Tuesday roundup

Albert Mohler offers a discomforting but important essay in which he starts out looking at the impact of COVID-19 on higher education generally and then narrows the focus to the prospects for Southern Baptist Seminary and Boyce College.

Here's how he sets the table:

Where you find faithful Christianity, you find teaching and learning. The university itself emerged from an explicitly Christian foundation with Christ reigning over the entire curriculum. Where you find faithful churches, you find a learned ministry and faithful theological education. The mission of a theological seminary is to educate ministers in truth so that they will preach the Bible and minister to Christ’s people in faithfulness and truth.

Throughout the long centuries of Christianity, churches have established what became colleges, universities, and seminaries – and the schools that remain faithful are the schools that serve Christ and the church.

The COVID-19 crisis presents what is likely to be an existential crisis for many of these schools. In an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Zemsky predicted that twenty percent of all institutions of higher education might close for good in the wake of the coronavirus. The prediction was made back in March. The actual number is likely to be higher than twenty percent.

The reasons are fairly easy to understand, and the challenges to higher education did not begin with COVID-19. The entire sector of higher education has been facing a future of declining birthrates, costs that have escalated beyond sustainability, and a business model that is outdated. Any wise president has known for years that changes are coming, and the wisest were leading their schools through change and adjustment.

COVID-19 is a bomb set in the midst of those plans, and it has detonated. In an unprecedented act of necessity, schools had to send their students home. Dorms are practically empty, classrooms are dark, gymnasiums and stadiums are silent, and libraries are inhabited only by librarians. This is not the way it was supposed to be, but this is the way that it is, and there will be no quick return to normal. In truth, we all know that some new “normal” awaits the schools that manage to survive and thus earn the opportunity to thrive once again.

The coronavirus just collapsed a decade of institutional strategy and planning to a matter of weeks. The stress test tremors we all saw coming has become an earthquake.

The three stages of impact that higher education will have to deal with are the immediate situation, the coming 2020/2021 academic year, and the other side of the crisis. He recommends that those in academe brace themselves. Some of what they'll see won't be pretty.

Oriana Skylar Mastro of the American Enterprise Institute has a piece in Foreign Policy entitled "5 Things To Know If Kim Jong-un Dies."  They are: If the regime collapses, it will happen quickly. The United States is prepared, kind of. North Korean Nukes would need to be secured quickly. China would take the lead militarily, whether the United States likes it or not. The collapse of the regime would likely set back America's position in Asia.

That last point is to a fair degree due to the phenomenon Matthew Continetti was talking about in the piece I discussed in the post below: Trump's erratic behavior toward Kim - threatening fire and fury and then appeasing him with three summits - along with such stunts as demanding that South Korea and Japan pay the US to host our troops, basically reducing them to the status of a mercenary army - has weakened our network of alliances there.

At Law & Liberty, Mary Elizabeth Halper reviews Fred K. Drogula's biography of Cato the Younger.  It seems to me that there's somewhat of a parallel between Cato's position vis-a-vis Julius Caesar and our present situation. Cato was a conservative senator in the last days of the Roman republic. Cato prized integrity foremost among virtues, which made his dealings with the autocratic and mercurial Caesar, shall we say, difficult. Halper's verdict: Drogula intimates that Cato just despised Caeser because he had a burr in his saddle and doesn't even consider that Cato was disgusted with Caesar's power-lust.

Somebody at the Washington Post has taken the time to analyze what President Trump's participation in the press briefings has consisted of proportionally:

A Washington Post analysis of the 35 briefings held since March 16 finds that the president spoke more than 28 hours across those press conferences. The paper drew on annotated transcripts from the data analytics company Factba.se, focusing on the last three weeks of briefings in particular, which have seen the U.S. death toll climb past 50,000.

And between April 6 and April 24, Trump spoke for 13 hours — more than twice as long as Dr. Deborah Birx, who oversees the administration’s virus response and spoke for almost six hours, or Vice President Mike Pence, the coronavirus task force leader, who spoke for about 5½ hours. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, spoke for just over two hours. 

In other words, the president took up 60% of the briefings. The Washington Post report added that Trump answered questions addressed to someone else on the stage more than a third of the time, including queries that had already been answered by the intended official.

So what was the content of Trump’s remarks during those 13 hours? Two hours were spent on attacks — mostly against Democrats (drawing roughly 30 minutes), the media (for around 25 minutes), the nation’s governors (more than 22 minutes) and China (almost 21 minutes), according to the report.

About 45 minutes were spent praising himself and his administration, including three instances in which he played videos that featured support for him and his administration. 

Just 4½ minutes were spent expressing condolences for coronavirus victims.

This situation is tough on all of us. Let's do a lot of praying for each other, ourselves, the nation and the world.