Traveling to Attend the Online Learning Consortium’s INNOVATE Conference in Nashville!

 

Dear Commons Community,

I leave today for Nashville to attend the Online Learning Consortium’s  INNOVATE Conference.  This is one of the major events of the year for online learning. This year’s program will have a plethora of presentations, panel discussions,  research highlights, discovery sessions, and pre-conference workshops. All of the details about the program are available at the Conference website.  

The venue, the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Conference Center, looks like a grand setting for INNOVATE.

Tony

James Comey Interview:  Donald Trump Is Morally Unfit to be President!

Dear Commons Community,

I watched the ABC News/George Stephanopoulos’ interview last night with James Comey, the former F.B.I. director fired by Donald Trump last May.   The interview covered a number of topics including Trump’s treatment of women, Russian government blackmail, likening The Donald to a Mafia boss,  and the President’s chronic lying.  Perhaps the most provocative statement from Comey was that “Donald Trump was morally unfit to be president.”  I found Comey a bit sanctimonious and wobbly with some of his explanations especially with regard to Hillary Clinton.  Here is a recap provided by the New York Times:

“If there was any chance that President Trump and James B. Comey could have avoided all-out war, it ended Sunday night.

That was when ABC News aired an interview with Mr. Comey, the president’s fired F.B.I. director, as he uses a publicity blitz for his searing tell-all memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” to raise the alarm about the dangers he says Mr. Trump poses to the country.

While ABC aired one hour of its conversation with Mr. Comey, it had conducted a five-hour interview with him, a transcript of which was obtained by The New York Times. In it, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump a serial liar who treated women like “meat,” and described him as a “stain” on everyone who worked for him.

He said a salacious allegation that Mr. Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow had left him vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. And he asserted that the president was incinerating the country’s crucial norms and traditions like a wildfire. He compared the president to a mafia boss.

“Our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country,” Mr. Comey told ABC’s chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, on the program “20/20.” “The most important being truth. This president is not able to do that. He is morally unfit to be president.”

I think James Comey’s new book,  A Higher Loyalty, is going to be a best-seller.

Tony

 

Central Missouri:  Can Closing a Humanities College Save a University?

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning has an article describing the financial problems at Missouri colleges and specifically at the University of Central Missouri.  Entitled, Can Closing a Humanities College Save a University?, it specifically examines a proposal to close or merge Humanities programs into other departments and schools at the University. Here is an excerpt:

“In 2010, Charles M. Ambrose became president at the University of Central Missouri and led an effort to put the institution on firmer financial footing by recasting its mission and creating new initiatives to both become more efficient and create new revenues. 

The result was called “Strategic Governance for Student Success,” and it produced a wide range of measures with catchy names emphasizing the university’s positive aspirations. “Learning To A Greater Degree,” “Strategic Resource Allocation Model,” and “Contract for Completion,” to name a few.

The university also eliminated one of its five colleges, redistributing academic programs in health into a new College of Health Sciences and Technology. 

In February, administrators announced another effort to improve the university’s long-term financial outlook, relying mostly on budget cuts, including a proposal to eliminate the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

While the details have not been finalized, one result could be that departments such as English, history, and philosophy could be merged with programs from the College of Education. Art, music, and dance departments could share a college structure with a variety of sciences, statistics, and technology.

Administrators are estimating the changes could save $600,000 a year by getting rid of a dean and five department chairs. Though many of the people in those jobs would remain on the faculty, money would be saved from the stipend and release from teaching time the university grants those employees. 

Ambrose said the changes are necessary to respond to declining numbers of international students, stagnant state appropriations, increasing health care and pension costs, and a state law limiting tuition increases to the rate of inflation. 

Although the measure is still in draft form, Ambrose expects that the university’s Board of Governors will vote on a final version at its April 27 meeting, just a few months after the idea was introduced.

The relatively quick pace for making such changes is not only necessary, the president said, but desirable. “We are being very active and offensive in this plan so we don’t have to keep doing it,” he said in an interview.

Faculty offered predictably mixed reviews of the plan, especially its short timeline.

There is no doubt that the university needs to respond to its budget problems, said Michael Bersin, a professor of music and a former president of the Faculty Senate. But it’s not clear that another reorganization is really the answer to the university’s core problems, he said, and such a move could weaken the university’s role as a regional comprehensive university. 

