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Stupidity in Ann Arbor
No, this is not a college football thread. The stupidity at the University of Michigan is their new Covid policy:
- FOR STUDENTS: This could include relocating to your permanent residence, staying with a nearby relative or friend, or finding a hotel space. Students in Michigan Housing must leave their residence halls during isolation, even if they are in a single room.
The bright people with public health degrees are taking the less vulnerable younger demographic and sending them out into the community where they can infect others. Hey, you have Covid, why don’t you go stay with grandma?
Published in General
Think of how many lives they’ll save with that policy…
I know this isn’t supposed to be a football thread, but what does that policy mean for football practices and the continued football season?
If it is unsafe to be in a single dorm room, isn’t it unsafe to go to classes?
How many football players do you think live in U of M housing?
The NCAA has not published Covid guidelines since the advent of the Winter 2022 sports season. I guess the policy is left to individual schools.
MLB still has a Covid IL.
I keep thinking organizations can’t come up with any more stupid policies. Silly me.
The fading intensity of the neo-Marxists’ first global assault on humankind built around the SARS-CoV-2 virus (most plausibly: a genetically engineered bio-weapon, perhaps with a complementary second use as a medical research tool) was only a strategic pause, to allow the activists to prepare for a second phase.
That second phase started in earnest in about August, 2023–last month.
It is tempting to interpret the OP’s Ann Arbor case as an example of the new phase. But that would be to ignore that fact the intellectual armies in control of the university never really slowed aggressive operations or pulled back, the way the rest of the secondary prog-controlled institutions did. The forces in charge of higher education are the elite divisions, closest to and most loyal to the intellectual leaders; they are analogous to the SS in the earlier progressivist initiative by the Nazis.
A weak supporting/diversionary front has been opened up that simply re-uses the same mostly neutralized weapons used in the first 30 month assault, which burst into the public’s awareness in America in March of 2020. Those include again pushing mask usage on the most submissive and still-uninformed members of the public, hysteria about the latest new variant, getting the media to blindly repeat the same lies about vaccine effectiveness and safety, and lockdowns.
There have been, presumably, zero COVID deaths among Michigan students in the past 12 months.
So there needs to be less than zero in the next 12 months for this policy to show benefit.
Good luck.
Why would you think that?
If these Universities saw enrollment drop precipitously due to crazy COVID policies they might rethink them.
Seems the only way to make the COVID cult back off is to make it painful for them to continue with their nonsense.
Isn’t enrollment/attendance down all over?
I believe so. But apparently it hasn’t hurt them enough.
A cultural Marxist might attack that position this way: There is not just one science. You are using white science. White science is only used by the exploitative dominant social group to maintain their privileged position and keep the exploited classes under their control.
So glad my daughter decided against even applying to Michigan. The way various schools and states handled Covid definitely influenced her decision of where to go to school. She’s a freshman, and we don’t need her being isolated while just starting out life in a new place and among new people. Our neighbors had a son experience the isolation during his freshman year in 2020 and he is just starting to recover from it. If her school starts up this masking nonsense, I’ll be working to organize a rebellion.
Yeah? Well, it ain’t working worth a damn.
I don’t know the economics of universities and where all their funding comes, but I assume there’s enough government money floating around, in addition to foreign students paying full boat, to protect them from market forces.
A cultural Marxist would definitely not attack that position, as I understand their theory. (Which I only been studying for a short time, with limited time dedicated to it.)
He would reply that it is true, and that it proves that they were right all along about the inevitable course of History. History created feudalism through the clash of contradictions in the prior stage, and capitalism and white privilege through the clash of contradictions in feudalism, and is creating communism from the contradictions in capitalism and white privilege.
TAX THE ENDOWMENTS!
Gobsngobsngobs of gubmint (you and I the taxpayers that is) money to various departments but also remember the gubmint (you and I the taxpayers that is) is still “loaning” gobsngobsngobs of tuition money and giving grants to millions of dopey kids and their parents to send said kids away from home for a coupla years. A decent idea (widely available advance education) turned into a terrible system.
Until they do the institutions will behave more like hedge funds than places of learning.
That was surprisingly quick and easy to think about.
