And many students aren’t buying these “performative” safety measures. In July, University of Missouri freshman Caleb Poorman was scrolling through Instagram when he noticed a direct message from an unfamiliar account: Gen Z micro-influencer agency Glacier.
Brand partnership scams run rampant on Instagram — look at any celebrity’s comment section and you’ll see dozens of “wanna collab?” messages. Poorman had never taken a sponsorship deal and had reason to be skeptical, but Glacier’s message wasn’t a sham. Instead, it was an unusual sponsorship opportunity with his university, which often goes by Mizzou.
The partnership between Glacier and Mizzou had a simple goal: identify potential social media influencers on campus and pay them to deliver public service announcements on safe Covid-19 prevention habits. Poorman, who now has about 1,700 followers, was among the first to sign up. Soon, he and four other Mizzou students were posting photos with captions encouraging their peers to use hand sanitizer, wear a mask, and log onto Mizzou’s symptom checker app #CampusClear. They were to be the inaugural class of Covid Ambassadors.
“I realized I was just as much responsible for my safety and everyone else’s safety as the next person,” Poorman said. “It was almost an obligation to take on a role as a Missouri ambassador.”
As academic institutions struggle to control Covid-19 outbreaks on campuses across the country, administrators are relying on groups of student influencers turned public health advocates to help tamp down on the wave of infections. At least 17 colleges and universities in the U.S. have launched student ambassador programs to promote Covid-19 safety on campus. While some schools have gone with Mizzou’s tactic of partnering with outside marketing firms, the vast majority have focused on in-person ambassador programs, which aim to encourage the student body to wear masks and stay socially distanced by the example of their peers.
“It seems very clear to me that Mizzou chose to invest in performative safety measures rather than investing in actual safety measures.”
But many students are skeptical whether these programs are really schools’ best bet for combating Covid-19. Many returned to campuses without a clear sense of how college life would play out during a deadly pandemic. They say administrators have stumbled to address the crisis on campus, resorting to selling branded PPE masks and relying on students to out their peers (and, when all goes wrong, simply laying the blame with any students who defied social distancing rules).
“It seems very clear to me that Mizzou chose to invest in performative safety measures — influencers, sidewalk stickers, etc — rather than investing in actual safety measures like testing, contact tracing, and quarantine housing,” tweeted Mizzou sophomore Caitlin Danborn.
Other school communities criticized ambassador programs for over-policing student behavior. At the University of Michigan, student groups denounced the school’s ambassador program for partnering with the Ann Arbor Police Department to help keep students in check on and off-campus. The groups worried the heightened police presence to enforce public health guidance would disproportionately impact Black and brown students. The University of Michigan responded to the backlash in late August by announcing that no police officers would accompany the student ambassador teams as they did their work. But as more and more student groups came forward with complaints about the program, the university ultimately decided to discontinue the ambassador program altogether.
Other students complain the social media ambassadors come off as trying too hard. After Mizzou ambassador Niki Tajik posted a photo of herself wearing a mask with a caption that read “the struggle of wearing glasses with a mask is very real,” other influencers lit up her comments with sarcasm. “This inspired me to wear a mask,” one joked. “ thanks, girl.”
Inés Eisenhour, an in-person public health ambassador for the University of Miami, said in an essay published in Slate last month that getting her fellow students to wear masks has been difficult. In her piece, Eisenhour recalled how one man on campus simply ran away when asked to put on a mask. Others took their masks off when they were out of the student ambassadors’ sight or responded with anger. “So, we’re fulfilling our job descriptions, but are the public health ambassadors really changing people’s mindsets?” Eisenhour wrote. “No. I just don’t think that’s possible.”
The University of California, Davis, also tried the approach of allowing student ambassadors to report students to staff members if they notice safety violations. “We wanted to engage students as partners in helping us create a positive culture of health, shared responsibility and personal accountability,” Cory Vu, associate vice chancellor at UC Davis Student Affairs, said. “Who else is better to model and engage the campus community in conversations on healthy behaviors than students?”
“Are the public health ambassadors really changing people’s mindsets? No. I just don’t think that’s possible.”
While other universities pay their in-person student ambassadors around $10/hour, the Columbia Missourian reported that Mizzou paid $10,300 for the social media campaign partnership with Glacier, opening up a deeper debate over whether schools should pay students for their labor. At a time when many colleges, including Mizzou, do not pay their athletes (though bills have been introduced to let the athletes profit off their image) hiring social media ambassadors at potentially high rates comes off to some as absurd and hypocritical. Mizzou is not the only university to hire social media influencers: YouTube royalty Brooklyn and Bailey are paid partners for their school, Baylor University, and continued to defend the school’s Covid-19 safety methods even after they contracted the disease.
Poorman declined to comment on how much money he earned from Mizzou by posting on Instagram but said the intentions behind the campaign were not misplaced. “My generation, Gen Z, and even millennials, in general, are on social media, so the rhetoric that social media isn’t a viable tool to influence people is ridiculous,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t have the positive results we were hoping for, it’s not going to be bad for anybody.”