New England Diary

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Loco in loco

Storefront on Wooster Street in New Haven. New Haven is well known for its pizza but Yale students have been ordered not to eat in the city’s restaurants at least until Feb. 7 in an example of stringent medical theater.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

This note from a Connecticut boarding school is a display of that fragmenting thing, for a multiethnic semi-democracy, of excessive identity politics:

“As we continue the important dialogue

among Taft's BIPOC {Black and Indigenous People of Color} alumni and students,

we hope you will join us virtually 

Thursday, January 13, 7pm EST

This event includes

Taft's Pan-Asian Affinity Group,

Mosaics (Black/LatinX Female Affinity Group),

Shades (Black/LatinX Male Affinity Group),

and Somos (LatX Affinity Group)’’

 

Education should be  almost entirely focused on people as individuals, not as members of groups.

In other academic craziness, Yale has told students, whom they have placed under a quarantine until Feb. 7, that they:

“{M}ay not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors) except for curbside pickup.”

Does the university plan to send the campus cops around the city to arrest resisters at their tables?\

Then we have Princeton University’s order:

“Beginning January 8 through mid-February, all undergraduate students who have returned to campus will not be permitted to travel outside of Mercer County or Plainsboro Township for personal reasons, except in extraordinary circumstances. … We’ll revisit and, if possible, revise this travel restriction by February 15.”

Will there be roadblocks at the county line?

This is ridiculous medical theater and lunatic in loco parentis that will have little or no effect on the spread of COVID, which is pretty much everywhere now anyway.

But it’s certainly a good way to create right-wingers.