(John Hinderaker)
Experience shows that if you are 25 years old or younger, the Wuhan virus is less deadly than the average seasonal flu. (If you didn’t already know that, watch this.) And how many young people die of the seasonal flu? Virtually none. So it is hard to say why primary and secondary schools and colleges are not opening for business this fall.
In the case of K-12, there is an obvious villain in the teacher’s unions, which want more money for less work, are bargaining for far-left policies as a condition of re-opening, and, as always, couldn’t care less about the kids. But what about our colleges and universities? How can we explain their going online when there less than an average risk to their students?
A lot of students are unhappy about being deprived of the on-campus experience that their parents pay for. Thus, enrollment at schools like Harvard and Yale is reported to be down by around 20%. But on the other hand, some students are holding out, demanding to be excluded from campus. Campus Reform has the bizarre story, including this sub-head: “Student activists across the nation are protesting against in-person instruction.”
As the fall semester approaches, students from universities across the United States are holding protests, marches, and “die-ins” to denounce the return of in-person classes.
In the alternative, I suppose you might just…not attend. But nothing is that simple these days.
Campus Reform previously reported on a “die-in” held at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus. Students held gravestone-shaped signs bearing phrases like “HOW MANY LIVE$?,” alluding to Penn State administrators allegedly choosing profits over students’ safety.
Penn State’s “Die-in”
Another sign read “one death is too many.”
Whoever said that is too dumb for higher education. Seriously.
The students listed their demands, chanted “2, 4, 6, 8, we don’t wanna go back to State.”
Wow. That could be arranged.
Leftists at the University of North Carolina mounted a similar protest against going to school. This tweet, for example:
Tomorrow Aug 5th @ 4pm
If you’re able, come out to protest the university’s commitment to becoming a fucking death cult. pic.twitter.com/YFPiU775AD
— Kelly McArdle (@_iocheaira) August 4, 2020
It is hard to know what to make of students who don’t want their own universities to re-open. Presumably they want to be awarded degrees without the inconvenience of going to class, meeting with professors, interacting with their fellow students, studying in the library, and so on.
I can imagine wanting these things–barely–but I can’t imagine being proud of it. It takes a unique sort of cowardice to demand, as an 18-to-22-year-old, that one’s school shut down for fear of catching a disease that, in that age group, amounts to a cold–for the small minority who even notice that they caught it. While at the same time demanding that the shut-down institution pretend you are a student in good standing and are actually learning something.
Quite a few Americans have not covered themselves in glory amid the COVID hysteria, but these young people rank at the bottom of the pack.
