COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Prevented Me from Getting my Advanced Degree

Guest Post by an Anonymous Student

In 2022, life was good. I had graduated from Roger Williams University in 2019 summa cum laude and a semester early right ahead of what I call the plandemic, and had been lucky enough to find a job with a major company. However, I was looking for something more rewarding outside of that office job and knew I wanted to pursue a more meaningful career. After much research and consideration, I hit on speech and language pathology (SLP). I knew this would be a great career field as well as a philanthropic one, as I could go on to help children affected by masking policies during the plandemic, many of whose speech development had been hindered since there is no visual counterpart for phonemes when mouths and facial expressions are blocked. I applied to Southern Connecticut State University‘s (SCSU’s) Communication Disorders Graduate Program, and was delighted to learn I'd been accepted for the start of the fall 2022 semester. Sadly, however, my acceptance turned out to mark the beginning of a bureaucratic nightmare stemming from one factor—the so-called COVID-19 “vaccine.”

Because I was gambling on COVID vaccine mandates being lifted before I was to enroll, it was thrilling to learn that the entire system of public higher education in Connecticut had done away with mandates for students, faculty and staff (although interestingly, this did not appear well-publicized—I happened upon a notice of it on one of the websites in the 17-institution system, listed unassumingly above the masthead). Thankfully I had not succumbed to taking the jab because I had already figured out much of the scam surrounding it.

But all this was the road to nowhere: SCSU was continuing to block me, as I learned that accepted students to the Nursing and SLP programs were still required to take the COVID jab, while everyone else at SCSU was off the hook.  SLP was happily maintaining its mandate because its clinical study partners, separate from the University, were still enforcing mandates, and I couldn’t complete my degree without working in clinical facility settings.  Not willing to give up, I asked the SCSU-SLP personnel to help me sort out the problem, querying them about options though not receiving encouragement in return.  Do all the clinical partners mandate the vaccine, I asked the SLP Director.  It took weeks to get the answer I was hoping for:  no, a current one does not.  Hallelujah!  However, I was told, ’we can’t just assign you to that one partner for your clinical requirements; it depends on how we assign each student—that wouldn’t work out for you’.  No solutions, just roadblocks.

Puzzling was my understanding that the SLP program had as part of its clinical activities an on-campus site where students served community persons under faculty tutelage and supervision.  Were masks or mandates needed there, even though the campus-at-large did not require either?  If so, that opportunity was not offered to me as an accepted graduate student born and bred in Connecticut, with a great academic record, who pays taxes supporting SCSU as does her family, and wants to contribute quality SLP services to Connecticut upon graduation—no solutions for me; bye-bye.

I’d already wasted so much of my time waiting for wisdom to descend upon the COVID propaganda pervasive in this state, time tick-ticking away for what I believed were nominal grounds in reality.

Still determined, I continued to talk to the SLP director, pressing for some way to rectify the situation. I was ultimately told ‘Well you can apply to the Undergraduate SLP program, take a year of prerequisites, which you would have taken the first year of your Graduate program.’  To bolster their subpar answer to an awful situation, they told me what good employment opportunities the Bachelor’s in SLP awaited me. (Once in that Bachelor’s program, as explained below, I heard other faculty say the opposite, which is more accurate based on the credentialing American Speech-Language-Hearing Association information: the Graduate Program is really a requirement for a great SLP career.)  Horrid hitch #2 was that after a year of Undergraduate tuition at SCSU, I’d then need to re-apply to the SLP Graduate program I’d already been accepted to.  Sounded quite shady, especially proposed by a department and University who in my experience had already proved untrustworthy.

While I was still pressing for an exemption or other remedy, the opportunity opened up for submitting a “Non-Medical Exemption” form, whereas before only Medical Exemptions were considered. Hoping if successful I could still enter the Graduate program I had been accepted to for fall 2023, I optimistically prepared a heartfelt message of my commitment to the program, and a research-paper-style submission of over 10 pages of charts and graphs, and references to responsible, well-reputed scientists, researchers, medical personnel, and media disputing the necessity of COVID injections, masks and mandates.  Asking repeatedly for at least a general timeframe of when I might hear back on this 2/2/23 submission, I was never given a clear answer, so I waited months with no idea if the decision would come in time for me to finally enroll in or pursue any alternatives to what I’d set my heart on.

Frustrated with the dead air on this, on a Friday night near April Fools Day 2023 I emailed the two administrators to whom I’d emailed the ‘Non-Medical Exemption’ form a full two months previously, asking for a decision to finally be made. Both responded quickly to that! However, it only led each to weirdly inform me that they’d never received it!  Still not throwing in the towel, I re-forwarded the original emailed submission, and…BOOM, I received a quick response, but not to tell me that they’d finally accepted my Exemption, but to say that they no longer required any Exemption Forms!

With still only the undergraduate year option left open to me, after watching with much discomfort the many months of my 20s wash away, but with hope still burning, I acquiesced.  I took out a student loan and started the undergraduate year in fall 2023, leading to a Bachelor of Science degree that as of this moment I expect to complete in a couple weeks. I recently asked my professors for their thoughts on my nutty admissions situation, and they all exclaimed in great surprise, assuring me I was a terrific student and ‘How can that be?!’  But none took a stand for me.

With its saturation in communist ideology, campus life at SCSU was pretty dreary, though I did make some lovely friends.  The heaviness there was palpable in my opinion, and I and those who visited me there could sense the same uninspiring mood. We noticed so readily the limited joy and laughter in the classrooms, dining hall, outside in the sun, anywhere!  The propaganda infused in SLP, as in every discipline, has been in my opinion depressing and unproductive.  I was the only voice in any of my classes to question the obligatory DEI narrative interwoven into all classes, and what often appeared to me nonsensical pedagogy based in needless ‘politically-correct’ complications. Why can’t we adhere to some unifying standards, I thought, such as freely using standard English in our practice, rather than prioritizing the accommodation of any and all dialects one can imagine? I didn’t accept that any English-speaking patients of any age cannot be well-served in a standard English environment, and I didn’t find any case histories or statistics that credibly point otherwise.

Overall, then, questioning the DEI model was clearly not part of the learning approach. Ironically my own “diverse” thoughts were mildly tolerated, but often with noticeable irritation, and certainly not encouraged. The other students were generally quiet or parroted the instructors, but kindly they were not nasty to me after class.  I thought to myself that maybe they were glad somebody spoke up, while they were too intimidated to ever do so. Through all that, I maintained a high GPA, and I was honored to be chosen by a campuswide committee to speak at a university event, even being assigned to the graduate student portion of it.

Before the deadline for fall 2024 admission, I did re-apply to the SCSU Graduate program, and can you guess?  I was denied!  No explanation. Even after asking multiple administrators, replies were variations of ‘it’s just a different applicant pool’.  Also the unhelpful ‘you can just apply to other SLP Graduate programs’ (note that SCSU has the only accredited SLP Graduate Program in Connecticut, and out-of-state tuition for me would be two-to-three times more expensive).  They played me well. 

Just mentioning, does anyone else think that maybe just one of the factors—besides blatant discrimination due to my resistance to the COVID jab—might be the DEI credos at work there, that have nothing to do with fairness or merit?