Collision, Collusion, and Collateral Damage

My life has directly collided with the world of right wing talk radio, a world I’ve been exploring on this Page for the past several months.

Here in Ohio two days ago we had the first three confirmed cases of Coronavirus. A fourth case was confirmed today.

Also today the state governor informed the NCAA that he would not allow crowds to attend any of the March Madness games scheduled to be played in Ohio starting next week.

And today, as with thousands of my colleagues at *The* Ohio State University (Go Bucks!), I worked from sunrise to sundown, almost literally, to convert the two face-to-face courses I am teaching this semester into hastily-improvised online courses.

That’s because the university—quite rightly, in my opinion—suspended all face-to-face classes as soon as word arrived of those three confirmed cases.

But also today, Rush Limbaugh continued his unabashed campaign of pooh poohing all this concern about the Coronavirus, particularly the cancellation of events and the shutdown of campuses.

He sees all this as a plot, driven by the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media, to attack Donald Trump and deny him a second term. This attack extends to an attempt to shut down the mass rallies on which the President thrives and which were the hallmark of his 2016 White House run. The rallies are, after all, crowd events.

In effect, he makes clear, these villains are colluding with a glorified cold virus to bring down Trump.

He does have one thing in common with a number of worried college instructors, though: He suspects that down the line, university administrators will use the emergency shift to online classes to justify a permanent shift away from face-to-face courses to online courses.

Traditional higher education will thus become collateral damage in the attack upon Trump.

“Now we’ve shut down the University of Wisconsin for the next month. Here in Florida I’m told that the school systems are telling students to not go to school but to do learning online. There still will be education taking place. Let me ask this.

“What happens if all these places shut down, what happens if after a month they realize that the University of Wisconsin, that we don’t have to reopen, we can do every bit of educating that we do here online. We don’t have to have the buildings open. We don’t have to pay for electricity. We don’t have to pay for the heat or to air-condition the place. We don’t need to do this. We don’t need to do that.

“As these institutions shut down places, don’t think that there isn’t gonna be some kind of reaction. You can’t shut down a university for a month without somebody having a reaction to how that went, how that goes. We will just have to see.”

El Rushbo leaves it at that, in his characteristic way of establishing a premise and leaving his listeners to draw the obvious conclusion.

But if you know anything about Limbaugh and his listeners, you know that he considers professors as prime members of the liberal elite, and his real point is not that this will happen. It is that when it does, we professors will have been hoist on our own petard.