{"id":88453,"date":"2020-10-02T14:32:42","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T20:32:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=88453"},"modified":"2020-10-02T22:18:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-03T04:18:47","slug":"me-the-coronavirus-and-my-fiendish-attempt-to-take-away-the-freedoms-of-byu-students-staff-and-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2020\/10\/me-the-coronavirus-and-my-fiendish-attempt-to-take-away-the-freedoms-of-byu-students-staff-and-faculty.html","title":{"rendered":"Me, the coronavirus, and my fiendish attempt to take away the freedoms of BYU students, staff, and faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_17636\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-17636\" style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/02\/north-korea-army.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-17636\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/02\/north-korea-army.jpg\" alt=\"We don't play card games. That would be evil.\" width=\"450\" height=\"296\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-17636\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Brigham Young University Today?<br>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 Here is the article that triggered their indignation:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.defendingutah.org\/post\/2020\/10\/01\/byu-censors-information-corona-virus-tyranny-on-campus\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Enoch Moore, \u201cBYU Censorship: Corona Virus Tyranny on Campus\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If you read down a bit, you\u2019ll find the brief paragraph in which my villainy is revealed.\u00a0 It is said to have originally been written by one Maddie Mehr:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #8f0303;\"><strong>\u201c\u201cI called them and said, \u2018Hey I\u2019m not even there. I\u2019m 300 miles away,\u201d Isham said. She said she was told that\u2019s just the way it is by Daniel Peterson, dean of Chinese at BYU and member of the Disruptive Student Committee.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure what to make of that little passage.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There <em>is<\/em> no \u201cdean of Chinese\u201d at Brigham Young University \u2014 nor, for that matter, so far as I\u2019m aware, at any other university in the English-speaking world.\u00a0 Chinese doesn\u2019t have its own dean, for the simple reason that it doesn\u2019t have its own college, At BYU, Chinese is one of the principal languages taught, along with Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, and Arabic, in my <em>department<\/em> of Asian and Near Eastern Languages.\u00a0 There is no \u201cDaniel Peterson\u201d in <a href=\"https:\/\/ane.byu.edu\/chin\/faculty\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">the Chinese section of my department<\/a>.\u00a0 My department, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, is housed within BYU\u2019s College of Humanities, whose dean is J. Scott Miller, a professor (as it happens) from my department.\u00a0 But his specialty is <em>Japanese,<\/em> not <em>Chinese<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I teach Arabic, and I have some degree of competence in several other languages, but I neither speak nor read Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Is there a \u201cDisruptive Student Committee\u201d at BYU?\u00a0 Possibly.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t say.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve never <em>heard<\/em> of one.\u00a0 And I\u2019m certainly not <em>on<\/em> it.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Have I ever met or spoken with Bella Isham?\u00a0 Not so far as I\u2019m aware.\u00a0 Not on this or any other topic.\u00a0 I had never heard of her until I read the article mentioned above.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For the record, though, I fully support BYU\u2019s efforts to control COVID-19 among faculty, staff, and students.\u00a0 I resent the fact that a public health and epidemiological issue, a scientific issue, has become a battleground for hot-tempered political ideologues.\u00a0 I don\u2019t pretend to be a health expert or medical authority, and I\u2019m content to follow the advice of the overwhelming majority of competent scientific authorities on contagious diseases.\u00a0 I won\u2019t argue that with visiting firebrands, though.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a specialist on pandemics and, with no exceptions thus far, neither are those who come here to challenge me.\u00a0 I\u2019m busy.\u00a0 I want to get on with my life.\u00a0 So I listen to reliable medical advice and I do just that.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 Here is the article that triggered their indignation: \u00a0 Enoch Moore, \u201cBYU Censorship: Corona Virus Tyranny on Campus\u201d \u00a0 If you read down a bit, you\u2019ll find the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17165,17171,1152,1149,17180,9264,8031,13514,9108,936,17177,5421,17174,17162,9101,17168,13411,13781,9104,2532],"class_list":["post-88453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bella","tag-bella-isham","tag-brigham-young-university","tag-byu","tag-chinese","tag-contagion","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid","tag-covid-19","tag-daniel-peterson","tag-dean","tag-disease","tag-disruptive-student-committtee","tag-enoch-moore","tag-epidemic","tag-isham","tag-mask","tag-masks","tag-pandemic","tag-peterson"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Me, the coronavirus, and my fiendish attempt to take away the freedoms of BYU students, staff, and faculty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; 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