Three weeks before the UK began lockdown, The New York Times published an article by Harvard historian Hannah Marcus entitled ‘What the Plague Can Teach Us About the Coronavirus’. The standfirst – “We need to be on guard against the xenophobia and persecution that arose during outbreaks of that dreaded disease” – struck a familiar chord for educators, and one much closer to home.
In the Middle Ages Jews were accused of poisoning wells and bringing the plague to Europe. Quarantine measures for immigrants were introduced in New York after epidemics in the late 19th century, and the term ‘cordon sanitaire’ originally expressed the geography of segregation, as much as it did disease control. In 2020, the target has been different.
Throughout January and February, we received reports from colleagues and peers about the harassment Chinese students were experiencing. This included jeers and insults as they went about their daily business. One UCL student from Singapore was beaten up on Oxford Street; his attackers accusing him personally of bringing coronavirus into the UK. Not surprisingly, when many received the call to return home, they fled. Thousands of students left London and on arrival in their home countries many were placed in quarantine, where they were deprived of mobile phones, access to the internet, and lost contact with their fellow students.
