Pro-Palestinian protesters march around the Columbia University quad, April 2024.Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx/AP
Update, March 21: Columbia University claims its mask ban allows for “medical exemptions”; it remains unclear whether such exemptions include people with existing health issues or who currently have an infectious disease, as with North Carolina’s statewide mask ban.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Columbia University has agreed to terms set by the Trump administration in order to retain its federal funding. This includes a mask ban, and it’s unclear whether and how health exceptions would be implemented for people who, for example, are immunocompromised. The administration’s anti-mask demand seems to be in response to students at Columbia’s encampment wearing medical and other masks, which are really not that effective in concealing one’s identity.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, too, is reportedly trying to get lawmakers to include a mask ban in the state’s budget bill. High-grade masks remain the most efficient preventative safeguard against Covid, flu, and other communicable respiratory diseases. When Hochul first proposed mask bans last year, some New Yorkers I spoke with were angry that the bans were being proposed in the name of Jewish safety.
When Rikki Baker Keusch, a disabled New York-based Jewish community organizer, saw that Hochul was seriously thinking about a mask ban, they were livid. Taking Covid precautions has also become the norm in the Jewish community they are a part of in New York City. “We required everyone to test [for Covid] before Seder,” said Baker Keusch, who wears masks to protect themselves from infectious diseases during pro-Palestinian protests. Getting Covid again while at a demonstration would set back “all of the health progress I’ve barely been able to make since my last Covid infection,” Baker Keusch said.
As I reported, North Carolina passed the first state-level ban on masks in response to pro-Palestinian protestors. That was followed by a ban in Nassau County, New York, where police officers did not receive adequate training on what health exemptions could look like.
There are reasons for concern that a mask ban on a university campus could likewise be poorly implemented. “You’re not allowed to interrogate somebody about their private health information, or family member’s or loved one’s health information,” New York Civil Liberties Union senior attorney Beth Haroules told me previously, a fact Nassau County officials had apparently overlooked.
The date when a mask ban would be implemented at Columbia, and the parameters of the ban, have yet to be announced.