It was almost like not thinking at all
I wouldn’t know where to look for comprehensive numbers across the country, but here’s a single data point: Texas A&M had just under 65,000 total students in 2019, and it’s up to over 70,000 students this fall.
It’s interesting that the President of that school was on Trey Gowdy the other night and was proud that they taught based on conservative values.
Not always, but there might be more hope for A&M than most places.
I don’t see why you think that this policy is stupid. It’s hard to gather the context from a small quote of a policy, with no link. I gather that UMichigan has a policy requiring students who get Covid to be in “isolation,” and they cannot live in student housing.
These are college dorms, right? So to prevent the disease from spreading, kids with Covid have to go somewhere else.
Where else they might go is not UMichigan’s problem. UMichigan’s problem is to try to prevent the spread of Covid on campus.
Other places will have their own policies, naturally.
I’m presuming here that “isolation” refers to the isolation of an individual student with Covid, and not some isolation of the whole dorm or campus.
I suppose that you could argue that it’s stupid for UMichigan to have a policy about Covid at all. They could just let the disease run through the student population, like they would with an ordinary cold.
One of the things I have learned though the Covid activities is how absolutely terrible America’s “educators” are at the critical thinking they purport to be teaching.
America’s “educators” (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) have been saying for many years how important it is for our children to learn “critical thinking skills,” and that they were the people to teach them. But, the reaction of teachers (mostly through their unions) and school administrators to Covid revealed (and continues to reveal) that they will not or cannot analyze data and information to determine things like risk levels (which I consider part of critical thinking), effects trade-offs, cost/benefit analysis, etc.
How should I have any confidence in their ability to teach our children and youth if they themselves are so bad at thinking and analyzing? My esteem for the teaching profession has diminished considerably over the last 3.5 years.
That is exactly why it’s stupid. You cannot stop it from spreading. However, if it spreads among a younger and healthier population it is less likely to kill vulnerable populations. To send Covid patients to homes or hotels where elderly or more vulnerable populations exist is irresponsible. Your thinking is Cuomoesque. “I’m going to ‘save’ the hospitals by packing the disease into nursing homes.” Here you’re “saving” the University. From a public health perspective it is sheer lunacy. To say “it’s not their problem” is a whole other problem.
Why don’t you educate us? Conduct the cost-benefit analysis faced by the UMichigan administrators in deciding what to do about Covid in the dorms.
It’s pretty easy, isn’t it?
If we let kids with Covid stay in the dorms, and one of them dies, then we get sued for not having a Covid policy.
If we tell kids with Covid that they can’t stay in the dorms, there probably won’t be a lawsuit, and even if there is, we’ll win, because we did everything that we could.
It’s perfectly rational, from their point of view.
If that’s the thinking, it’s very narrow minded thinking on the part of the university, and thus the stupidity. Just moves the problem, and may be increasing the risk of spreading the disease. Sending the disease elsewhere is not necessarily preventing the spread of the disease in general, as New Yorkers learned early on as the government manipulated death statistics by manipulating where people were sent to die. Such narrow thinking also led to stupidity such as CDC and state governments insisting attempts to limit the spread of a single virus had to take precedence over all other considerations, no matter how serious those other considerations were.
My wife is still ticked-off (15 years later) about the time our son’s college closed the dorms because several students (including our son) had significant cases of flu, and thereby sent our son to drive 200 miles home while sick. Sure, the college limited the spread of the flu on campus, but created lots of others risks in doing so. [Anticipating questions, no, college students don’t just go rent a room at a nearby motel (they have few funds for such unexpected expenses, and this particular town had only three motels with about 100 rooms among them with 4,000 students being kicked out of the dorms).]
“Safetyism.”
They could have a “covid policy” that allows the students to isolate in the dorm. Then they can’t get sued for “not having covid policy”.
Google says that in 2021 there were 19 million students attending colleges and universities in the US.
As of June 2023, fewer than 7000 people in the US between the ages of 18-29 have died of Covid.
I
couldn’t finddidn’t look for a finer breakdown, but given the way the curve grows by age I feel safe in saying that a disproportionate majority of those are in the upper end (post-college age) end of that cohort.For all practical purposes, college students don’t die of Covid.
They should all be sent down to Hillsdale. They might learn something.