Gongol.com Archives: July 2020

July 6, 2020

US government to punish international students if their colleges go online for the fall semester

Students will be kicked out of the country if they're on visas and instruction is made available online. There is no good reason for the government to do this; students from places like China and Iran shouldn't be tossed out just because of a pandemic beyond their control. ■ Look at what's happening in Hong Kong at this very instant. Free expression is under massive assault there as China thunders in with an oppressive "national security" law. Nobody can make a good-faith argument for involuntarily sending a student studying at an American university back to these conditions, just because Covid-19 has closed their university. Nobody.

Brand-name universities go all-online for fall classes

Harvard is going all-online for the academic year. At Yale, "the bulk of instruction will be conducted remotely". Princeton says "we will need to do much of our teaching online and remotely". ■ Some observers note that tuition remains the same, even though the delivery method is going to be different. Should it? ■ Online instruction is different from classroom-based instruction. Whether it's better, worse, or just equal is entirely up to how it's executed. Make no mistake, though: This pandemic is forcing an epochal shift in higher education. ■ We owe it to ourselves and our children to decide two critical public questions: (1) Should housing be treated as an investment or as a universal need? (2) Does higher education exist merely for sorting or for maximizing the potential of as many people as possible? ■ These two questions represent enormous shares of domestic spending, and bear massively on the long-term economic prospects of many of our people. Decide well.

Face masks reduced growth in Covid-19 spread by 40% in Germany

That's a giant change, thanks to a low-cost, low-effort intervention. One wishes we could find similar tools to knock down the growth in other bad things by 40%. If we could easily and cheaply reduce heart attacks by 40% or automobile fatalities by the same, wouldn't we do it without making politics a part of it?

Three police officers mocked Elijah McClain in pictures

The officers, of the Aurora (Colorado) police department, engaged in appalling behavior. If someone can't show good judgment with a camera, how can they possibly be expected to show good judgment with lethal force?