I hope the weekend is finding you all well and you aren’t too diminished from burning the midnight oil. Finals week fast approaches, and classes are grinding to an abrupt halt. Nevertheless, the show must go on. This Week in Viewpoints, we take a look at something we all know a little about these days—anxiety—before taking a look at a major fault-line in the fight against COVID-19 and some proposals for American higher education in year 1 PC (post-Corona).
I read a short article the other day that, while being somewhat obvious, nevertheless contains a helpful message to keep in mind. Emma Pattee at Medium writes about how “Anxiety is in Your Body, Not Your Mind.” I’m not going to quote from the article, but in short we have certain strategies of coping with anxiety that just aren’t up to the task. That is because most people conceive of stress as psychological rather than physiological. Better ways to handle stress will consist in exercising the body, like running to discharge built-up adrenaline or deep breathing to counteract stress-induced panic. It makes me think that, perhaps, part of the reason stress is such a big problem with people in my generation is because we are, as a whole, a lot less active and more sedentary.
Alexander Zaitchik at The New Republic takes aim at Bill Gates and how his NGOs have hamstrung the global COVID-19 response. Most people, when they think of Bill Gates as a harbinger of evil are stereotyped as crazy tinfoil hat conspiracists that think Gates is going to microchip everyone to give them the Mark of the Beast. It’s refreshing, in some sense, to get a takedown of Gates from a progressive perspective.
Zaitchik alleges in “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines” that the business giant and founder of Microsoft used his many non-governmental organizations to stymy the global response in one key respect: fighting tooth and nail to make sure intellectual property restrictions were held in place for drug research and manufacture. The article, which is a fairly long read, is a detailed analysis of Gates’ pro-IP stumping at the global level and the effect it has had on the pandemic response.
Finally, a recent article from Abraham Unger, an opinion contributor at The Hill caught my attention. In “How can colleges recover their civic souls?” Unger asks how American higher ed can better serve society given that, as he sees it, they are vehicles for graft and steep economic stratification.
He outlines four major ways universities should strive to recapture the public trust and a sense of effective contribution to society: giving back to the community, making payscales more equitable, interfacing more directly with the community, and lowering tuition.
One of the more interesting things I took away from this article was just how wasteful some universities are in their spending. At one point Unger writes:
City University of New York system hired the “powerhouse” consulting firm McKinsey & Co. for $3 million for two months of work to come up with a fall reopening plan. Democratic New York state Sen. John Liu from Queens, New York City’s most middle-class borough, asked: “High-priced consultants on a plan for which there are already enough highly paid CUNY officials, while students continue to suffer from a shortage of full-time professional faculty?”
Universities really do have an accountability problem when they can spend $3 million on think-tank consultations to do what their own administration should have done in-house. It highlights, among other factors, the deep need for reform in higher education.
