5 Years of Covid: 'Lessons Learned™' in Academia = Not All Was Bad, No Criticism of Mandates

Part two of a three-part mini-series on commemorative legacy media pieces showing off how far gone, mentally and from reality, most politicos™, journos™, and experts™ are these days

These days, it’s become quite fashionable to commemorate™ the fifth anniversary of the first-ever country-wide ‘lockdown’ (a prison term) in peacetime, which also gives away what doing so was: the imposition of martial law absent any such state of affairs. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll continue to do so, if only these pieces must be preserved for posterity:

5 Years of Covid--The Gaslighting Continues

As another towering and enduring testament to the utter depravity of those who ‘acted’ to ‘keep everyone safe’, I shall offer a three-part series this week.

First, the Austrian parliament and legacy media were the scene of the sustained efforts to gaslight everyone, which you may read up on here.

Second, while we’re somewhat on the topic of Norway and Covid, I’ll post a translation of the insane amount of navel-gazing going on among my peer group, academia. One word about the messenger, Norway’s equivalent of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an online rag by the name of Khrono, is well known by its sensational click-bait, if often rather poorly done reporting™. Note, in particular, that their staff writers appear quite well connected to politicos™ and other journos™ in legacy media, which means that most of my colleagues’ fear and loathing of Khrono at the same time. While their reporting™ on Norwegian academia is sometimes quite o.k.-ish, esp. their breathless reporting™ from faculty meetings (which are public) or other ‘domestic’ matters (e.g., a politico™ plagiarising his or her master’s thesis), their ‘foreign’ reporting is as bad as can be expected in legacy media (by which is meant translated and slightly rewritten second-hand reporting found in, say, Politico or The Atlantic, which shows the staff writers’ true colours—mostly dark red, I surmise—although they also add virtue-signalling ‘orange man bad’ noises).

And, third, to round off this mini-series, I’ll post a timely rebuttal from autumn 2020 by Milosz Matuschek—he writes mainly in German over at Freischwebende Intelligenz—who, on 1 Sept. of that memorable year, asked the pertinent question, ‘what if the Covidiots are right?’ in his regular column at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Needless to say, he was ‘cancelled’ for simply asking about Covid policies…

With that introduction said, please follow me down a few particular rabbit-holes in this second part, peppered with personal experiences from, well, moving to Norway in summer 2020 and working in Norwegian academia ever since.

Translation, emphases, [snark] and swear words mine.

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Five Years Since Norway Locked Down: How has Academia Changed?

‘It's pretty intense to be new in a new city and then be locked in your dormitory for several weeks’, says student representative Kaja Ingdal Hovdenak. She was a new student in 2020. How has the pandemic affected her? And the rest of academia?

By Elise Lystad, Joar Hystad, and Jørgen Svarstad, Khrono, 11 March 2025 [source]

‘Today, the Norwegian government is introducing the strongest and most invasive measures we’ve had in Norway in peacetime. It’s absolutely necessary’, said then Prime Minister Erna Solberg at a press conference on 12 March 2020 [there being no alternative is perhaps among the bigger lies peddled by politicos™, experts™, and journos™ back then (or in economics); I was still in Switzerland back in spring 2020, which ‘locked down’, sort of, a few days later—guess what: it’s still there…].

On that day, the whole of Norway locked down, and most people were told to stay at home [most people also did what they were told, incl. that student representative]. From kindergartens all the way up to universities, doors had to close immediately, with only a few exceptions. Cultural events, sporting events, gyms, swimming pools, to name but a few, were banned. Restaurants and pubs were closed [speaking of booze, that’s about the funniest nonsense: the gov’t also tried to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages (heavily restricted and taxed already), but staying at home for ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ (remember that one?) w/o booze was not an option: the gov’t quickly relented].

These measures were to last until 26 March. They were extended until 13 April. After this, more and more measures were introduced In some cases, the restrictions were eased, in others they were tightened. On 24 September 2021, the government announced that Norway was returning to a normal everyday life, with most of the measures removed, based on increased preparedness. There were several outbreaks of COVID-19 during the autumn and winter.

