Dear Commons Community,

Current North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has signed two bills that will drastically reduce the powers of his successor, incoming Democratic Governor-elect Roy Cooper.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“House Bill 17 and Senate Bill 4 were introduced by Republican lawmakers in the state legislature on Wednesday. Both bills passed in their respective chambers the following day by large margins. 

McCrory promptly signed SB 4 and HB 17 on Friday. 

Critics view McCrory’s haste to sign the bills as a power grab by a bitter incumbent and his legislature. Cooper declared victory over McCrory on Nov. 9, but McCrory refused to concede the race because it was too close to call.

Cooper was up by 4,300 votes on Election Day and continued to rise in the count. Instead of bowing out graciously, McCrory asked that all provisional ballots be counted, formally called for a statewide recount and made brash allegations of voter fraud before finally conceding on Dec. 5. 

HB 17 mandates that Cooper’s Cabinet picks receive approval from the Republican-dominated state Senate. It also bars Cooper from making any appointments to the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees or the state Board of Education.

The bill will also greatly reduce the number of administrative employees in “exempt positions” Cooper can designate. “Exempt positions” are not subject to the same hiring and firing rules that govern other state employees.

SB 4 takes aim at the North Carolina Board of Elections following several board decisions to extend voting hours in certain precincts in the Democratic stronghold of Durham County on Election Day. 

The bill will increase the number of Board of Elections members from five appointed by the governor to eight, split evenly along party lines. Cooper would appoint four of them, while two would be picked by the state House and another two by the state Senate. SB 4 also increases county election boards from three members ― two appointed by the sitting governor ― to four members, split along party lines. 

The bill could potentially undermine voting rights efforts in the state by requiring a 6-2 majority to move forward on any motions. The Board of Elections handles a number of questions related to election integrity. 

Cooper, who is currently the state attorney general, said he is willing to sue Republicans over these bills or any other potentially unconstitutional measures.

“They will see me in court,” he said during a press conference on Thursday. “And they don’t have a very good track record there.”

A sad day for democracy in the United States.  North Carolina’s Republicans have no shame.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial today slams the Republicans in the North Carolina legislature who are seeking to change a number of long-standing statutes to limit the powers of the new incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper.  It is a shameful and “brazen power grab” by a state political party without any morals.  The entire editorial appears below.

Tony

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A Brazen Power Grab in North Carolina

By THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD

December 15, 2016

“Having lost the governorship of North Carolina, Republicans there are resorting to a novel strategy to subvert the will of the voters: They are trying to strip the new governor of some of his powers.

First, for weeks after the close election, Gov. Pat McCrory refused to concede to Attorney General Roy Cooper, demanding recounts and alleging, without evidence, widespread voting fraud. It didn’t get him anywhere. So on Wednesday, during a hastily convened special session, Republican lawmakers introduced bills to, among other things, require State Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments; slash the number of employees who report to the governor to 300 from 1,500; and give Republicans greater clout on the Board of Elections, the body that sets the rules for North Carolina’s notoriously burdensome balloting.

With overwhelming Republican majorities in both chambers, and a governor, there seems to be little Democrats can do to prevent the bills from becoming law in the days ahead.

“This is one of the greatest coups we’ve seen in modern-day America,” said the House Democratic leader, Larry Hall. “This is an effort to nullify the clear vote of the people.”

Mr. Cooper said on Thursday that he might challenge the constitutionality of the measures in court, arguing that sweeping changes to the state’s power structure should not be rammed through without careful consideration and debate. If the Republicans succeed in stripping much of the governor’s authority, they will hamstring his ability to make sensible reforms in many areas, including public education, health care and environmental policy.

This legislative power grab is the latest underhanded step by a state Republican Party desperate to stay in power in a state where demographic changes would normally benefit Democrats. Republicans in North Carolina, a presidential battleground state, have used aggressive redistricting and voting suppression measures that are among the most brazen in the nation to win elections. The courts have blocked some of these efforts, but Republicans have found workarounds, for instance, by limiting voting hours and sites.

“I think they’re doing this because they think they can get away with it,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina.

Even if Mr. Cooper was to succeed in beating back these efforts to weaken the governorship, he would assume power with Republican veto-proof majorities in the House and the Senate. That means his greatest asset, in the short run, will be the bully pulpit.

