Ignoring useful successes

Another instance of the mainstream media and the Mandarin Class not just getting it wrong but failing to acknowledge how wrong they were. From The Education of Jerry Falwell Jr. by William McGurn.

This is actually a really good news story for higher education were it not such an indictment of the shameful mainstream media.

How it must hurt to have to admit: Jerry Falwell Jr. was right.

No doubt this explains why we’re not reading stories about how the president of Liberty University kept his Lynchburg, Va., campus open while keeping his community safe from Covid-19. The doomsday predicted when Mr. Falwell announced Liberty students would return after spring break never came to pass.

On March 16, three days after that announcement, Mr. Falwell had to abandon his plans for in-person classes when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam banned gatherings of more than 100 people. So Liberty moved its classes online. Thanks to long experience with such instruction—Liberty already had 100,000 online students—the move wasn’t as wrenching as it was for others. Meanwhile, students could still come back to campus if they chose, and about 1,200 of them did.

From the reaction, you would have thought returning to Liberty was a death sentence. An emergency-room physician told the Daily Beast, “If Liberty University reopens, people will die.”

On March 29, the New York Times ran a news story whose original headline read, “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus, Too.”

As the Times reported, nearly a dozen Liberty students had come down “with symptoms that suggested Covid-19,” a fact endlessly re-repeated in other news outlets. A snarky Financial Times op-ed citing “Falwell’s hubris” dropped the qualifiers and asserted “twelve students promptly came down with coronavirus,” which was corrected about a week later.

Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that Mr. Falwell “seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.” In one of several critical pieces, the Washington Post headlined a story “An authoritarian power structure brought coronavirus to Liberty University.”

Now the university has finished the school year and the students have gone home. So what actually happened?

To start with, only one student tested positive for coronavirus. Liberty says this was a graduate taking an online course who hadn’t been on campus before or after spring break. Four employees either working remotely or from offices off-campus also tested positive. But Mr. Falwell says no infections were traced back to campus. No Liberty student living on campus tested positive, and no staffer stationed on campus tested positive. But press accounts left a different impression.

Higher education, long an American jewell, is in peril. They bloated their costs, reduced the quality of the product, damaged their brand, and built a business model on exploiting their faculty and their students. The past decade, they have used international students and out of state students to paper over the financial cracks.

Covid-19 emptied the dorms. Demand for slots next year have plunged. Students appear to be focused on local institutions. There is a high likelihood that families are not going to be willing to pay $70,000 for a virtual experience. The inflow of students from China can probably be written off. The always reliable revenue from college sports has evaporated. The big institutions are in a hundreds of millions of dollars hole simply because of the current lockdown. Plans for the coming fall intake are still vestigial. The plans for financial viability are nonexistent.

Despite all the Mandarin Class prognostications of doom and the media Cassandras claiming that Liberty University would be the killing fields of education, none of it was true. Liberty University had the courage to do what was right. They followed the science. Young healthy people are the least vulnerable to Covid-19. And the results bear them out. They did not have a problem.

Just as happened with the bold moves by the Governor of Georgia, and the Governor of Florida, and South Dakota, etc.

The mainstream media has mistaken opinions and forecasts for facts. They have succumbed to credentialism, equating narrow expertise with accuracy and effectiveness. While adulating the idea of science, they are unable to think scientifically or even numerically. And everything is presented through a vicious partisan and ideological lens.

Is there a good reason to keep universities shut-down this coming fall? The sector seems still to be making that assumption even though there are counterfactuals such as Liberty University which suggest that with responsible caution, the sector might be pulled back from the financial brink by reopening and getting the revenues flowing again.

We need free speech for the revelations of what works and what does not. We need a free press and other mechanisms so that ideas can breed solutions. Instead we have the Mandarin Class calling for censorship of ideas. We have mainstream media sanctioning news which does not adhere to their ideological and partisan agenda. We have examples of success being hidden.

I don't know what the solution will be, but I know that the only sector in as perilous condition as higher education is the failing mainstream media.