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Senate paves road to reopening economy with coronavirus relief bill, but when will states reopen schools?
By a vote of 96-0, the U.S. Senate has passed a $2.2 trillion legislative package, by far the largest in U.S. history, to keep tens of millions of Americans on payroll and expand unemployment benefits to those who are laid off while the country waits out the deadly Chinese coronavirus that poses additional risk to seniors and those with underlying conditions.
That way, when the virus passes, those businesses, particularly the 30 million small businesses that are struggling most of all right now, but also critical industries, will be able to rapidly reopen and we can get back to our lives.
President Donald Trump has offered April 12, Easter Sunday, as a national goal to begin reopening what he says are “sections” of the country where the outbreak is not so bad. Every state for the moment has effectively shut down their schools, creating a daycare problem for tens of millions of parents, many of whom are temporarily working from home or are furloughed.
To get the economy reopened, President Trump and his administration will have to work with governors in all 50 states, who have 50 different plans about how long everything should remain closed:
So, when it comes to reopening the economy, the first thing to do would be to reopen the schools in some capacity. Parents are likely to take that as a cue from local authorities that it is safe to return to work.
As it is, many states are mulling over cancelling the remainder of the school year, which Kansas, Oklahoma and Virginia have already done. The more that do, likely the longer the recession we are in will last, because it will be that much longer that people stay home. That is because, again, if schools are closed due to public health concerns, individual families in localities are going to listen to their local authorities.
Adding a layer of complexity, many localities are extending closures even beyond what the states are ordering. For example, Chicago public schools will be closed until mid-April, while the guidance currently says March 30 for Illinois. New York City schools are closed until April 20, although the state guidance is for April 1.
That’s federalism.
Two decisions likely to weigh in favor of skipping the rest of the school year are President Trump’s decision to waive standardized testing requirements for states. It opens the door for states to take the additional steps of cancelling the tests, as many have already done, and potentially to cancel school until September.
And the Senate bill financially incentivizes states and businesses to remain in stasis until the virus passes.
That said, not even New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has cancelled school for the rest of the year, at least not yet, saying that there is a “smarter” way to respond to the coronavirus without shutting down the entire state’s economy. New York far and away has the most coronavirus cases at the moment, but so far not so many that the hospitals are yet overwhelmed. He promised his state could be considered a template for other states to follow in terms of how to mitigate risk without shutting everything down.
At the end of the day, all the federal government can do is issue recommendations to the states to follow, and to ease travel restrictions when the President believes it is safe to do so. President Trump and his task force are setting the tone that many states will follow.
Real consideration should be given by the President and states to the potential lifelong consequences of cancelling education for the remainder of the school year for students, as well as the economic impacts of those closures. These must be weighed against the virus’ trajectory, the rate of infection, hospitalization and fatality.
When we get to day 15 of the President’s coronavirus guidelines, the task force has promised a better read on where the virus is and where it’s going to be.
It will be up to the President to coordinate with state governors responsible for the closures, and to come up with reasonable recommendations to help our schools and economy to be reopened as soon as possible.
Recommendations for each state for reopening should be criteria-based and geared towards how to reopen while keeping the elderly and those with preexisting conditions safe.
Perhaps if we get to mid-April or the beginning of May and there are no new cases, maybe we can call that summer vacation and reopen the schools to finish their school years, with perhaps a two-week interlude between grades in September.
As it is, every state has closed their schools, and so long as that is the case, the country and the economy will largely remain on standby and the longer the recession we are in will last. Stay tuned.
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A Scholar’s Lament
George Leef
Professor John Ellis has served on college faculties since 1963 and is now an emeritus professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He has witnessed enormous changes in higher education over his years and he finds those changes to be deplorable.
In his new book The Breakdown of Higher Education, Ellis explains how our system was subverted, why it matters, and what it will take to put it back on the proper track.
Americans, Ellis observes, used to have almost unlimited confidence in our colleges and universities. They were expected to provide advanced learning for serious students and a forum for the discussion of important national issues, which they did. Higher education simply wasn’t controversial; few books were written about it and hardly anyone offered harsh criticism.
Today, however, many people are deeply distressed at the state of higher education, mainly because it has become terribly politicized. Ellis writes that “advocacy has now replaced analysis as the central concern of the campuses” and says that “this rot has been growing for decades and appears to have reached a point of no repair.” He provides plenty of evidence to back up his charge that radical politics has become the dominant force at many schools.
