There’s a fine line between doing what’s best for people, and what’s best for business — and private institutions, like Quinnipiac University, have pushed that barrier of morality and profit through its individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Policies that threaten to suspend or even kick students out of their housing for visiting each other’s dorms or having non-QU students on campus become confusing when they see tour groups of potential students walk across the quad as they head to classes. The “Bobcat Bubble” seems a lot more head-scratching when the university pushes its QU in LA program for the spring.

Many students and professors are uncertain if we will be able to return to campus in the spring, yet the university keeps chugging along with marketing to prospective students and study-abroad programs.

This is in no way delegitimizing the university’s COVID-19 response and getting us back to Hamden. The university follows guidelines from the Quinnipiack Valley Health District, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Connecticut’s Department of Health to ensure it does everything right in that regard and keep COVID-19 positive cases to a minimum. And Quinnipiac has been doing an amazing job at it thus far.

But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

The university cannot keep adhering to these guidelines in good faith and continue pushing the envelope to keep its revenue up. That’s how people get sick and potentially die from this virus.

Until Quinnipiac can show it cares about its current student body — not the prospective students visiting campus or alumni — I’m led to believe that the university’s attentiveness to health guidelines is just a charade to absolve any legal liability if a student loses their life from COVID-19 . It’s dishonest to balance profit with peoples’ lives in any way, shape or form. This isn’t any different.

As a student, I beg that the university’s interests are to keep me safe. They have squashed a lot of my concerns coming into this semester by continuously testing and making sure we wear masks on campus, but I don’t want to be infected with COVID-19 knowing my university put prospective students and alumni before a current student like myself for the sake of a profit.