Me, the coronavirus, and my fiendish attempt to take away the freedoms of BYU students, staff, and faculty

I’ve been contacted by two or three people who are incensed at my newly-revealed role in constructing a coercive police state at Brigham Young University.  Here is the article that triggered their indignation:

Enoch Moore, “BYU Censorship: Corona Virus Tyranny on Campus”

If you read down a bit, you’ll find the brief paragraph in which my villainy is revealed.  It is said to have originally been written by one Maddie Mehr:

““I called them and said, ‘Hey I’m not even there. I’m 300 miles away,” Isham said. She said she was told that’s just the way it is by Daniel Peterson, dean of Chinese at BYU and member of the Disruptive Student Committee.”

I’m not sure what to make of that little passage.

There is no “dean of Chinese” at Brigham Young University — nor, for that matter, so far as I’m aware, at any other university in the English-speaking world.  Chinese doesn’t have its own dean, for the simple reason that it doesn’t have its own college, At BYU, Chinese is one of the principal languages taught, along with Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, and Arabic, in my department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages.  There is no “Daniel Peterson” in the Chinese section of my department.  My department, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, is housed within BYU’s College of Humanities, whose dean is J. Scott Miller, a professor (as it happens) from my department.  But his specialty is Japanese, not Chinese.  During my tenure at BYU, previous deans of Humanities have come not only from my department but from the departments of Humanities and Classical Languages, Germanic and Slavic Languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and so forth.  I teach Arabic, and I have some degree of competence in several other languages, but I neither speak nor read Chinese.

Is there a “Disruptive Student Committee” at BYU?  Possibly.  I couldn’t say.  But I’ve never heard of one.  And I’m certainly not on it.

Have I ever met or spoken with Bella Isham?  Not so far as I’m aware.  Not on this or any other topic.  I had never heard of her until I read the article mentioned above.

For the record, though, I fully support BYU’s efforts to control COVID-19 among faculty, staff, and students.  I resent the fact that a public health and epidemiological issue, a scientific issue, has become a battleground for hot-tempered political ideologues.  I don’t pretend to be a health expert or medical authority, and I’m content to follow the advice of the overwhelming majority of competent scientific authorities on contagious diseases.  I won’t argue that with visiting firebrands, though.  I’m not a specialist on pandemics and, with no exceptions thus far, neither are those who come here to challenge me.  I’m busy.  I want to get on with my life.  So I listen to reliable medical advice and I do just that.