One case Ellis highlights is that of Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State. Gilley, a political scientist, wrote an article that was published in an academic journal, in which he argued that colonialism had some beneficial consequences for native peoples. That is certainly a debatable proposition and any scholar who read his paper would have been perfectly free to respond with counter-arguments. In an earlier day, that is all that would have happened.
But rather than arguing against Gilley, an outraged academic mob immediately demanded that his paper be suppressed.
More than 10,000 professors signed a petition demanding that the paper be withdrawn, and the journal’s editor even received death threats. Under severe pressure, the journal did retract the article (but in the spirit of academic freedom, the National Association of Scholars has republished it).
About the Gilley affair, Ellis writes,
What was truly astonishing about this episode was that here were literally thousands of people with professorial appointments who completely rejected the idea of academic thought and analysis.
Yes, it is astonishing that so many professors would resort to intimidation rather than reasoning when faced with something they disapproved of. But in the American academic world today, colonialism is one of the many issues about which there is only one acceptable view, namely that it was an unmitigated evil inflicted by whites on natives. Many faculty members who had neither read Gilley’s paper nor studied the questions it raised nevertheless felt free to demand that his work be expunged.
It is indeed chilling to realize that such behavior is now perfectly normal among the professoriate.
Another instance showing how an unscholarly, adversarial mindset has permeated our higher education system is the furor over an op-ed piece written by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego. In their piece, they defended bourgeois norms and argued that the abandonment of such norms helps explain why “disadvantaged groups” are making little economic progress.
Again, rather than seeking to debate the argument Wax and Alexander advanced, the academic community reacted with sheer vehemence.
More than half of Wax’s law school colleagues signed a letter to the dean “condemning” the piece and stating that if it weren’t for tenure, Wax should be fired. Those professors did not deign to argue against Wax but simply declared her views to be intolerable. In their worldview, the only permissible explanation for the socio-economic troubles of minority groups is racism. Any “deviationism” (as Maoists used to put it) must be punished. Fortunately, Penn couldn’t fire Professor Wax but did punish her by taking away the first-year civil procedure course she had taught expertly for years. Too bad for students, but the mob had to be appeased.
American professors didn’t always act in this unseemly manner. Well into the 1960s, it had a liberal majority, but without the vast imbalance we see now nor today’s radical politics and intolerance. To be sure, there were many dedicated leftists, but they fought for their beliefs with arguments, not force. By example, our activist faculty now teaches students to act on emotion, not reason.
Ellis traces the transformation of the faculty to the 1962 manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which called for bringing socialism to the U.S. Its writers saw that their path required a takeover of American education, especially colleges, to control how young people were schooled. While we don’t yet have the fully socialist country the SDS envisioned, its project of dominating education with a faculty hostile to capitalism and our traditions of limited government has been exceedingly successful. Ellis points out that it took three strokes of good luck (from the SDS perspective, anyway) for that to occur.
First, the 1960s ushered in a period of enormous growth in higher education. That expansion required the hiring of great numbers of new faculty. As Ellis writes, “The number of new faculty appointments that were needed was greater than the total number of existing professors in the nation.” Many of the newly hired faculty were already invested in radical leftist politics.
Second, the Vietnam War led to campus protests that emboldened the faculty to embrace activism both in and out of the classroom.
Third, the mania for diversity that began sweeping through colleges and universities in the 1970s led to the creation of many new academic departments where the old rules of objectively searching for truth were tossed aside in favor of pushing an ideology. While the incessant focus on diversity is supposedly beneficial for black and other minority students, Ellis demurs: “Black students on the way to getting an excellent college education are being waylaid by political radicals intent on diverting them from that goal to use them for their own purposes.”
What, if anything, can be done to restore our higher education system? Ellis isn’t terribly sanguine.
In some states, there has been legislation to protect freedom of speech on campus. Unfortunately, such laws don’t get at the root of the problem and won’t accomplish much. Ellis explains,
Neither new nor old rules will ever be enforced while radicals control all the enforcement mechanisms. Students will know that they can rely on leniency if they break the rules because they know that campus authorities are essentially on their side.