It wasn’t until 12 February 2022 that the government announced that it was removing all regulatory measures against COVID-19.

[this is a very bad recap that peddles exclusively false information: when Omicron arrived, everyone threw a fit, public health officialdom readied the ‘Green Pass’ (Covid Passport), and it was only Omicron’s relative ‘mildness’ that made the gov’t reconsider its stance, based on an assessment by the Institute of Public Health (Norway’s CDC); needless to say, these people soon started lying about these events, which I’ve detailed in this long posting from spring 2023]

It is now five years since the country first went into lockdown. Has the pandemic changed universities and university colleges? And what have they (perhaps) learnt? [so, follow me down this particular rabbit hole, peppered with my own experiences from Aug. 2020 onwards…]

Two Weeks in Quarantine

Khrono has spoken to vice-chancellors, students, research fellows, and experts about what they think [no me]. Common themes include increased flexibility, different study habits, better digital solutions, and a generation that lived through its most formative years in lockdown [‘different study habits’ is quite a bit—you know, I always offer office hours starting at 8 a.m. to separate the wheat from the chaff; most ‘students’ don’t manage to appear before 11 a.m.].

Kaja Ingdal Hovdenak, leader of the Norwegian Student Organisation (NSO), became a student in autumn 2020. She has experienced a student life with a lot of digital teaching [remote instruction is the second-worst kind of teaching (no instruction being the worst), and the problem isn’t just that it’s not the same but that it affords both instructors and students alike the opportunity to wear sweatpants and linger on the couch]:

In the first lecture I attended, there were 200 of us and everyone was a metre apart and everything. Then there was one person in the room who tested positive for Covid, and everyone in the room had to be quarantined for two weeks. It’s pretty intense to be new in a new city and then be locked in your dormitory for several weeks. [I was teaching in Switzerland at that time, and until there was a ‘lockdown’ announced in mid-March 2020, there were increasing concerns among everyone, but there were no ‘halfway measures’; there was also a dearth of tests™ available, hence no contact tracing or quarantine-by-association; once the ‘lockdown’ was declared, however, everything switched to remote instruction, which was as shitty an experience as Ms. Hovdenak imparts].

She thinks many students, including herself, felt their social antennae rusting when they returned to campus [I think what ‘rusted’ was a different kind of ‘antenna’ of young, single people; bad jokes apart, I’ve talked to quite a few colleagues (admin and faculty) and students since then, and there were quite many who quit attending university as ‘this isn’t what we expected’; also, quite a few students who pulled through were particularly sad that, upon high school graduation, they couldn’t do a ‘gap year’ abroad—talk about first-world problems…].

‘It does something to you that the first few years of study are digital. It has taught us a lot, but it has probably also weakened the students‘ experience of student life both academically and socially,’ she says, adding:

Despite this, we can see that it has had a positive effect on digital teaching. We were somewhat forced by the pandemic to create good digital solutions. But we mustn’t underestimate physical life on campus [or, say, offline and/or off campus, which is even more important, but since virtually all students—the vanguard of the unruly—complied without protests or at least non-compliance, well, what is there to add? (I merely point to the incoherence of Ms. Hovdenak’s mentions of ‘digital teaching’].

Steeper Curve

But what were the consequences of being alone so much?

In the Student Health and Wellbeing Survey (SHoT) for 2022, one in three students reported that they had experienced serious mental health problems. In comparison, only one in six students reported the same in 2010 [a damning, if not catastrophic indictment of gov’t policy, even if one allows for the consideration that definitions of what constitutes ‘mental health problems’ may have changed in the interim].

‘The demand for mental health services was steadily increasing in the years before the pandemic, but in the last two or three years we’ve seen the curve steepen’, according to Øystein Sandven, head of the mental health department at the student welfare organisation Sammen i Bergen:

It’s still the case that anxiety and depression are the main reasons why students contact the psychological health service [and that factoid alone should give everyone quite a bit to think about his or her own role in this].