Central Missouri is just one of many examples of regional public universities struggling both with their budgets and their academic identities. Such institutions have become stretched thin over the past decade by falling enrollments and stagnant state appropriations. At the same time, they are under public and political pressure to keep tuition low and tailor their academic programs to work-force needs.

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point is considering cutting 13 majors, primarily in the liberal arts, and some faculty to deal with a $4.5-million budget deficit and declining enrollment. 

A $25-million shortfall at Eastern Kentucky University has led that institution’s board to eliminate nearly two dozen degree programs, men’s and women’s tennis, and 153 positions. 

The causes for the cuts are similar in many cases: declining enrollments and state budget woes. At Central Missouri, enrollments have fallen by more than 2,700 students since the spring of 2016, according to university figures. 

What makes that statistic worse is that the shrinking enrollment is driven mostly by a loss of international students, most from India, who pay significantly higher amounts for their tuition. Since the fall of 2016, the number of international students on campus has dropped from 2,638 to 944, the university reported. Tuition from international students has fallen from nearly $30 million in fiscal year 2016 to an estimated $14.5 million for the current fiscal year. 

Missouri lawmakers are now considering a state budget that is essentially flat for higher education but that limits tuition increases. Meanwhile, per-student appropriations for higher education remain more than 26 percent below what they were in 2008, before the most recent recession. 

“You could easily say the fiscal pressure on the state budget puts higher education in the crosshairs,” Ambrose said. 

Bersin was more direct, saying that the state’s elected officials have created an impossible situation for the university. “This was brought about by the General Assembly and a governor who do not know what we do, do not understand what we do, and do not care,” he said. “They give lip service to the value of this institution but unfailingly vote for the things that contribute to the problems.” 

The fiscal problems in Missouri are becoming typical of the situation that public higher education increasingly is finding itself or as President Ambrose said in the “fiscal crosshairs” of state policy  makers.

Tony

 

 

Teachers Push Kentucky Legislature to Override Governor Bevin’s Veto of Public School Education Spending Plan!

Dear Commons Community,

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin railed against teachers protesting outside the state capitol this week, asserting with certainty that their demonstration resulted in children being sexually assaulted, poisoned and injured. 

“I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them,” the Republican politician told reporters Friday evening.

“I guarantee you somewhere today, a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were home alone, because a single parent didn’t have enough money to take care of them.”

He added that he knew “for a fact” that “hundreds of thousands” of students were home because schools were closed across the state’s 39 districts so to allow teachers and administrators to protest potential funding cuts.

Hours later, the Republican-dominated legislature overrode the GOP governor’s veto of the state’s two-year operating budget, which includes record new spending for education.  As reported by the New York Times:

“With the chants of hundreds of teachers ringing in their ears, Kentucky lawmakers voted on Friday to override the Republican governor’s veto of a two-year state budget that increases public education spending with the help of a more than $480 million tax increase.

The votes came as thousands of teachers rallied at the Capitol, forcing more than 30 school districts to close as the state continued the chorus of teacher protests across the country.

The two-year state operating budget includes record new spending for public education, fueled by a 50-cent increase in the cigarette tax and a 6 percent sales tax on some services, including home and auto repairs. But Gov. Matt Bevin vetoed the budget and revenue bills, calling the latter “sloppy” and “non-transparent.” He said it would not raise enough money to cover the new spending.

The veto put Republican lawmakers in a tough position by asking them to vote a second time on a tax increase in an election year. But 57 House Republicans, later joined by just enough Senate Republicans, voted to override.

“We have to have this revenue to fund our schools,” said Representative Regina Huff, a Republican and middle school special education teacher.

The House voted 57 to 40 to override the veto of the tax increase and 66 to 28 to override the budget veto. Later, without a vote to spare, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 20 to 18 to override the tax increase veto. Senate President Robert Stivers cast the decisive vote for the override.

The Senate later voted 26 to 12 to override the budget veto.

The rallies in Kentucky came amid teacher protests in Oklahoma and Arizona over low education funding and teacher pay. The demonstrations were inspired by West Virginia teachers, whose nine-day walkout after many years without raises led to a 5 percent pay increase.

In Arizona, after weeks of teacher protests and walkout threats across the state, Gov. Doug Ducey promised a net 20 percent raise by 2020.

In Oklahoma, teachers ended two weeks of walkouts on Thursday, shifting their focus to electing pro-education candidates in November. Gov. Mary Fallin signed legislation raising teacher salaries by about $6,000 and providing millions in new education funding, but many say schools need more money.

