Earlier this month, a student at one of the country’s most eminent law schools received an email announcing that a fellow classmate had anonymously lodged a complaint against him. The allegation: that he had violated University policy by engaging in prohibited behaviors, such as momentarily lowering his face mask to take a drink of water during a 90-minute lecture.
These institutions may not erradicate the virus but they have wiped out critical thinking and any genuine sense of autonomy and Constitutional freedoms. Imagine it's only about $40,000 per year to learn to heed authoritarian mandates uncritically.
Outside of the criminal justice system, I can't think of any American institution where adults are able to lord it over other adults to the extent they do so in academia. When I am feeling uncharitable, I sometimes conclude this fact is what makes their jobs so attractive to many college administrators.
If Trump were an actual bomb thrower instead of a petulant teenager in a cheeseburger-eating geriatric’s body, he would, upon reelection in 2024, hack the bloated “overhead” allowance that accompanies every federal grant and funds the imperial grievance studies apparatus. Colleges would slough off Vice Presidents of Student Life like an ICU patient with Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
I've got to agree with Matt, at least as it applies to the official political left. The notion that Trump was somehow uniquely autocratic has been shown by the current administration to be a pathetic joke.
Snitches getting stitches is sometime a very good and just policy. Snitch culture doesn't help enforce rules. It gives a new channel for sociopaths to destroy people for sport or profit using idiot authorities as the muscle.
I wonder how widely some commenters would be willing to extend their anti-snitching stance. Does inner-city gang culture, for example, have a point when it fervently discourages "snitching" to the cops?
Isn't the previous commenter's point that the few avenues we were taught to negotiate conflicts directly in good faith have been replaced with thousands of ways for aggrieved individuals to appeal to authority in virtually all contexts? And if there are more opportunities for slithering cowards to opportunistically and dishonorably leverage a false victim status to gain attention or to lift their status, isn't it okay to remind them that while they may not feel subject to a code of honor, they're still subject to the laws of physics?
In some cases, yes. Depends on the crime committed and the reasons for informing. Some people inform to get out of trouble they put themselves into. Some people inform to get rivals arrested and/or their business protected by police in return, like Whitey Bulger often did. Some informants lie, like infamous "jailhouse snitches" who make up "confessions" that never happened. And given that our judicial system is basically designed to wreck people's lives permanently if they're convicted of certain types of non-violent crimes like drug sales or possession, then, yes ,there are a lot of good ethical reasons to mind one's own business. Inner city gang culture is as much caused by external dysfunction as internal.
I'd say the downside comes when people, who are often just LARPing as "gangsters" start labeling legitimate cooperation with law enforcement as "snitching". If some scumbag shoots up a public street just to feel like a badass, then he deserves to go to prison but often doesn't because anyone who works with the police to arrest him gets called a "snitch" by idiots.
"I haven’t dutifully sought out enough “experts” to verify that forcing vaccinated 20-year-olds to wear masks while playing basketball...."
You should need zero such "experts".
These "experts" should be ignored, until they're forced to testify under oath, on pain of prosecution, that they're so sure (of whatever dogma they're puking out), that they'll be happy to be taken to the gallows, if an equally credentialed expert is willing to testify to the contrary.
I greatly appreciate your reporting on this. Higher education has been fraught to some degree pretty much forever, but there used to be ways to dodge some of the worst of it. With full spectrum snitching and surveillance in place, that's not possible any more. And the people who thrive in that environment are despicable and dangerous.
The way that I think about it is that COVID has enabled some of the worst pre-existing pathologies of academia to crystalize into a formal bureaucratic apparatus
At some point, I'd recommend some kind of Nuremberg trial, for promotional sake, I'd even rent a conference room in Nuremberg, to call the "experts" to the stand to explain why they recommended lockdowns (zero RCT proving efficacy), mask wearing (zero RCT proving efficacy), vaccines for those not at risk (more at risk from side effects than covid), quarantines for the health (that in turn reduced their immunity and increased likelihood of infection), silencing therapeutic alternatives/additives to vaccines (recommended by many physicians who assess each individual based on their specific need) etc. etc. It would make for an interesting trial. Plus, Nuremberg. Good beer too.
Consider this as a possibility: Covid is already endemic. (As quite a few countries have now acknowledged and subsequently have ended Covid restrictions, ridiculous vaccine passports, and other mandates.) Everyone will eventually encounter this virus (with most coming through it just fine; some not, just like most diseases). If this is a fact, then the question is, to what purpose and end game are all the restrictions and the attendant erosion of due process and our liberties? And are the trade-offs worth it? (Here speaking directly to those who would say....but the hospitals.) Those who take the *most unscientific position*, i.e. that Covid can be eradicated (think that through), are running this shit show and years from now, I am convinced, it will be seen as one of the most damaging blunders this country inflicted on itself.