Mr. Cooper can travel around the state promoting a robust legislative agenda that includes investments in public education and the repeal of the discriminatory transgender restroom law that Mr. McCrory and his legislative allies passed earlier this year, leading to a backlash by the business community. He ought to remind taxpayers how much of their money has been wasted on legal challenges to Republican voting suppression efforts. And he should use his victory to persuade them that even in a rigged system, voters can defeat greedy leaders who have violated their trust.”

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has created a website, entitled The Digital Era, that traces 50 years of technology. Each breakthrough comes with a photo and brief description. 

A fun look back at how we have gotten to now!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Guardian just published a letter (see complete text below) from Stephen Hawking where he warned that recent divisive votes like the election of Donald Trump and the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU are backlashes against growing inequality across the world.  This letter is a good review of some of the positions that Hawking has publicly taken in the recent past.

For example, Hawking argues that now is the time to come together to support the poorest among us by working together as a global community, instead of insulating ourselves in nationalism, as Brexit and Trump aim to do.

Hawking is worried isolationism will make it more difficult to address issues like climate change on a global scale. He writes, “We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.”

The renowned astrophysicist did say he was hopeful that humans would be able to figure out a way to travel to Mars or other suitable planets before that happens.  For example, NASA is currently looking across space for planets beyond our solar system that could host human life. 

Tony

==============================

Letter to The Guardian

Stephen Hawking

12-01-2016

As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centred around one of the world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community that I became part of in my 20s is even more rarefied.

And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this, with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.

So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.

It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.

What matters now, far more than the victories by Brexit and Trump, is how the elites react

I am no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward, and the electorate – or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it – took no more notice of me than any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.

What matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

 ‘In sub-Saharan Africa there are more people with a telephone than access to clean water.’

It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.

For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.

Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

To do that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations. If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present.

With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.

We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.

Dear Commons Community,

It was with great sadness that I heard from Che-Tsao Huang yesterday that our dear colleague, Don O. Watkins, had died.  Don was someone special and a close friend to many of us at the City University of New York.  Don worked at Brooklyn, Medgar Evers, Hostos, and Baruch Colleges, and the Central Office as faculty and as an administrator.  I first met Don in 1975  at Medgar Evers College.  Don was the Dean of Administration and I was responsible for computer services.  He taught me and all of us who worked with him so much about social justice, the role of public higher education, and leadership.  His lessons which were always given by example and informal discussions, have stayed with me my entire life.  I last saw Don earlier this year and we talked about a lot of things and especially about our trips to China in 2001 and 2006 as part of CUNY’s Sino-American Conference on Education. I will always treasure the weeks we spent together in Shanxi Province with CUNY and Chinese colleagues. My heart is very heavy today.  Below is Don’s NY Times obituary.  It says it all about what a fine and inspiring individual he was. My sincerest condolences to his family.

Tony

=====================================================

Obituary

Don O. Watkins, of Levittown, New York, passed away from cancer on December 8, 2016, at 89, surrounded by loving family at the Hospice Inn in Melville, New York.
Don was born in Wauseon Ohio in 1927 to Orra and Florence Watkins. He was an outstanding student-athlete and inducted into Wauseon’s academic and athletic halls of fame.
Don served in the Army during WWII. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Denison University and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy and Sociology of Education from Yale University. His Denison football coach, Woody Hayes, called Don one of the most remarkable young men he ever knew.
Don met his wife, Barbara, at camp when they were fourteen years-old. They reunited after WWII and married in 1950. In 1960, they moved to New York when Don started teaching at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York (CUNY). 
Don remained an educator for the rest of his life, as professor, dean, and academic Vice President. His career focused on civil and human rights, organizational behavior and higher education. He taught and mentored countless students and educators at Brooklyn, Medgar Evers, Hostos and Baruch colleges, and CUNY’s Graduate Center, and also served as a university ombudsman for many years. In 1995, he retired as Professor Emeritus after receiving CUNY’s Presidential Excellence Award.
Don was deeply committed to civil rights, marching on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr., serving as a community advisor after the 1965 Watts crisis, directing studies on employment discrimination, protesting apartheid, and serving on CUNY’s affirmative action committee until 2015. When he was arrested during a 1985 anti-apartheid protest, the supervising NYPD officer recognized Don as his former professor and hugged him, to the surprise of officers and protestors alike.
Don’s humanitarian interests were international in scope and, in 1982, he became Vice President of the U.S.-China Education Foundation. For the next thirty years, he frequently traveled to China while fostering relations in higher education.
Don was also active in his community of Levittown, New York, serving two terms as an elected school board member, including as Vice President and President.
Don was a devoted son, brother, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and husband. He was always present for his children, a joyful grandfather and great-grandfather, and loving husband to Barbara, his wife of sixty-six years.
Don is survived by his wife, Barbara; children, Beth Sturman, Kurt (Catherine) Watkins, Thomas (Patricia) Watkins, and Christopher (Martha) Watkins; grandchildren, Kerrie (Woo) Kang, BriAnne Watkins, Cristina (Richard) Kingston, William Sturman, Matthew Watkins, and Bryan Watkins; great-grandchildren, Hana, Audrey, and Isla; and sister, Joan Domeck, and brother, Roger (Sue) Watkins. Don was predeceased by sister Rachel (Robert) Ellis and brother Harold (Evelyn) Watkins.

