Following body lice infestation, UMD students look for someone to hold accountable
Editor’s Note: Riona Sheikh is a former freelance writer for The Black Explosion.
University of Maryland students erupted into discourse following the administration’s delay in body lice communications, and whether their Student Government Association played a role.
Students initially shared the discovery on Sept. 17, found in Kirwan Hall and McKeldin Library, through social media apps like YikYak, TikTok, and Reddit’s r/UMD forum. The forum has 68.8k members and acts as a platform for student discourse in a question-and-answer format.
A post was uploaded on Sept. 17 by u/beemovieee, who claimed to be a McKeldin employee. It was titled “LICE INFESTATION 4TH FLOOR MCKELDIN.” For many students, this was their first encounter with the situation.
“I heard about it through Reddit, just kind of that initial post that made everybody aware,” said Hannah Stokes, a junior psychology major who recently transferred from the College of Southern Maryland.
On Sept. 19, two days after the post, the University Health Center director, Spyridon Marinopoulos, sent out an email to the student body confirming the presence of lice, its extermination and general information.
The email opened with,“Your health and well-being are our top priorities.”
Shortly after, student discussion over Marinopoulos’ statement took place on social media. Among many, senior Alek Effland, an accounting major, posted a thread to the r/UMD community that asked students to “Contact SGA about poor lice response.”
Effland urged students to reach out to the university’s Student Government Association, writing, “[The SGA has] direct access to administrators and can put pressure on leadership to develop action plans when future public health issues occur.”
“The lack of student awareness regarding SGA’s actions on anything can be a part of a general transparency issue”, said Beza Mangesha, a senior hearing and speech sciences major who also found out about the lice through the Reddit post.“Actually, I have questions, like, what was SGA doing when everyone was running around saying, ‘Lice! Lice!’”
SGA president Dhruvak Mirani answered Mangesha’s question in a Thursday interview with The Black Explosion.
“Most students don’t have a direct line to speak with administrators the way I do. So I took initiative,” Mirani, a senior international relations and computer science double major, said.
When Mirani spoke with university administrators, they sent a statement on the Department of Environmental Safety, Sustainability and Risk website regarding the lice infestation. The issue, Mirani said, was the lack of notification to the student body. Following his discovery, he reached out to all the presidents of student organizations on campus.
“On Thursday, I was communicating with administrators throughout the day to ask them to release more information about what was happening. It was my conversation with President Pines on Friday morning that led the university to release the statement they ended up sharing,” he said.
According to Mirani, the delay resulted in student organizations suffering. “It made it difficult for student organizations to make decisions about what to do in terms of holding meetings and rescheduling them.”
Moving forward, he said he hopes to increase student awareness and facilitate information in an engaging way.
“One thing we’ll be advocating for this semester is having access to a student body newsletter so that we can regularly communicate our updates to students without having to go through intermediaries,” Mirani said.
Overall, Mirani was glad that the statement was eventually released, but also felt concerned over the delay.
“It was an unjustified sense of anxiety that folks had to experience that an earlier statement probably would have precluded from happening,” he said.
And this “unjustified sense of anxiety” was echoed by students.
“I first heard about the lice on Wednesday,” Effland said. “My understanding is that people were reporting it to the university and that they didn’t do anything immediately; it seems like they waited a few days to take action.”
Mangesha was left wondering what buildings were safe for her to stay in before her trips back home. With no information from the university, word of mouth from students became her primary source.
Mallory Coleman, a freshman animal science major, experienced similar confusion that was caused not by a lack of information on how to prevent or treat it, but where to go for help if students did have body lice.
“I know we have like that little health center, but nobody knows where that is,” she said.
Students without certain social media apps also expressed that they were more vulnerable to being uninformed.
Being a transfer student, Stokes said, “I didn’t get Reddit until I started going here this summer, and my TikTok [feed] doesn’t really get much from the school. So, if I didn’t have either of those avenues, I wouldn’t have known until somebody else told me.” She felt that with a time-sensitive situation, there’s no telling when and if that would happen.
Stokes believes the university’s delay in communicating may be attributed to their effort to verify body lice claims and minimize false information; however, she also noted the safety issues that came with that approach.
“People were saying that they themselves, or people they knew, were going to McKeldin to try and find where the lice had been; now we have students that are actively going into these areas on purpose that might transfer the lice to other places,” she said.
Evangeline Clifford, a senior psychology major who found out about the lice through the initial Reddit post, shared a similar frustration. “I feel like they waited until everybody already knew, so they were forced to address it. I also find it interesting that [the university] addressed it with The Diamondback before they sent something out to the student body,” she said.
While Effland, the original poster of the Reddit forum that called students to reach out to SGA, said the delay was a product of incompetence, Clifford believes that it could be attributed to the university attempting to preserve its public image.
“I get it because you don’t want to have constant scandals in the news. You don’t want to seem like your university is falling apart,” she said.
The delay caused a media frenzy with coverage from NBC4 Washington, WUSA9, The Washington Post and more.
According to Clifford, she could see the university’s urgent response in other situations throughout the years.“Addressing things as little as possible or as vaguely as possible, when something bad happens, like suicide, or political protests, they avoid it to make it seem like they are not taking sides,” she said.
SGA Vice President and international relations junior Riona Sheikh recognized Clifford’s concern and also encouraged students to remember they are not powerless.
“The university says that it stands for diversity, inclusion, and addressing student concerns, but the administration is not doing that… In SGA, it is our role to represent student concerns and to act to fix them, and use the discretionary power that we have to try and get administrators to change,” she said.
The university did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publishing.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled Riona Sheikh’s name. Dhruvak Mirani recieved the health statement from the University of Maryland, rather than finding the statement himself. This story has been updated.