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A university president makes a case against cowardice
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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#42So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.
He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.
Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated
For real. The sibling comment is flagged now but people seem to have memoryholed the impact of COVID on the healthcare system.
Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.
I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.
Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#44Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
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Then they would need to tax nonprofit religious organizations too. Why don't they just make the special interests pay their own multi-trillion dollar war bills instead of sabotaging US universities with surprise taxes? If you increase expenses and cut revenue, what should you expect for your companies?
Why not just make a flat tax for everyone and end all the special interest pandering and exceptions for the rich. It is a poisonous misapplication of the time of our government to constantly be fiddling with tax code to favor one group or another.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#46Some of that so-called activism seems to be closer to suppressing any thoughts someone dislikes. Removing that from university life is not cool, that „activism“ itself went off the rails too.
Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price. Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without…
> they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized
You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to the most studied medicine in human history or the one that saved more lives than any other medicine in human history?
I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown. How many people died because of COVID? You don't know. No one knows. Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.
Ah yes, because we don't have the exact numbers your appeal to idiocy must be normalized.
Do you know how many people are saved by antibiotics RIGHT NOW? You don't know?! NO ONE KNOWS!
Give me a break, we don't need to dissect every corpse to see how effective the vaccine is.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#48Wild that he is some kind of exception. Rolling over, folding is not the university culture I remember.
There wasn't, historically, the level of enormous potential negative consequences legally and practically if the universities talked back. Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.
Might have been a mistake to let some of them turn into real estate hedge funds.
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#49A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?
Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to the most studied medicine in human history or the one that saved more lives than any other medicine in human history?
I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown. How many people died because of COVID? You don't know. No one knows. Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.
Do you think the rough death toll of pandemics are fundamentally unknowable to some approximation? Do you think the massive increase in mortality during the pandemic was a coincidence?