Columnist Doug Girardot writes that in their reopening rhetoric, BC officials did everything in their effort to downplay the realities of college life in a pandemic. The flurry of summer emails students received in their inboxes and the maroon and gold technocratic signage littered throughout campus have suggested a conditional promise of normalcy: If you do all these things, then we can have school just like usual. But this is a dangerously fantastical apodosis.