I don't think this has anything to do with a virus of any sort at this point. I would place good money on this being led by the same people who are strong believers in Global Warming Is K-K-Koming to Kill! They feel that the earth is sick, and this is the current reaction to it.
The Venn diagram of college professors and climate alarmists is an almost overlapping circle. And I would state from my own experience dealing with universities (I come from an academic family) that they have almost zero contact with anyone outside their political ideology. This gives them no insight into the other half of the country, the dreaded conservatives. And, further, their dislike of the other leads them to discount any and all things that emerge from that group. And while this says really poor things about the science of that coming out of universities, it also leads them to do the opposite, lest any of their peers think them conservative.
Oh, and by the way, the University of Oregon is now a football team with a degree mill attached. Been like that for a good dozen years.
Keep reporting! over and over again. This is invaluable work.
Has anyone here read Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir) by Foucault, arguably his masterpiece? What is happening in universities vis a vis Covid is so frighteningly close to Focault's discussion of Jeremy Benthams' Panopticon.
And to take it further, I do wonder if the restrictions you see throughout the Anglophone world, and a few other places, but especially in the United States aren't a kind of rehearsal for a future disciplinary/police cram-down stemming from a financial or climate or political melt down.
Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote an opinion piece on MedPage Today regarding this topic. His opinion is very consistent with the thoughts expressed by Michael Tracey. Then look at the comments ...
I am so glad I am no longer in college, nor are my kids. The COVID restrictions place on college age kids these days while in school are absurd. And the snitch-culture being taught/encouraged is worse yet. Keep exposing this Michael. The more college administrations hate you, the more progress will be made in attenuating this absurdity.
Re this: "George Mason University just sent out a directive demanding that masks be worn in cubicles, 'even if you are alone within the cubicle and even if there is no one occupying the cubicles and spaces around you.'”
This one makes sense. Covid spreads in aerosol form -- EXACTLY LIKE cigarette smoke. So what are the chances that cigarette smoke would remain confined to a cubicle? Zero. Speaking from experience, I've found that even one smoker's plumes can stink up half an auditorium. Same for the virus.
Granted, confusion over this is widespread as restaurants, for instance, try to reopen by putting up transparent barriers between tables. This is nuts. If they worked, smokers could not only fling off their masks but could also light up and happily puff away in their magical little spaces without annoying or killing anyone else.
Also, I don't get why Harvard shutting down some classes because of a Covid outbreak is such bad practice. The vaccines are only marginally effective against the latest Covid variant and don't do squat to prevent someone with an asymptomatic case from spreading it to everyone else. So what was Harvard's alternative? Keeping in-person classes open until everyone was infected? Delta is an actual thing, not a magical incantation.
Here again, there has been confusion. Authorities should have told us from the start that Covid vaccines would not be "sterilizing," ie instantly capable of canceling the disease and preventing the vaccinated from spreading it. They were only intended to greatly reduce hospitalizations and deaths while being somewhat less effective at preventing contraction of the disease and almost entirely ineffective at preventing a "breakthrough" vaccine recipient from transmitting the disease to others.
Instead, much bigger promises were made (a kind of "noble lie" to encourage people to get their shots, I guess) and now there's a small industry spanning both the political left and right pointing out the contradictions and finding an unsurprisingly angry and receptive audience.
Very much agree, especially on the fallout from all the white lies / noble lies told on purpose as well as in many cases just the "broken telephone" of bad journalism. Sometimes you can't compress a complex topic into a 30 second news story on the 7:30 news without so much information loss.
Same happened to a friend of mine who is an exec at a well known Fortune 50 company. Went to a meeting in an empty building (zoom call as I recall) and removed mask while sitting in a cavernous lecture area to participate in call, certainly more than 6 feet from the nearest individual (btw, all are vaccinated). Someone on call reported the HR violation that is now a permanent "down grade" in their personnel file and required a meeting with the "manager". Peak 2020-2021 - all the more reason to quite corp culture and work for yourself.
I'd love to say something absolute, that we're being unnecessarily paranoid.
Or at least, unjustified in being suspicious about what the admins are going for. I think some caution IS still necessary, so we could be gracious and just say they are trying to protect our youngster, but are inadvertently taking this too far.
But maybe there ARE nefarious motives.
This particular telltale aspect here is Orwellian for sure, but I don't understand what is gained by it. I mean, from a student snitch point of view. Are they forgiven for a failing a test?
It seems the old process of junior-high behavior getting drummed out of everyone by high school has broken down and now persists through college and into the 25th grade & beyond
These institutions may not erradicate the virus but they have wiped out critical thinking and any genuine sense of autonomy and Constitutional freedoms. Imagine it's only about $40,000 per year to learn to heed authoritarian mandates uncritically.
