open letter submitted to Revolver News concerning the Covid contact-tracing and quarantine measures adopted by Hillsdale College administrators.

Like the letter’s anonymous author, I am a senior enrolled at Hillsdale College who feels discontent with online classes. Unlike the author, however, I remain immensely grateful to Hillsdale College for its continued commitment to providing its students with an exceptional education during these challenging times.

While the open letter certainly raises a few questions about the way the college has handled the Covid-19 virus this semester, I found its tone unreasonable and ungrateful, and its presentation of certain “facts” dishonest.

Hillsdale does not deserve to suffer the slings and arrows of heedless, emotional undergraduates. Instead, it deserves our love and gratitude coupled with well-aimed, constructive criticism. As every Hillsdale student knows, the college is dedicated to furnishing us with an education that begins and ends in the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty. Our criticism should be grounded in the same; it ought to be reasoned and measured, giving due respect to both the college’s difficult position and to the tireless work done by so many professors and administrators on our behalf.

In short, we should seek to converse and correct in charity, not complain and condemn in anger. It is my goal, then, to set the record straight by correcting the author’s factual misstatements, and offer measured comments on our shared concerns.

Like every Hillsdale College student, I have in my inbox an email, dated August 6th, from Dr. Larry Arnn, president of the college. In this email, Dr. Arnn invited students back to campus and linked to a website, which detailed, well in advance of our return, Hillsdale’s policies for isolating individuals exposed to the virus. Contrary to remarks in the open letter, Hillsdale students were given fair and timely notice about what to expect upon returning to campus.

The author accuses the Wellness Center Director of condemning hundreds of students to unappealable periods of isolation, sometimes without food or heat. I too heard similar rumors; while some of them may have been true at the outset, I know that the college moved swiftly to address these and other issues as they emerged. Students have been receiving plenty of food and attention while in quarantine, and any implication to the contrary is unfair. Further, personally blaming the Wellness Director for the contact tracing and quarantine policy is unjust. Hillsdale Hospital partnered with the college to make this policy; the Wellness Director was merely appointed to implement it.

Contrary to the author’s accusations of “underreporting,” Hillsdale has, in fact, been quite transparent in publishing its quarantine numbers. Since the semester began, Hillsdale has been sending campus-wide, twice-weekly updates identifying the number of students in isolation. At its peak on November 12, 293 students were quarantined, either because they had tested positive for Covid, had shown symptoms, or were contact traced. The number has declined since then.