Duke intends to bring back its classroom mask mandate based on county-level COVID data from the CDC. Help us end Duke's masking policy once and for all by showing the university administration that we do not support it. 

Since September 22, 2022, Duke University has not mandated masking in any campus settings aside from health clinics and buses. Duke’s then-provost, Sally Kornbluth touted the move as “a step towards more normalcy on campus and in classrooms.” 

On January 9, 2023, students, faculty, and staff at Duke University were sent an email notifying them that the CDC had moved the surrounding Durham County into its “high risk” category for COVID-19 community spread.  This was followed by the university’s announcement that “if Durham remains at high risk for two consecutive weeks, we will return to mandatory masking in classrooms until the rating drops below high risk.” 

For most of the Fall 2022 semester, two and a half years since the pandemic began, campus life had seemingly returned to as close to normal as students could expect. We were finally allowed to attend classes and communicate with our classmates and professors without being hampered by arbitrary masking requirements. The vast majority of students did so with renewed enthusiasm and vibrant discussions returned to many classrooms. There was a palpable change in the energy on campus.

Students at Duke have endured enough. We were weary of being forced to engage in weekly surveillance testing and wear masks on campus for most of the prior academic year and we are now fed up with being compelled to engage in performative displays of safety theater at the expense of our communication, learning, and mental health.

Mandatory masking is not a cost-free mitigation strategy and has negative impacts on our educational experience. Students were willing to endure these costs when they felt it was justified by an urgent sense of emergency but that justification is no longer present.

The world is now nearly three years removed from the outbreak of the pandemic and most of society has learned to live with endemic COVID-19. Immunity is widespread among the Duke population as well as in the broader community. There is no longer an emergency sufficient to justify continued emergency measures. Normalizing an emergency measure like mandatory mask-wearing is not an appropriate or fair course of action.

The rest of society has finally recognized that the decision to wear a mask is a personal one and should be made by informed individuals who are capable of making their own risk assessments. Why must Duke continue to lag behind and take this choice out of the hands of its community members?