Outside of the criminal justice system, I can't think of any American institution where adults are able to lord it over other adults to the extent they do so in academia. When I am feeling uncharitable, I sometimes conclude this fact is what makes their jobs so attractive to many college administrators.
True. Its the perfect job for aspiring petty tyrants.
If Trump were an actual bomb thrower instead of a petulant teenager in a cheeseburger-eating geriatric’s body, he would, upon reelection in 2024, hack the bloated “overhead” allowance that accompanies every federal grant and funds the imperial grievance studies apparatus. Colleges would slough off Vice Presidents of Student Life like an ICU patient with Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
the left has turned so authoritarian it’s an unrecognizable disgrace
It's not the left. That doesn't mean that I'm accusing the right.
I've got to agree with Matt, at least as it applies to the official political left. The notion that Trump was somehow uniquely autocratic has been shown by the current administration to be a pathetic joke.
OK, the left/right meme is pretty much useless when discussing Trump/Biden. Hard to know the difference -- is there one?
the "alleged" left then.
Snitches getting stitches is sometime a very good and just policy. Snitch culture doesn't help enforce rules. It gives a new channel for sociopaths to destroy people for sport or profit using idiot authorities as the muscle.
I wonder how widely some commenters would be willing to extend their anti-snitching stance. Does inner-city gang culture, for example, have a point when it fervently discourages "snitching" to the cops?
Isn't the previous commenter's point that the few avenues we were taught to negotiate conflicts directly in good faith have been replaced with thousands of ways for aggrieved individuals to appeal to authority in virtually all contexts? And if there are more opportunities for slithering cowards to opportunistically and dishonorably leverage a false victim status to gain attention or to lift their status, isn't it okay to remind them that while they may not feel subject to a code of honor, they're still subject to the laws of physics?
In some cases, yes. Depends on the crime committed and the reasons for informing. Some people inform to get out of trouble they put themselves into. Some people inform to get rivals arrested and/or their business protected by police in return, like Whitey Bulger often did. Some informants lie, like infamous "jailhouse snitches" who make up "confessions" that never happened. And given that our judicial system is basically designed to wreck people's lives permanently if they're convicted of certain types of non-violent crimes like drug sales or possession, then, yes ,there are a lot of good ethical reasons to mind one's own business. Inner city gang culture is as much caused by external dysfunction as internal.
I'd say the downside comes when people, who are often just LARPing as "gangsters" start labeling legitimate cooperation with law enforcement as "snitching". If some scumbag shoots up a public street just to feel like a badass, then he deserves to go to prison but often doesn't because anyone who works with the police to arrest him gets called a "snitch" by idiots.
"I haven’t dutifully sought out enough “experts” to verify that forcing vaccinated 20-year-olds to wear masks while playing basketball...."
You should need zero such "experts".
These "experts" should be ignored, until they're forced to testify under oath, on pain of prosecution, that they're so sure (of whatever dogma they're puking out), that they'll be happy to be taken to the gallows, if an equally credentialed expert is willing to testify to the contrary.
If you listen to the "experts" too much you get Australia.
I greatly appreciate your reporting on this. Higher education has been fraught to some degree pretty much forever, but there used to be ways to dodge some of the worst of it. With full spectrum snitching and surveillance in place, that's not possible any more. And the people who thrive in that environment are despicable and dangerous.
The way that I think about it is that COVID has enabled some of the worst pre-existing pathologies of academia to crystalize into a formal bureaucratic apparatus
At some point, I'd recommend some kind of Nuremberg trial, for promotional sake, I'd even rent a conference room in Nuremberg, to call the "experts" to the stand to explain why they recommended lockdowns (zero RCT proving efficacy), mask wearing (zero RCT proving efficacy), vaccines for those not at risk (more at risk from side effects than covid), quarantines for the health (that in turn reduced their immunity and increased likelihood of infection), silencing therapeutic alternatives/additives to vaccines (recommended by many physicians who assess each individual based on their specific need) etc. etc. It would make for an interesting trial. Plus, Nuremberg. Good beer too.
Consider this as a possibility: Covid is already endemic. (As quite a few countries have now acknowledged and subsequently have ended Covid restrictions, ridiculous vaccine passports, and other mandates.) Everyone will eventually encounter this virus (with most coming through it just fine; some not, just like most diseases). If this is a fact, then the question is, to what purpose and end game are all the restrictions and the attendant erosion of due process and our liberties? And are the trade-offs worth it? (Here speaking directly to those who would say....but the hospitals.) Those who take the *most unscientific position*, i.e. that Covid can be eradicated (think that through), are running this shit show and years from now, I am convinced, it will be seen as one of the most damaging blunders this country inflicted on itself.
I don't think this has anything to do with a virus of any sort at this point. I would place good money on this being led by the same people who are strong believers in Global Warming Is K-K-Koming to Kill! They feel that the earth is sick, and this is the current reaction to it.