At the end of 2023, mental disorders among students were properly investigated for the first time. The survey showed that every third student has a mental disorder and that one in four had had suicidal thoughts [welcome to the future: as the boomers retire and the younger generations take over, this cohort will, before too long, be in charge: let’s all brace ourselves].

A Little Shock and Frustration

Alone in their dormitories, or at home with mum and dad, in girls’ and boys’ rooms, students would then follow lectures over the internet.

Overnight in March 2020, all teaching was suddenly digital. Few or no exams were physical, and research fellows were not allowed to do lab experiments or travel on field studies. And anyone with young children was expected to home-school and home nursery—while working [you kinda know how that went: productivity went off a cliff, kids walking into remote meetings, etc.].

But many teachers had never had anything other than physical teaching before [I’m going out on a limb here: most instructors aren’t really good at what they’re doing].

Malcolm Langford, a professor of law at the University of Oslo, led the way in the new landscape.

This was in spite of the fact that he had such poor internet access [remember that Norway is at the forefront of all things digital] at his farm in Rygge that he had to hold lectures and digital meetings in his car. He drove to a car park five kilometres from home and used the mobile network.

Langford was head of a centre for excellence in education, CELL, and had some experience of the digital tools that everyone suddenly had to use [lolz, the good professor had used Teams and Zoom before (in Switzerland, these were rolled out in 2018/19, if memory serves, but they were hardly used because you could just pick up the phone or walk to whomever you needed to talk to]:

It was very special the first few days. There was a bit of shock and frustration in a way [why? I mean, if you’ve had experience with these things, this is nonsense]. But there was also a kind of exciting and innovative dynamic, where people realised that they had to learn something together and change quickly [this is highly subversive, but in a bad, collectivist notion; note the law (!!!) prof. getting all giddy about this, if you can stomach/believe it].

Digital Volunteering

A few days after the lockdown, he and Professor Elisabeth Gording Stang created the Facebook group ‘Digital Volunteering in Higher Ed’ [orig. Digital dugnad i høyere utdanning], where people could share tips and tricks from the new everyday life. After a few months, it had almost 5,000 members.

In 2020, Langford received the students’ teaching award for his contribution to the digitalisation of teaching, among other things [I have no clue how these ‘awards’ are handed out in practice (the theory surely seems deficient)].

He emphasises several positive aspects of the pandemic [what a sick mind]:

Firstly, it forced a real digital skills boost [because clicking on ‘join meeting’ is such a yuuuuuuuuuuge new task, as opposed to unreal digital skills].

Many people believed that the higher ed sector had 10 years of development in just a few weeks [why, oh, why, am I thinking of the age-old adage of ‘there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen’?].

The pandemic also meant that researchers and teachers collaborated more, both nationally and internationally [nope, they merely spent wasted more time chatting remotely, writing emails (a curse if there ever was one: nowadays, so many more useless ones are sent), and using messenger apps]

If we had a research seminar, researchers from Bergen, Tromsø, and Volda could participate. It was a mini-revolution for both dissemination and organisation, which also meant that we could travel a little less [this is a key incentive for the admin/HR people: Covid drastically reduced travel expenses, which is good™ under the conditions of New Public Management]

One last thing he emphasises is—the vigour that emerged:

We can be energetic if we want to be. There was a real spirit of co-operation, people helped each other, adapted to the situation, and got creative. Can we utilise that again in slightly different areas? [you mean, perhaps, to collectively get together and affect, or force, change in politics?]

Students Demand More Flexibility

[I’ll have the urge to preface this paragraph: whenever I hear anything about this (nearly everyday now), I feel the urge to puke; students have become very pampered, demand this and that, often using entirely inappropriate wording, and they are aided and abetted by admin people at every step of the way because…no-one ever came up with a good, valid reason; they now appear when they want, demand exemptions, and don’t understand that enrolling at a university is, technically speaking, a contractual obligation for both sides]

So here’s the question: what do the students do now?

Wenche Bergseth Bogsti works at the nursing programme at NTNU in Gjøvik and was appointed meritorious teacher in 2024. She is the head of the nursing programme and has spoken to colleagues about how students are affected by the pandemic.