Memorial service on Tuesday, December 27 at 4:00 p.m., at the Thomas F. Dalton funeral home, 2786 Hempstead Turnpike, Levittown, NY 11756, preceded by calling hours from 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Dear Commons Community,

In a decision that has been brewing for a while, US Department of Education Secretary John B. King Jr. yesterday rejected an appeal from the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, one of the largest national accreditation agencies, to remain on its list of approved accreditors.  As reported by The Washington Post:

“King is siding with his staff and an independent advisory board that deemed the council incapable of rectifying years of lax oversight of troubled for-profit colleges. Advocacy groups, lawmakers and state attorneys general have accused the accrediting agency of letting schools accused of fraud or with abysmal graduation rates receive millions of dollars in federal loans and grants, despite the risks to students and taxpayers.

The council has responded to the criticism by increasing the frequency of its on-site evaluations, removing board members with conflicts of interest, bringing in new leadership and stepping up enforcement actions. Its threat to revoke the accreditation of ITT Technical Institute set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led the for-profit schools to shut down. Still, the council’s efforts have not quelled objections to its participation in the federal student aid program.

“We are deeply disappointed in this decision as we believe it will result in immediate and meaningful harm to hundreds of thousands of students currently enrolled at ACICS-accredited institutions,” Roger Williams, ACICS interim president, said in a statement. “We believe the department’s decision-making process was flawed and potentially unlawful as it did not take this significant progress into account.”

Williams said the accreditation agency plans to file a lawsuit seeking an injunction. That will leave the schools the council accredits in a holding pattern until a final court ruling.

At stake is the future of nearly 300 colleges with 600,000 students. They will ultimately have 18 months to find a new accreditor to prevent students from losing access to government loans and grants. Other accreditation agencies might reject colleges accredited by the council, such as the Art Institutes, which would be the death knell for some. Even if council schools are able to find an accreditor willing to work with them, getting approval could be a long and arduous process.”

This decision was overdue but better late than never.  It will be interesting to see what the new US DOE Secretary, Betsy DeVos, does with King’s decision.

Tony

Dear Commons,

24/7 Wall St. has compiled a list of top employers in each state.   Generally, there is one company or public institution that employs the most people.  Individual state governments and military were excluded from the list.  Here is an excerpt:

“There is a large variation in the number of workers that the largest employers in each state employ. This is due largely to states’ various population sizes. In Maine, the largest employer — Hannaford Supermarkets — employs only 10,000 workers. By contrast, in Texas, the largest employer — Walmart — employs more than 171,831 workers.

As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart has an outsized impact on state labor markets.  Walmart is the only company to claim the top employer spot in more than one state. In fact, the nation’s largest retailer employs the most people in 19 states.

Educational and medical institutions also frequently top a state’s list of employers. The most common largest employer across the 50 states, after Walmart, is the state’s university system. Educational services dominate statewide employment in 16 states. Organizations operating in the healthcare sector are often major employers as well. Several of these are also part of a university system.

To determine the largest employer in each state, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed employment figures for nonprofits and private and publicly held companies from company press releases, government data, business journals, local media reports, as well as statements from company representatives. For the purposes of our analysis, we treated state government employers like public universities as independent organizations, in keeping with how states frequently identify and compare company headcounts. Military bases were excluded from the rank. In most cases, employee counts for the various colleges, laboratories, and medical centers falling under a single university system were combined. This was because these systems frequently attribute employees from the university and medical centers together. However, when a spokesperson from the medical centers or universities identified the organizations as distinct employers, they were counted separately.”