The Venn diagram of college professors and climate alarmists is an almost overlapping circle. And I would state from my own experience dealing with universities (I come from an academic family) that they have almost zero contact with anyone outside their political ideology. This gives them no insight into the other half of the country, the dreaded conservatives. And, further, their dislike of the other leads them to discount any and all things that emerge from that group. And while this says really poor things about the science of that coming out of universities, it also leads them to do the opposite, lest any of their peers think them conservative.
Oh, and by the way, the University of Oregon is now a football team with a degree mill attached. Been like that for a good dozen years.
Thanks, Michael. This is so out of control. I appreciate your work against this authoritarian nightmare, which is why I subscribed.
Keep reporting! over and over again. This is invaluable work.
Has anyone here read Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir) by Foucault, arguably his masterpiece? What is happening in universities vis a vis Covid is so frighteningly close to Focault's discussion of Jeremy Benthams' Panopticon.
And to take it further, I do wonder if the restrictions you see throughout the Anglophone world, and a few other places, but especially in the United States aren't a kind of rehearsal for a future disciplinary/police cram-down stemming from a financial or climate or political melt down.
I read "Discipline and Punish" in college, and clearly need to re-read ASAP
This is the essay you should read...
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/how-we-forgot-foucault/
Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote an opinion piece on MedPage Today regarding this topic. His opinion is very consistent with the thoughts expressed by Michael Tracey. Then look at the comments ...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94785?xid=nl_vanayprasad_2021-09-30&eun=g1685188d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VinayPrasad_093021&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_Vinay_AYWDRL_Large_Active
I am so glad I am no longer in college, nor are my kids. The COVID restrictions place on college age kids these days while in school are absurd. And the snitch-culture being taught/encouraged is worse yet. Keep exposing this Michael. The more college administrations hate you, the more progress will be made in attenuating this absurdity.
Re this: "George Mason University just sent out a directive demanding that masks be worn in cubicles, 'even if you are alone within the cubicle and even if there is no one occupying the cubicles and spaces around you.'”
This one makes sense. Covid spreads in aerosol form -- EXACTLY LIKE cigarette smoke. So what are the chances that cigarette smoke would remain confined to a cubicle? Zero. Speaking from experience, I've found that even one smoker's plumes can stink up half an auditorium. Same for the virus.
Granted, confusion over this is widespread as restaurants, for instance, try to reopen by putting up transparent barriers between tables. This is nuts. If they worked, smokers could not only fling off their masks but could also light up and happily puff away in their magical little spaces without annoying or killing anyone else.
Also, I don't get why Harvard shutting down some classes because of a Covid outbreak is such bad practice. The vaccines are only marginally effective against the latest Covid variant and don't do squat to prevent someone with an asymptomatic case from spreading it to everyone else. So what was Harvard's alternative? Keeping in-person classes open until everyone was infected? Delta is an actual thing, not a magical incantation.
Here again, there has been confusion. Authorities should have told us from the start that Covid vaccines would not be "sterilizing," ie instantly capable of canceling the disease and preventing the vaccinated from spreading it. They were only intended to greatly reduce hospitalizations and deaths while being somewhat less effective at preventing contraction of the disease and almost entirely ineffective at preventing a "breakthrough" vaccine recipient from transmitting the disease to others.
Instead, much bigger promises were made (a kind of "noble lie" to encourage people to get their shots, I guess) and now there's a small industry spanning both the political left and right pointing out the contradictions and finding an unsurprisingly angry and receptive audience.
Very much agree, especially on the fallout from all the white lies / noble lies told on purpose as well as in many cases just the "broken telephone" of bad journalism. Sometimes you can't compress a complex topic into a 30 second news story on the 7:30 news without so much information loss.
Same happened to a friend of mine who is an exec at a well known Fortune 50 company. Went to a meeting in an empty building (zoom call as I recall) and removed mask while sitting in a cavernous lecture area to participate in call, certainly more than 6 feet from the nearest individual (btw, all are vaccinated). Someone on call reported the HR violation that is now a permanent "down grade" in their personnel file and required a meeting with the "manager". Peak 2020-2021 - all the more reason to quite corp culture and work for yourself.
I would use my girlfriend's thong to mask up. They deserve ridicule for this exercise in safety theater.
I'd love to say something absolute, that we're being unnecessarily paranoid.
Or at least, unjustified in being suspicious about what the admins are going for. I think some caution IS still necessary, so we could be gracious and just say they are trying to protect our youngster, but are inadvertently taking this too far.
But maybe there ARE nefarious motives.
This particular telltale aspect here is Orwellian for sure, but I don't understand what is gained by it. I mean, from a student snitch point of view. Are they forgiven for a failing a test?
I really don't know what to think about all this.
It seems the old process of junior-high behavior getting drummed out of everyone by high school has broken down and now persists through college and into the 25th grade & beyond