Bogsti recognises that teachers and students have become more digitally savvy [note the witches’ circle here—the question was a different one] :

There was a very steep learning curve during the pandemic, and it opened up new opportunities. At the same time, after the pandemic we see that students demand more flexibility [my least favourite moments teaching these days are answering student emails about where to find the reading assignments (which were published online half a year earlier)].

There were fewer questions about alternatives to coming to university and attending classes in the past, but now there is a desire for freedom of choice and digital alternatives [among whom? The most insane notion here is the conflation of ‘freedom’ and ‘digital alternatives’, let alone the issue of the more digital stuff there is, the less academics one will need, esp. with recent advances in ‘AI’]

Most Important Year in a State of Emergency

Rector of the University of Agder (UiA), Sunniva Whittaker, also recognises that the pandemic has had an effect on students’ desire for flexibility [remember: attending university is a contractual obligation: I do have ‘desires for flexibility’, but, alas, my employer reads the same contract and has different ideas—who would’ve thought that…?]:

It has been important for us to get students back on campus. We see that the pandemic has had an impact on students’ expectations of flexibility [what about my expectations of students actually showing TF up for class? I mean, I’m not forcing them to go to university…] They want to have digital teaching as an option [so, if the night before was longer than anticipated, ‘attendance’ in sweatpants on the couch is an option (with the camera switched off)]. And it’s clear—we are significantly stronger today when it comes to using digital tools.

The students studying now have had some of their most important formative years in a state of emergency. I’m sure many of them are characterised by this.

She also emphasises the importance of being able to turn around quickly when you need to:

That’s important to keep in mind for the future. You never know what’s around the next corner. My overall impression is that I’m impressed with how the higher education sector handled the pandemic and adapted to a completely new situation. [well, what else could I add? You see, my university used female senior citizens in yellow vests as ‘enforcers’ who yelled after people to use hand sanitiser upon entering buildings or put on face diapers in corridors (but not in lecture halls and offices), for starters].

Special Start to the Job

One person who really had to turn round quickly was Gunnar Yttri. He took over as rector of Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) on 1 January 2021. With constant closures and re-openings, the man from Sogndøl had a special start to his job as rector:

For me personally, it was an advantage that the emergency preparedness was well established before I took office.

He is otherwise keen to highlight a moment from the pandemic era, which he believes has been under-communicated in the sector and society in general:

It is about the importance of the university and college sector for how Norwegian society dealt with the challenges that came, and how important a role we played in the national emergency management [this is where the rubber meets the road].

As rector, I gained very good insight into how important our position as a college was [note the royal ‘we’].

He points out that many university and college employees, especially at management level, contributed by sitting on various committees towards the health and school system. In addition, there is the research and expertise on what needs to be done in a crisis situation [i.e., wearing speedos and harping about the gov’t not locking down hard enough while, at the same time, sitting on committees advocating for pandemic™ mandates, such as prof. Jörn Klein (which, of course, begs the question: how does one spell ‘conflict of interest’ in academese?]

This is knowledge that we will also benefit from in the situation the world is in now. I am not thinking about the pandemic, but about the security and trade policy situation we find ourselves in. The pandemic showed that universities and university colleges are important for Norwegian preparedness [sure, let’s do the same shit outside your area of expertise™, which is to say, let unelected experts™ govern us all a bit harder: no thank you, I’d rather take my chances with elected officials, to be frank (and here, too, another anecdote from 2021: as a professor, I have an office to myself, yet I recall having to write 5 or 6 ‘petitions’ by email to the dept. chair asking permission to go back to my workplace every time a new round mandates™ was declared…]

Less Attendance

The balance between digital and physical education has been important both during and after the pandemic. In some places in the country, lecture halls are still empty [that’s got little, if anything, to do with remote instruction: the demographic decline heralded for decades is here, and there’s little that can be done to change this ‘even’ (sic) in the medium term: it takes about 20 years for a child conceived today to reach the age of university enrolment; moreover, socialist policies + absurd central planning dictate that university campuses must be spread across the country irrespective of students living there and/or wanting to study wherever; case in point, at Nord U, they arew facilitating this nonsense to this day by offering remote curricula (they merely stream lectures etc.) to those students who can’t, or won’t, attend in person)]