Kentucky teachers have not asked for a raise. They are instead focused on education funding and a battle over their pensions.”

Congratulations to the teachers and the Kentucky legislators who voted to override.

Tony

 

At A.E.R.A – Pathways to Change: CUNY Reshapes Academic Policy!

Dear Commons Community,

I will be at the American Education Research Association (A.E.R.A.) Annual Meeting being held today in New York City.  I will be on a panel with Matt Goldstein, Chet Jordan and Lexa Logue entitled, Pathways to Change: CUNY Reshapes Academic Policy.   If you are at all interested in the Pathways initiative and what it has meant to the City University of New York, I think Matt, Chet, and Lexa will provide much food for thought.  If you are at the conference stop by.  Below is the location and abstract.  

Tony

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Pathways to Change: CUNY Reshapes Academic Policy

Sat, April 14, 8:15 to 9:45am, New York Marriott Marquis, Fourth Floor, Odets

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In 2013 the City University of New York implemented the Pathways Initiative. Pathways represented a sweeping change in institutional policy and practice, revised the general education curriculum, aligned major requirements across the colleges, and allowed for a more fluid transfer process within the system. The implementation of Pathways generated an historical conflict among numerous constituencies over issues related to faculty governance and academic freedom. This symposium will include key former administrators who led the Pathways Initiative and faculty from different sectors of the CUNY system. The conversation will highlight the successes and challenges of the Pathways Initiative and will invite audience members to join in a lively debate with panelists regarding the conflicts, promises, and possibilities of Pathways.

New Report on Faculty Time – Teachers, Researchers, and Service Providers!

Dear Commons Community,

A team of researchers from the Center for Postsecondary Research, at Indiana University at Bloomington, examined the time that professors devote to the key components of professorial work: teaching, research, and service. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The report, Faculty Types and Effective Teaching: A Cautionary Exploration of How Faculty Spend their Time, maps out five core types of faculty members based on the relative amounts of time they spend on those three core areas of work. It captures a more nuanced view of faculty roles than job titles provide.

The researchers devised the categories using their analysis of responses to the center’s Faculty Survey of Student Engagement by some 16,000 full-time instructors who teach at least one undergraduate course.

The five types of professors in the study are the classic, teaching-heavy, research-heavy, service-heavy, and moderate-load.

Here’s what the researchers found about the five types:

  • Classic faculty: 16.3 percent of professors, 53.5-hour average workweek on research, teaching, and service. They spend most of their time teaching, a moderate amount on research, and a low amount on service. Tenured and tenure-track faculty members are very overrepresented in this group. Asian, black, and multiracial professors are slightly overrepresented, and white professors are slightly underrepresented. Professors working at public institutions are overrepresented. Use of the effective teaching practices asked about in the survey is higher than average for this group.
  • Teaching-heavy faculty: 32.5 percent of professors, 38.6-hour average workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time teaching, with low amounts on research and service. Lecturers and instructors are very overrepresented. Professors working off of the tenure track or at a college without a tenure track are overrepresented. Women are overrepresented. Professors working at very small or small colleges are overrepresented.
  • Research-heavy faculty: 15.5 percent of professors, 42.8-hour average workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time on research, a moderate amount teaching, and a low amount on service. Those in biological sciences, agriculture, and natural resources; physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science; social sciences; and engineering are overrepresented. Men are overrepresented. Asian professors are very overrepresented, and black and white professors are underrepresented.
  • Service-heavy faculty: 9 percent of professors, 52.4-hour workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time on service, a moderate amount on teaching, and a low amount on research. Tenured professors are overrepresented, and those on the tenure track are underrepresented. Full or associate professors are overrepresented, and assistant professors, lecturers, and instructors are underrepresented. Professors working at highly competitive institutions are underrepresented.
  • Moderate-load faculty: 26.7 percent of professors, 27.6-hour workweek on core tasks. They spend a moderate amount of time teaching and low amounts on research and service, devoting less time overall to those three activities combined than do the other groups. The researchers suspect that many professors in this group may be seeing patients or clients or otherwise engaged in work outside of these categories.”

I would generally have been among the “Classic” faculty although this year I am more in the “Research-heavy category.

Tony

 

Erin Bartram: Why Everyone Loses When Someone Leaves Academe -The Ph.D. Career Crisis!

