There’s no way to get around it — swine flu is at LSU. With dozens of students currently ill, this is a reality every LSU student has to accept.Welcome back to school.As students, staff, faculty and administration come to grips with this harsh fact, it’s important that panic not set in.  But, obviously, ignoring the situation can only make it worse.The first step is common sense. Stopping the spread of disease doesn’t mean turning into a hypochondriac, but it does mean being more cautious than usual. Wash your hands regularly. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Be careful around sick people.Basically, use all the health advice your mom gave you as a kid.These personal preventative measures are fairly simple, but common sense tends to turn into paranoia during pandemics.H1N1 is gathering a rather nasty reputation through widespread media coverage and rampant word-of-mouth. But the disease is actually less deadly than the standard flu that wreaks havoc on a fairly regular basis.There’s a huge difference between caution and paranoia. Swine flu certainly shouldn’t stress anyone out. Wiping every surface in sight with disinfectant and washing your hands every 10 minutes is probably going a little overboard — unless it gives you peace of mind.But the simple fact is swine flu shouldn’t interrupt anybody’s life in any meaningful way.Campus life should  — and probably will  — continue as it normally does, with a minor element of additional caution.This applies to academic life as well as simple personal interaction.In a classroom environment, the balance between health precautions and maintaining a brisk academic environment is especially difficult to create.  Classrooms often present the perfect environment for disease to spread — especially in the massive classes that crowd even lecture halls as large as the Cox Auditorium or the rooms in the basement of Lockett Hall.  Hundreds of students sit in cramped quarters in close proximity to each other.  And let’s not forget the lovely fact that H1N1 can survive on surfaces — such as a desk or chair in a classroom — for two to eight hours, according to the CDC.Encouraging, isn’t it?As disconcerting as these facts may seem, the responsibility to avert widespread contamination isn’t in the hands of instructors.  As much as students would like to think swine flu is going to result in less time in class this semester, this shouldn’t and won’t be the case.As much as I hate to sound like a professor — trust me, I enjoy finding that colored paper on the door saying class is canceled just as much as any student — it would be irresponsible for professors to use swine flu as an excuse to limit class time. Even students who have only been at the University for two days know the reason, because virtually every professor talks about it on the first day of class: SOMEBODY is paying for your education, so it would be just plain wrong for me (I mean them) to cancel class.Instead, it’s the students’ responsibility to not just follow common caution in keeping themselves healthy, but to monitor themselves to make sure they’re not getting sick. If students make it clear to a professor that they are feeling flu-like symptoms and that professor still penalizes their absence, then that professor is at fault. But, as much as some students like to whine about instructors and their fascist attendance policies, that seems unlikely.I hate to sound like a “tool of the administration,” but it should take a lot more than a few infected students to cut down on class time.Matthew Albright is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter@TDR_malbright.—-Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]