In nursing education, lecturers also notice that there is less attendance at physical education. If it is not mandatory, students will not come [in nursing (!!!); you know, in theoretical physics, I could see a kind of point, but in nursing? Or teacher education? I mean, that’s a no-brainer, yet the journos™ at Khrono are incapable of seeing this; another anecdote seems in order: there’s a fine balance between good teaching and attendance, and then there’s the irresponsibility of students who don’t understand contract law and their place within this entire absurdity masquerading as higher ed: until they graduate from high school, there’s always two or more adults in the classroom—which means that grown-up students (18+) often call themselves ‘pupils’ (elever) at university: talk about lack of self-respect and self-awareness; my take is quite sanguine here: behave like an idiot, be treated like one]

‘We are increasingly seeing that students want the university to adapt to the students’ individual needs and facilitate more. It is difficult to say whether this is due to the pandemic or is a general trend in society, because I see it in other areas as well, that students are more vulnerable and less robust. They want adaptation’, says Bogsti at NTNU [see my point here? and our (mostly female-staffed) admins are giving in at every step of the way, which merely breeds more demands on part of the students: Peter Pan Syndrome writ large, and spare a thought about what kind of future employees these current students will be…(my favourite absurdity involves a student who, a few days before the oral exam, broke his ankle and wrote me an email asking about me perhaps arranging a cab ride to class or otherwise help him out—our lovely admins set up a Zoom exam; that student, instead of sending on a doctor’s note, attached a picture of his leg in a casket…)]

At the same time, Bogsti emphasizes that there are many good students in nursing education, and that a group of students, if somewhat smaller than before, are good at showing up. And that there are several reasons why attendance may have decreased, including less competition for places and fewer applicants because the junior cohorts are decreasing [things have gotten so bad that they dropped the entry-level grade requirements; for the end of welfare statism as it exists, please see this long exposé]

‘Something stupid happened’

The first pandemic students have finished their education. Naturally, we don’t know anything about how they will fare in the long term.

‘What I and many others are afraid of is that something stupid has happened to this generation that will affect them for a long time. It is important to think about the fact that serious and bad things have happened without us knowing about them. There is more behind this, and it requires resourceful research to bring it to light’, says Edvin Schei.

He is a professor of medicine and a distinguished lecturer at the University of Bergen (UiB). He has taught courses about patient contact for many years. There, the students get a lot of exposure, and he does not see any drastic differences between the students before and after the pandemic. He points out that there is a lot that cannot be seen in short contact with the students:

The clearest impression I have is that the difference between medical students now and before the pandemic is not striking. They are marked by the pandemic experiences, and it may have had a major impact on them. But it is not very visible in a teaching situation. I don’t know if it costs them more now than before to participate. They behave the same way.

Get Students Back to Volunteering

Psychologist Sandven has no doubt that the pandemic negatively affected students’ mental health. This is also shown by numerous studies in the field.

He believes that a normalisation of society will help bend the steep curve back down:

At least we hope so. Getting students back on campus [good luck by moving more and more stuff online to perform cost-cutting] and getting them involved in student volunteering will have an impact in the long term. We need to work on both that and other measures that enhance socialisation and inspire networking [not the task of the university, by the way]

Socialising with each other and having an environment to operate in that is not digital will always be a good contribution to better mental health.

Student representative Hovdenak points out that student volunteering and student organisations took a hit during the pandemic. There are several who are struggling to get students to return to volunteering [so, get a helmet and do it?]:

Many are still struggling to recruit and several regular meeting points have disappeared. Students may only have two or three years as students, and that means that if you don’t get new volunteers, the threshold for volunteering to disappear is lower. It is extra vulnerable and has had enormous consequences for student volunteering.

