COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. Airline travel has slowed to a crawl and every major music concert like Coachella and South by Southwest have been canceled. Athletic events have been brutalized. All NHL games, the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball finals will be held, but in empty arenas, save for the families of team players. NASCAR races have been rescheduled or canceled.
There is a hidden benefit to the COVID-19 disruption unknown to most. This is an amelioration of the progressive brainwashing in most colleges and universities that may offer students and their parents a reprieve from these educational indoctrination factories.
For conservatives who have friends or loved ones, or are themselves attending college, COVID-19 carries with it a respite from the ongoing indoctrination. With the coronavirus scare and the arrival of spring break, nearly every university, save Falwell’s Liberty University, are now suspending face-to-face classes, and professors have been instructed to adopt the online mode of delivery for at least several weeks after students return, if not for the remainder of the term.
Since many professors still deliver their classes face-to-face, this mandate forces them to reformat their instruction into a more nuanced and less spontaneous style. Being able to use the most recent progressive proclamations from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post or New York Times will no longer be doable. There is already much pushback from the professorate because they are being forced to reformat their courses. Their yellowed lecture notes will have to be converted to online learning systems like Blackboard, Canvas, etc. Online lectures and projects must be developed and recorded in advance, and making changes is both difficult and time-consuming. This fact leaves little opportunity for liberal professors to inculcate students with more fake news and ideology.
This is not to say that progressive concepts are impossible to infuse into online classes, only that issues can’t be added on the fly which until now have enabled liberal professors to incorporate the latest outrage against President Trump and conservative thought or action into their world truth and against a fair and balanced presentation of events, ideas and theories.
At play is also the fact that online delivery of course content allow students to have time to contemplate the indoctrination they are receiving: mull it over, re-review it and talk to others about it. As important is the fact that these articles of indoctrination are now open publicly for students to show others what they are receiving for their or their or their parents’ educational dollar. This alone may force many professors to rethink putting their radical ideology on a medium that can be saved and passed around to non-believers including parents, conservative media and politicians.
It’s one thing for your child to call you up from college and say: “You wouldn’t believe what my professor just said about conservatives!” But when they return home for spring break and are able to actually show parents recorded lectures on the evils of conservativism and capitalism or the wisdom of social justice or socialism, it is quite another. It’s as if parents can now sit beside their college students in class and actually see the progressive indoctrination permeating American universities.
I suspect this situation will lead to a number of positive outcomes for college students and their parents. First, many academic majors in the behavioral sciences, philosophy, social justice and women’s studies may now be viewed in naked relief and receive the informed derision they truly deserve. Second, with newly informed parents, students are also more likely to change their major to something less progressive and more oriented to a well-paying career that will enable them to pay off their student loan debt. Third, a few may even change what college they attend, say from Progressive State University to a better, less progressively ideological place of higher learning like Hillsdale College, Pepperdine University, Chapman University, BYU or the like.
Many progressive American universities have held an ideological monopoly on students for decades. The good news is that the COVID-19 virus may temporarily loosen this educational stranglehold and offer new insight into how dysfunctional it actually is these days.