Pandemic Graduation Quotes

You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.

A highly regarded infectious-disease epidemiologist named Donald S. Burke, presently dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a lecture (later published) back in 1997 in which he listed the criteria that might implicate certain kinds of viruses as likeliest candidates to cause a new pandemic. “The first criterion is the most obvious: recent pandemics in human history,” Burke told his audience. That would point to the orthomyxoviruses (including the influenzas) and the retroviruses (including the HIVs), among others. “The second criterion is proven ability to cause major epidemics in non-human animal populations.” This would again spotlight the orthomyxoviruses, but also the family of paramyxoviruses, such as Hendra and Nipah, and the coronaviruses, such as that virus later known as SARS-CoV. Burke’s third criterion was “intrinsic evolvability,” meaning readiness to mutate and to recombine (or reassort), which “confers on a virus the potential to emerge into and to cause pandemics in human populations.” As examples he returned to retroviruses, orthomyxoviruses, and coronaviruses. “Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.” It’s interesting in retrospect to note that he had augured the SARS epidemic six years before it occurred. Much more recently, Burke told me: “I made a lucky guess.” He laughed a self-deprecating hoot and then added that “prediction is too strong a word” for what he had been doing.

In America and the European Union, around a third of the public have college degrees. An even smaller share get postgraduate education, barely 13% in the United States. And yet most of the leadership positions in Western societies are held by people who have at least a college education and usually some postgraduate training. In other words, about two thirds of people stand by and watch as the other third run everything. (In large Asian countries, which have a smaller share of college graduates, the divide is arguably much greater. Just 10% of China’s population attended some college and yet virtually every member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee has—99% as of 2016.

2020 was the year of sickened university students.

Advertisers also won’t miss traditional media, since the thing traditional media advertising does best—build mass brands—is increasingly irrelevant as we graduate from the Brand Age to the Product Age. There is a double bind here, because brand equity erodes slowly, and a few months of reduced spend isn’t going to move any needles. Which will make it that much harder even for marketers still attending the church of brand equity to justify returning their traditional media spend to pre-pandemic levels.

They didn’t seek commonality with other churches. It was divisive and fear-based.” At a very young age, she sensed that she was being trained, as a dog might be trained, to grow up to be a woman with no ambition other than to bear children. She learned that while there was only one road to heaven, there were a great many to hell. Secular music, for instance, which she was forbidden to listen to. Science, for another. In sixth-grade science class, when the theory of evolution came up, Charity was handed a note saying she needed to go straight to the principal’s office and wait it out until those lessons were over. The other kids who went to her church all got the same note. Which is not to say that she had not learned things in church. When she was seven years old, missionaries who’d been to Africa came and spoke of plagues they’d witnessed. That experience had triggered an obsession: from then on, she’d wanted to know everything she could about disease and the viruses that caused them. She decided to become a doctor before she grasped all the reasons why she couldn’t. “I didn’t know anybody who had graduated from a four-year college,” she said. “That’s not what people in Junction City did.” Her school guidance counselor told her that kids from Junction City didn’t become doctors, and that she should change her mind. Instead of changing her mind about her ambition, she guarded it. “I learned to hold that card close, because no one believed it,” she said. In her senior year in high school she was thrown a lifeline, in the form of a scholarship from a foundation set up by a local lumber tycoon, for kids whose parents hadn’t gone to college. The Ford Family Foundation, as it was called, offered to pay her way to Oregon State. “The elders said I was disobeying God’s will because I wanted to go to a four-year college,” Charity recalled.

In April 2020, Business Breakthrough (BBT) University in Tokyo, Japan held a graduation ceremony for students using avatar robots remotely controlled by graduating students from their homes. The avatar robots, dubbed “Newme”, were dressed in graduation caps and gowns for the ceremony, complete with tablets projecting the graduates’ face. BBT hoped the approach could be used as a model for other schools wishing to avoid large gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Friends have asked me how I felt about not being able to wear the “Sablay.” At first, it was frustrating. However, I realized that graduation was not diminished by the absence of celebration or custom. It is momentous for the value it espouses. To me, it was the fulfilment of a promise and an opportunity to aid in rebuilding a country slowed down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

was improving the lives of the current residents and laying the groundwork for generations to come. The CityForge founders had come up with the idea while they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill, and after graduating this past May, they had set out to make their concept a reality. They had spent the summer promoting their startup and raising money from friends, family, and passionate supporters. They used the funds for their trip to Kenya, where they planned to document every stop along the way—and identify their first “CityForge villages.” And, for reasons that remained unclear to Peyton, the two boys had made a