51–60 of 934 posts
It's nice universities will have to reform themselves and people will be able to speak their minds again without being afraid.
The data do not support what you suggest being a widespread problem. There's a popular story about it being a big problem, but when people start trotting out examples most of them fall apart on closer examination, which is weird if lots of solid examples exist (why pick so many that are, at best a stretch if not simply wrong, if this is a widespread trend and not just a couple actual events that were maybe not great?…
"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."
"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "
And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...
" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."
"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."
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Some 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pandemi…
The people who voluntarily glued themselves to propaganda TV never paid attention to it in the first place. They'll believe whatever they need to because they're mad about lockdowns.
Earlier 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.
We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.
So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.
And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene. Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up. Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to m…
So 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.
Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.
So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.
So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.
And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene. Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up. Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to m…