A twenty-year professor on trusting your provost with your life: Don’t.

Because come this fall, they may ask you to.

[cartoon of white man in suit and tie putting his head in lion’s mouth]

The executive suites and Presidential cabinets of America’s universities appear to include far too many people willing to put your life at risk to keep from shutting down. As a faculty member, will you go along with it, if called back to campus? Before you decide, ask yourself a few simple questions.

1. Is your provost Dr. Zeke Emanuel?

If you’re one of the 18,000 or so faculty and staff at the University of Pennsylvania, you’re in luck. (He’s actually the Vice Provost.) The rest of us unfortunately have to settle for lesser lights.

But whether your provost is an epidemiologist or not, what really matters is whether they’re smart enough and brave enough to engage with the emerging data on COVID-19 transmission on campus and the overall status of this pandemic — rather than wishful thinking and Trumpian talking points.

What’s come out so far is not promising.

Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University and a former governor of Indiana, appeared on MSNBC on April 26, 2020, to “explain” that COVID-19 is unlikely to be lethal to the young and healthy population of West Lafayette, Indiana (where Purdue is located). Apparently…