How about imploring colleges to hire for intellectual diversity, adding some conservative or libertarian faculty members to offset the leftist dominance? While having some non-leftist faculty would be good for students, it won’t do anything to change the fact that the left has control of our colleges and will keep on using them to promote their views.
The one and only approach that will work, Ellis argues, is to stop feeding the beast the money it needs.
State legislatures have the power of the purse over their higher education systems and need to start exerting it. As a prelude, legislators who want to stop subsidizing leftist politics should establish fact-finding committees to enlighten the public as to the severity of the problem.
Ellis and his colleagues at the California Association of Scholars did exactly that with a 2012 study of the blatant politicization within the University of California system, but top administrators chose to ignore it and the big Democratic majority in state government likes things the way they are. But in conservative states, such an effort could open eyes about the problem of politicization and catalyze change.
At the individual level, parents and alumni also have roles to play. The former can choose not to send their sons and daughters to colleges that have largely become camps for political indoctrination, and the latter can stop sending them donations.
Professor Ellis has brilliantly exposed the fact of and reasons for the breakdown of American higher education. This book deserves a wide audience.
SOURCE
How North Carolina Colleges Are Responding to COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic has injected uncertainty into nearly every aspect of society—and higher education is no exception. As North Carolina’s leaders grapple with the challenges posed by curbing the virus’ spread, dramatic policy decisions are being made on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.
The following is a summary of what higher education leaders in North Carolina are doing and discussing in the face of national and state declarations of emergency.
Special Meeting of the UNC Board of Governors
On Friday, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors met in special session by conference call. After UNC system president William Roper gave his report, board member Marty Kotis asked him three questions about the virus’ impact on the campuses.
One of Kotis’ questions concerned how students’ lives were being “upended” by having to swiftly move off-campus. Students were notified on Tuesday that they had to move out by Saturday—with only some students being granted exemptions to remain in campus housing. It is estimated that only about 10 percent of students remain on each UNC campus.
“Have we addressed the residential tenants’ legal rights?” Kotis asked. He inquired whether students would get a refund for their meal and housing expenses. He noted that many students will need a refund because many depend on the jobs they have on campus and may have to pay additional housing and food expenses elsewhere.
Additionally, with all of the changes, Kotis wondered if it was realistic to expect students to be ready to start online classes by Monday, March 23.
“It’s surely understandable that people want their money refunded,” Roper responded. “We will quickly get to the point [of] how much is the refund, [and] how we are going to get it to them.”
On the note of residential students’ legal rights, UNC system legal counsel Tom Shanahan commented: “Among the things we will work through in the coming weeks and months is not just the refund process, but how particular housing contracts work…Housing contracts generally address instances in which the university can suspend and ask residents to move out.”
Kotis also worried about the system’s finances. He noted that university foundations, the fundraising arm of the institutions, will likely take a hit. He also pointed to a law that bars the system from borrowing for operating purposes. “Do we have any indication of the magnitude and the impact?” Kotis asked. “We are in the process of looking at our cash balances and this new operating environment that we’re in,” Roper said. He added that the system should have an answer in a few days.
“We are not out of cash, but we are carefully looking at this and we’re going to be giving instructions to the institutions on their operations probably next week,” Roper said. The legislature is not in session, but the system is making a priority list of policy recommendations to make to the legislature during its next session.
Finally, Kotis recommended that the system pause its capital spending projects and divert the money for more immediate needs such as hospital beds. He also pointed to how other colleges are repurposing dorm rooms as treatment centers, suggesting that UNC adopt similar measures.
Kotis’ suggestion to delay asking the legislature for operations and capital improvement funding was adopted by the board. During his report, Temple Sloan, chairman of the Committee on Budget and Finance, proposed that capital improvement plans be tabled:
In light of where we are in the current health crisis, I would like to make a special motion: A motion to table all items voted by the budget and finance committee yesterday. I believe the more prudent action is to reconvene the budget and finance committee within the next two weeks to review the items discussed yesterday and to put together a coronavirus relief package—a request for the legislature.
UNC President Answers Questions During Media Availability
After the board’s meeting, Roper and board chairman Randy Ramsey conducted a conference call with the media. Roper said that he was “delighted” that the board decided to table capital projects, as it gives the system time to determine what the immediate financial and resource needs will be in the coming weeks.
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