Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in college doesn’t stay in college. In fact, contrary to the assurances of those once saying that “woke” students would change when hitting the “real world,” it has long been apparent that they actually change that world and make it more unreal. This is why, says one journalist, it’s terrifying that academia is now inuring students to full-bore COVID Ritual — and that many young people support the unscientific restrictions.
In his article, Michael Tracey makes a couple of rarely heard points relating to why not just COVID, but COVID Ritual, may be here to stay. For starters and aside from more nefarious reasons to perpetuate coronavirus restrictions, changing course would require a “paradigm shift” in thinking on the disease. Second, the tremendous China virus “infrastructure” — a lot of money is being made off SARS-CoV-2 scientific obscurantism — won’t be dismantled anytime soon.
Tracey points out that from Burbank in the West to Bangor in the East, a COVID iron mask is descending across academia. One part of the issue is that “thinking,” where “cases” (people who contract the virus) are used as a metric for devising policy.
This is irrational because viruses spread; that’s what they do, and avoiding them is like trying to avoid laughter. For example, anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the population harbors Herpes simplex 1 (the cold sore virus). No, it’s not as threatening to as many people as the China virus is, but it can in rare cases affect the eyes and even cause blindness among the immunocompromised. And we don’t try halting its spread.
Likewise, young, healthy people with robust immune systems aren’t imperiled by COVID; in fact, viral spread among the non-vulnerable can be positive because it helps achieve herd immunity. Yet this doesn’t deter colleges from treating old adolescents like nursing home residents. Tracey provides an Ivy League example:
As of September 17, Columbia University has newly forbidden students from hosting guests, visiting residence halls other than their own, and gathering with more than 10 people. The stated rationale for these restrictions? Administrators have extrapolated from the “contact tracing” data they’ve compulsorily seized that a recent increase in viral transmission is attributable to “students socializing unmasked at gatherings in residence halls and at off-campus apartments, bars, and restaurants.”
This is despite Columbia and other institutions having achieved near 100 percent “vaccination” compliance, again proving that the “get jabbed to get back to normal” appeal was always nonsense.
Another example of college COVID craziness is “Connecticut College in New London (estimated total cost for the 2020-2021 academic year: $79,575),” which “has its entire student body under mass quarantine,” wrote Tracey earlier this month. Here were some of the restrictions (some have since been lifted):
- Students must stay on their floor of their dorm and not have friends visit their rooms and may socialize with a maximum of three students outside, socially distanced.
- Residence hall common rooms are closed and the school’s Shain Library is off limits to students.
- Athletic practices are suspended and athletic facilities are closed (even though weight gain, a result of sedentary living, is a China virus risk factor).
- “Students may not have visitors to campus.”
- Students must have approval from their class dean to leave campus to attend to “urgent matters” (I’d just say I was attending to a non-urgent matter).
- Students may only ride in vehicles with others when they’re “roommates/apartmentmates” — and then only when “urgent.”
The full list of regulations is here.
But Connecticut College (CC) has nothing on the University of Southern California, which actually labels as verboten “unsanctioned indoor ‘hydration,’” writes Tracey in his more recent piece. No, that’s not a joke.
And who are the medical “experts” formulating these rules? At CC, one “member of the ad hoc infectious disease task force, Ariella Rabin Rotramel, currently serves as the College’s ‘Interim Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion,’ and is also Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies, with a specialty in ‘Queer Theory and Activism,’” relates Tracey. Her “pronouns” are “they/them.”
“I’m sure they is a lovely person,” Tracey then wrote, “but it’s unclear why Rotramel should be endowed with authority to issue virology-related policy pronouncements.”
Yet “they” is not alone. CC’s chief COVID Arbiter of Virtue is Dean Victor Arcelus, described as a “specialist in holistic learning.” Among other things, this “expert” said he was “‘quite disappointed’ at reports that parties had been rudely held this past weekend at an on-campus residential facility,” Tracey also tells us. “‘There will be conduct consequences,’ the administrator warned. ‘Suspension is most definitely on the table.’”
Arcelus, who sounds in name and tone like a Roman governor, further stated that there might not be a return to an iron-mask lockdown if the students are good little boys and girls.
The perverse incentives for these professorial potentates “are easy to grasp.” Tracey explains. “These administrators have so much invested in the infrastructure of ‘case’ detection they’ve constructed over the past year and a half — not to mention the wider ideological project of ‘stopping the spread’ at all costs — that it’s impossible to imagine conditions under which they’d voluntarily move to dismantle the surveillance systems over which they preside. And not just because the new powers conferred by this infrastructure — the ability to micromanage the private lives of young adults, track and adjudicate the propriety of their movements, etc. — is probably creepily intoxicating on a level these administrators may not be overtly conscious of, and in any event would almost certainly never publicly admit.”
There’s also the fact that, harking back to thought paradigms, it’s hard to people to abandon ideas after devoting so much time, reputation, energy, and ego to them. In accordance with the saying that it’s “easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled,” it’s hard to admit you’ve been all wrong. Related to this is the “Focusing Effect,” the psychological phenomenon whereby people rely too heavily when making decisions on the first information they get on a topic; and the “Backfire Effect,” which is when contradictory evidence only strengthens people’s beliefs.
But then there’s the Brainwash Effect. Instead of rebelling against the campus COVID craziness, too many students support the establishment. And as Reason wrote this week, “If recent history is any guide, we should be terrified that the current crop of college students might leave campus possessed of the notion that the most insane version of pandemic oppression is perfectly normal and desirable.”
For sure, for the young are our future, as is said. And it’s alarming that instead of demonstrating and holding widespread cough-ins, students are swallowing whole the establishment’s liberty-for-security lunacy.
