My university is forbidding the professors who teach in person to move their classes online during snow days. When campus is closed because of weather conditions, we do what we always did and cancel class. Online is not an alternative to in-person. Nothing is an alternative to in-person. Looking at food on a screen isn’t eating. Making kissy noises at a screen isn’t kissing. It brings me to tears that there are at least a few people on campus who get this.
It’s very revealing that during the pandemic professors have done absolutely everything to destroy higher education while administrators have fought them at every step to prevent it. If professors were allowed to do what they want, every university would end up being an online diploma mill with pre-recorded “content” and underpaid people in India grading the essays students bought online from other underpaid people in India.
Clarissa's Blog 
It seems to me that wokeness is, among other things, an inclination to collective suicide. I guess that lefty professors know that the economy will eventually collapse because of the depletion of natural resources, and that will cause the end of society as we know it before the end of their lives. They may deny it in speech, but deep down they know it is true. They also know that a post-collapse society will not need them. Repressed anguish is still anguish, and can lead to seemingly absurd, self-destructing behavior.
Of course, that is just my opinion… I may be wrong.
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I think you’re right, though. Mainstream culture in the west is inclined toward civilizational suicide, at the moment. Thus the relentless drive for absolute conformity: gotta make sure we all go over that cliff together.
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What’s even funnier it’s disguised as care for one’s safety and wellbeing.
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It’s important that we all be wearing seatbelts and masks when we go over the cliff. It keeps others safe.
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Yay for an actual snow day!
Even if the snow is lackluster.
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It depends on which administration, which university, and for what. How is your DIE department on Branch Covidia? Where does your particular admin stand on non-proggie speakers on campus, or student mobs?
In a healthy institution, it’s Admin + laity + some teachers who hold the line against SocJus and all the rest. See the Seminex controversy of the U.S. Lutheran church.
In an unhealthy institution, it’s the oligarchs against everyone but the court eunuchs, and the eunuchs conniving and backstabbing each other.
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Do you have any advice or resources for anyone who would like to learn about pedagogy? I have no expectation that my niece’s school will educate her so it’s up to us.
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I think that professors and administrators are rallying up to destroy higher ed but from different angles, and they use COVID to do so. If there was an economic rationale for professors to teach remotely from an administrative perspective, administrators would ask professors to stay home forever. Where I work, administrators want professors and students on campus, because the university is loosing money on empty parking lots and fast-food restaurants.
And then, some professors say that they not want to be back on campus, because they “do not want to die.” I heard that last week from a colleague in English. It is infuriating.
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UK has been the same. I left our union with great sadness (here unions operate at the national level for a given sector) after the general secretary said that universities would become the “care homes of the second wave”, that we should not “fetishize face to face teaching”, and the like. I don’t know much about STEM, but within the Humanities and some Social Sciences, I think the prevalent “tabula rasa” mindset and the belief that humans are infinitely malleable has a lot to answer. If human nature and instincts don’t exist, then doing everything from home forever can actually seem like a rationale response – you avoid Covid and other viruses and perhaps even other threats, and your psyche isn’t going to suffer because hey it can adapt to anything!
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