Improvement Phase

Empty lecture halls and student organisations are one thing. But empty offices are also something that is seen more often than before. Many workplaces, including universities and college colleges, now have home offices as something that employees can have permanently one or more days a week [this is so absurd, it boggles the mind: for starters, faculty members at public universities in Norway are exempt from mandatory workplace attendance; at my dept., we’ve moved the entire curriculum into what’s called ‘bloc teaching’ in 2022/23 to afford faculty more research time; I was the lone voice who objected publicly back then because if you afford faculty the opportunity to teach a semester worth in half the time, they will spend the rest of the time ‘working from home’ (easily to be checked by looking at, say, publications); by spring 2024, that mission has morphed into ‘bloc teaching is welcomed by about 50% of students’, which is why we’ll keep doing it although the variables have changed…]

HVL Rector Yttri says that when it comes to how the pandemic affected the working environment in the higher education sector and elsewhere in society, work still needs to be done to find the right balance between physical presence and teaching—and home office and digital teaching [I told everyone back in 2021/22, if you’d wish to bring back students to campus, make sure faculty is present: I was shouted down by the chair…]

‘We are in an improvement phase. It is about how we will have it in the future’, says Yttri [remember, the real™ goals of whatever kind of revolution are always in the future].

More Mandatory Attendance

Student leader Hovdenak has noticed that there is more mandatory teaching at universities and college colleges:

The institutions feel a responsibility to get students back on campus [nope, there’s little ‘feelings’ involved: higher ed gets financed by students obtaining credit points, and if students don’t attend (which they should for enrolment is a contract), higher ed’s funding gets cut]. It is a habit for many to be back on campus completely [you should be, because it’s not something you’re forced to do]. Especially with a busy everyday life and financial pressures, it can be difficult to find time for both studies and a part-time job’, says Hovdenak [stop whining, that’s been the case for most people who ever attended university].

At the nursing school in Gjøvik, Bogsti sees an effect of the students’ balancing their studies and work:

Many prioritise working rather than attending classes [yep, because student loans are quite low and the gov’t doesn’t care even adjusting them for inflation; and then there’s the entire absurdity of the benefits of online instruction plus diploma vs. work experience]. They have digital learning tools available, so it’s easy to think that I can skip this, and I’ll read another time so I can go to work. And we suspect that this is not always done [the worst kind of nonsense is the notion that attendance is what makes students learn—reading assignments are very formalised, students typically don’t read beyond them, and their professors often lack any non-academic experiences: what (else) could go wrong?]

Delays for Many

The pandemic brought many changes, but also obstacles, as it was underway. This also applies to research fellows nationwide. It is difficult to avoid when you close down an entire country, and many lose access to their workplace.

‘Many researchers depend on lab work and other experimental research. The pandemic had consequences in the form of delays in data collection. Many were then delayed in their doctoral work’, says Karl Henrik Storhaug Reinås, who is president of the Fellowship Organisations in Norway [guess what else experts™ are concerned about: low competitiveness of graduates…], adding:

This applies to many of the natural sciences, but within the social sciences and humanities, you often depend on meeting people. I myself am from the field of education [lol, not a real field], and it was completely impossible to do classroom surveys [as if that would improve the field…]

He also saw the consequences of the pandemic for fellows in other settings:

I have sat on employment committees, and there we saw many delays due to Covid. And there were many who experienced that the requirements were strict for postponement or extended contracts. There are many who did not complete their studies on time, or who may not have completed them at all [well, if researcher Jane or John Doe didn’t graduate on time, why extend the contract? Sorry not sorry if that sounds harsh, but that’s how the world works: you can’t bitch and moan about students not attending classes and their demands while caving to every crocodile tear shed…]

‘At times impossible’

According to the Academy for Young Researchers' report Career after Corona, published in June 2021, the work situation worsened for many younger researchers [I have skimmed that one, but it was in summer 2021, hence when I revisited the linked content now, my assessment is correct: that BS has little, if any, bearing on the subject matter]:

‘This is not surprising, given that this is a group that often has responsibility for small children, lives in cramped conditions, works under tight deadlines, and needs to establish international networks’, says Guro Nore Fløgstad, head of the Academy for Young Researchers [none of this was different before the Covid Mania].

