So essentially, the campus has been shuttered by the unilateral decree of Dean what’s-his-face. Sounds familiar. Visits with friends prohibited, special permission slips required for anybody to leave, and confinement to one’s personal living space imposed. Note that they even have their own adorable little color-coded “Alert” system, apparently modeled on the Department of Homeland Security’s dopey old “Terror Alert” system — rightly lampooned in the early 2000s for its uselessness and absurdity, but now accepted as a reasonable model for the present “crisis.”
So what prompted this drastic action at Connecticut College? First, to fully appreciate the lunacy being practiced here, you have to understand that Connecticut College already required vaccination at the outset of this school year. Everybody is vaccinated (or, technically, 99% of the student population is vaccinated per the Dean’s stated figures). And yet far from enabling a return to normalcy, as is supposed to be the premise behind vaccination, all that it’s done is set the stage for further extreme intrusions. That’s because the College also mandates that these near-universally vaccinated students submit to a twice-weekly testing regimen. Seems rather like a solution in search of a problem — but that’s all the better for paranoid busybody Deans such as Victor Arcelus, who clearly relish any opportunity to exercise power over their precious little fiefdom.