At the very least, Syracuse University’s decision to place a professor on administrative leave for referring to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan Flu” and the “Chinese Communist Party Virus” demonstrates the administration’s oversensitivity and willingness to fold under pressure from the speech police. At most, it represents SU’s zealous crackdown on free speech.

In their joint statement emailed to the SU community on Tuesday, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Karin Ruhlandt and Interim Vice Chancellor and Provost John Liu pillory one of their own staff members for his bold decision to place these terms in his syllabus.

Racist, xenophobic, bigoted and hateful are the allegations the two administrators circuitously levy against this professor.

So it’s hateful now to attribute to an illness the name of the geological region where it originated? In that case, infections like Ebola, West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, and Zika (just to name a few) need renaming as well.

Naming illnesses after places is time-saving and allows for greater distinction between similar diseases. While examples do exist of highly distasteful disease naming-schemes, like AIDS at times referred to as gay-related immune deficiency, the naming process is almost never intended to humiliate or shame a group of people.

In all fairness, very few people likely desire to have their neck of the woods be associated with disease and death. Folks who share names with hurricanes are frequently reminded by meteorologists not to take it personally. Their justification? More easily recognizable storm names generate greater public awareness: more lives saved.

Nevertheless, SU administrators are not interested in reasonable explanations. They have, instead, decided that labeling COVID-19 after the totalitarian regime that actively suppressed life-saving, early reporting isn’t a righteous calling-out of a malicious government but an act of vicious racism.

How many lives and livelihoods could have been saved had the Chinese government sounded the alarms in December when cases of this new virus started piling up? Blood is on the hands of the Chinese government, but don’t let SU administrators catch you acknowledging that reality.

Published on August 25, 2020 at 10:43 pm