According to Fløgstad, the university sector handled these challenges in different ways:

Some fellows and postdocs were given generous deferrals—others were not [could it be that this was merit-based? A thought that must not be uttered in Soviet Norway]. In particular, research that required fieldwork and access to laboratories was difficult—and sometimes impossible—to carry out [I see that point, and at my university, those concerned received commensurate deferrals, but I don’t know that much about other places]. Some fellows and postdoctoral fellows who were hired just before or during the pandemic experienced starting their limited employment period completely without colleagues, which was a burden in a position category that can already be experienced as lonely [oh my, what can I tell you? You can’t comply your way out of tyranny…]

Digital Advances—But

[Khrono] Did anything good come out of the pandemic for younger researchers?

‘Yes, the way we work in academia changed during the pandemic, and some of the changes have been positive. In terms of internationalisation, the threshold for digital participation in conferences has become lower, and it is easier to maintain networks digitally. It is also a good thing that it has become easier to exchange ideas between researchers from countries with smaller travel budgets’, says Fløgstad [doesn’t apply to Eastern Europe or other ‘second-world’ places].

Reinås has also seen that digital innovations make it easier to have meetings across borders, especially for people who do not have the opportunity to travel themselves. But:

My impression is that a lot is being forgotten. Digital competence was absolutely crucial during the pandemic, but then many have now returned to a similar situation as before. I am a little afraid that the good digitalisation strategies that came with the pandemic are not being taken care of [no further comments].

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Bottom Lines

After this long, tone-deaf, and silly compilation of quotes without analysis, I’ll offer mine:

The Covid Mania has changed academia—for the worse. Institutions are struggling to justify the massive investments that were poured into digitalisation of everything, esp. the now-ubiquitous streaming/recording devices in all classrooms and lecture halls.

These investments, of course, now demand that they are used—for otherwise they may (ahem) appear wasted money.

As to the exaggerated importance placed on feelings and sentiments, well, what else is there to not but: you’re a grown up, hopefully voluntarily attending university, and are responsible for yourself (plus, being an adult, you get to legally buy & drink booze, shoot a gun, get a driver’s licence, and vote), so please TF get over it.

My personal experience in academia suggests that institutions are increasingly trying to placate every new demand, whim, and BS peddled by students, journos™, or politicos™. And they are doing so because they have over-invested in infrastructure (partly due to Covid-induced ‘special funding’ and partly because New Public Management points to what’s called ‘third-party funding’, i.e., investments, donations, etc. from non-state actors) and are now faced with the double-whammy of dwindling enrolment numbers and increasingly bureaucratised structures (courtesy of New Public Management).

As a meta consequence, academia is today run by a dual hierarchy of idiots whose primary markers are incompetence and decision-making by people who don’t know shit from shinola:

• historically, universities are self-governing, quasi-autonomous entities run by academics (who don’t know how to do govern/manage institutions with some 30,000 people)

• that is why a permanent bureaucracy (administrators) has been installed, ostensibly to help the professors but, in reality, they call all the shots without knowing a single thing about academia

Hence, it’s not a dialogue between deaf and blind people (although that metaphor—by French historian Fernand Braudel considering interdisciplinary exchange of historians and sociologists—has more than a kernel of truth), but it’s way, way, way worse.

I mean, just re-consider any of the above parts of this long piece: there’s no introspection, no-one who’s even mildly critical of, say, lockdowns, remote instructions, contact tracing, mask mandates, etc., so say nothing about administration of experimental poison/death juice injections. It is as if none of these things ever happened to cause even the remotest semblance of concern.

So, this is where we are: the Covid Fighters are feted in legacy media, yet they are arguably in way, way worse shape than the literal naked emperor: the latter was at least conned into his delusion; the Covid Maniacs are true believers, hence a way more dangerous breed.

If you’re not done with these morons, perhaps you’d like to read up on them:

Delusional as Fuck, Norway's Public Health Officialdom Calls to 'Replace US Leadership'

What a f****** nightmare.