As the current semester comes to a close and we enter yet another one where masks will be required, I would like to try and make some sense of what continues to be utter nonsense on the behalf of VU. Knox County is currently no longer in the red and Knox County public schools are mask optional. There are many students who have either had to go to online learning, quit, or wear the mask while exacerbating underlying conditions just for the sake of continuing their education. The vaccines have been widely available for some time now and those that wish to get them would have done so by now. It makes no sense to perpetuate the lack of interpersonal interaction afforded by actually seeing the FULL FACES of their professors and fellow students. This has become an abusive mandate in the mental damage it does to young people. We are already becoming a very impersonal society with “virtual” everything, zoom meetings, rampant use of social media for a perceived reality into one another’s lives, and of course now covering our faces. One can only imagine the psychological and emotional damage this does to our young people. One would also think this would be a priority of the university to return learning back to normal and be more inviting to those students they have forced into learning online from the isolation of their home with these mandates. We chose Vincennes University because unlike it’s larger city counterparts, it seemed like a “down to earth” environment while still offering a very nice campus close to home. We are sadly finding, it is anything but down to earth, lacking the common sense one would expect from a smaller town university. VU is doing (or so I’ve been told) what the larger Indiana colleges and universities are doing because they feel pressure to follow along with the crowd. However, I would dare say a large group of VU students come from areas and from families with roots that go deep into common sense rather than following along with contrived “mandates” handed down from authorities with no actual legal backing. VU was Indiana’s first college…….so why should they not be the first to stand up to the tyranny of our government and stand for freedom like most of their students' families do and allow masks to be optional? Cases continue to decline and we are now SIX HUNDRED plus days into the 15 days to flatten the curve……..Unmask our kids or at least allow optional masks and freedom to choose what is best for the individual!