This is an interesting list and readers may want to check out their own states.  Here in New York, the State University of New York with 89,871 employees, is the largest employer.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The job market for those with doctoral degrees remains weak.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“People awarded doctoral degrees at American universities last year continued to face less-certain futures than those who earned such degrees before the economy took a nosedive in late 2008, according to new federal survey data.

The survey of 2015 doctorate recipients found that 38 percent of those responding to a question about their future plans reported having no definite commitment for employment or postdoctoral study. While a slight improvement over the previous year, when 38.6 percent of respondents said they had no such commitments, that figure remains substantially higher than it was before the Great Recession. In 2008, before the nation’s economic woes began to be widely felt, fewer than 31 percent reported having no job or postsecondary study lined up.

Despite the weak job market, the number of doctorates awarded by American institutions rose for the fifth straight year, reaching an all-time high of more than 55,000. Among the fields with the fastest growth were political science, sociology, and education. The share of 2015 doctorate recipients who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents stood at about 64 percent, nearly a percentage point higher than the year before.

The data come from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, an annual census sponsored by six federal agencies: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

The National Center for Education Statistics maintains a website with a plethora of data going back several decades on doctoral graduates. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Research and teaching assistants at Columbia University have voted to unionize as the Graduate Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers union. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning:

“The National Labor Relations Board ruled in August that graduate students who serve as research and teaching assistants at Columbia were primarily employees, not students, and so could unionize under federal labor law. The ruling reversed a 12-year-old decision involving Brown University, and threw open the doors for graduate students to organize into collective-bargaining units at private colleges and universities.

The graduate students at Columbia are the first at a private college in the country to form a union since that ruling. The group voted 1,602 to 623 in favor of unionizing.

“Today 3,500 RAs and TAs like me have won a voice to make sure Columbia University is the best place possible to learn and work,” said Addison Godel, a teaching assistant at Columbia, in the news release.

In a written statement, John Coatsworth, Columbia’s provost, said the university had told eligible voters to hear arguments for and against unionization. Now, he said, the university will work “to ensure that Columbia remains a place where every student can achieve the highest levels of intellectual accomplishment and personal fulfillment.”

Congratulations to Columbia’s research and teaching assistants.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As an example of the growing income inequality in our country, recent data indicate that the chance of an individual born in 1980 of making as much as her/his parents is about 50 percent and in decline.  An individual born in 1940 had a 92 percent chance.  In a piece in today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt provides data on a new index developed by economists at Stanford University that tracks income by families over time.  Using census data from the past 80 years, the data paints a sad picture of how our society is evolving in terms of achieving the American dream.  Here is an excerpt.

“The phrase “American dream” was invented during the Great Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian James Truslow Adams, who defined it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”

In the decades that followed, the dream became a reality. Thanks to rapid, widely shared economic growth, nearly all children grew up to achieve the most basic definition of a better life — earning more money and enjoying higher living standards than their parents had.

These days, people are arguably more worried about the American dream than at any point since the Depression. But there has been no real measure of it, despite all of the data available. No one has known how many Americans are more affluent than their parents were — and how the number has changed.

It’s a thorny research question, because it requires tracking individual families over time rather than (as most economic statistics do) taking one-time snapshots of the country.

The beginnings of a breakthrough came several years ago, when a team of economists led by Raj Chetty received access to millions of tax records that stretched over decades. The records were anonymous and came with strict privacy rules, but nonetheless allowed for the linking of generations.

The resulting research is among the most eye-opening economics work in recent years. You’ve probably heard some of the findings even if you don’t realize it. They have shown that the odds of escaping poverty vary widely by region, for instance, an insight that has influenced federal housing policy.

After the research began appearing, I mentioned to Chetty, a Stanford professor, and his colleagues that I thought they had a chance to do something no one yet had: create an index of the American dream. It took them months of work, using old Census data to estimate long-ago decades, but they have done it. They’ve constructed a data set that shows the percentage of American children who earn more money — and less money — than their parents earned at the same age.

The index is deeply alarming. It’s a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different.

Their frustration helps explain not only this year’s disturbing presidential campaign but also Americans’ growing distrust of nearly every major societal institution, including the federal government, corporate America, labor unions, the news media and organized religion.”

Leonhardt’s last comment that the economic situation regarding well-paying jobs and employment has gotten to the point where young people have come to distrust our major political and social institutions, is most telling.  It is a sad commentary as to what we the older generation have allowed to happen in our country.

Tony