Dear Commons Community,

Erin Bartram, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Hartford, wrote a farewell letter to colleagues on her personal blog after yet another tenure-track job rejection, and has given up on the academic job market for good. Her essay struck a chord among the throng of the academic jobless. The Chronicle of Higher Education reviews her story.  See below.

We wish her well!

Tony

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She Wrote a Farewell Letter to Colleagues. Then 80,000 People Read It.

By Sarah Brown FEBRUARY 15, 2018

Last week Erin Bartram was a little-known visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Hartford. On Sunday night, she published an essay on her personal blog about why, after yet another year of coming up short on the tenure-track job market, she was leaving academe.

The piece, “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind” (a not-so-uncommon example of what’s known in higher education as quit lit), has become a sensation. Bartram framed her discussion around the emotions involved — specifically, grief. “I didn’t feel I had the right to grieve,” she wrote. And faculty members, she said, often don’t think deeply about the departure of countless Ph.D.s each year.

“If we don’t see the loss of all of these scholars as an actual loss to the field,” she wrote, “is it any wonder I felt I had no right to grieve?”

Her piece has sparked responses on the Ph.D. career crisis, whether there’s too much pressure on students to publish while they’re still finishing their dissertations, and how advising might temper unrealistic expectations about academic jobs. Bartram estimates that her post has been viewed 80,000 times.

She spoke with The Chronicle about her 15 minutes of fame and how academe might wrestle with the questions she has raised.

How are you feeling now that the essay is out there, compared with how you felt when you were writing it?

I have been writing it in my head for a while. Honestly, I thought I would put it out there, and the historians I know on Twitter and the people who read my blog would read it and be like, “Oh, this is a shame.” And then it would kind of fade away. I sort of wrote it as a goodbye to my colleagues.

I had no idea that it would resonate with so many people, and I still don’t think I have grasped how much it has meant to people. I almost feel bad, because it’s clearly made a lot of people confront stuff that they hadn’t fully dealt with — last year, five years ago, 20 years ago.

But I also noticed that very few people said, “This is new. I never thought about it that way.” Most of what people said was, “I felt this way, and I never thought that I could say it out loud. So thank you.” Which is good, but also a problem in and of itself.

Why do you feel bad?

Obviously we need to have this discussion if there’s been all this — not just all this grief, but all of these people feeling like they didn’t even have a right to be sad. And I’ve heard from a lot of friends with tenure-track jobs who are feeling just horrific survivor’s guilt.

It’s hard to get emails from people who say they had to pull over on the side of the road and cry. Or, “I read this out loud to my wife so that she would finally understand what this was like.” Or, “Thank you. I was finally able to cry over this thing that happened 10 years ago, and I didn’t realize how much I hadn’t let myself do it.”

I also got messages from historian friends who were like, “I can’t bring myself to read this because I know what it’s going to do to me.” It’s hard to know that you’ve made so many people upset, even if it’s a good upset.

A lot of people who responded to your piece also feel stuck in a seemingly never-ending cycle of adjunct and visiting positions. Many of them are grappling with the same question of “Do I stay or leave?” Do you advise them to leave?

It’s weird to hear from people who are like, “I’m going to be in the place that you are in soon — I know that is coming.” I don’t know what to say to people other than that it’s OK to listen to your own feelings on the issue — and not listen to other people, particularly when those other people, as supportive and caring as they might be, may have come through academia in a time that does not resemble the one we’re in now. You’re the one who has to decide. You’re the one who would have to live with the consequences of adjuncting for another year.

You had this life of the mind, and you imagined a future in it, and that’s great. But if it didn’t turn out to be a healthy and stable life for you, you’re not obligated to stay in it.

What has surprised you most about the response?

It’s how all I had to do to write something different in the quit-lit genre was to write about how I felt. Yeah, there’s a lot of analysis in there, and obviously I’m thinking a lot about the larger structures that have shaped this. But apparently the thing that resonated most with people was to talk about grief and loss — not just the loss that’s felt by the person leaving, but to actually say, “Are we losing a lot when these people leave? What does the field lose?”

It may have punctured this very useful coping mechanism. We all come out of grad school, and we all might be brilliant, but the thing that determines whether or not our work is worth anything is whether or not we get this job. And then as soon as we don’t get the job, the only way for people to deal with that brain drain is to say, “Well, clearly their work can’t have been that good anyway. We’re not losing anything when they go.”

There are countless people who have — and more people who will, after reading this interview — go look at my CV and find reasons why I didn’t get a job. It’s absolutely their right to do that. But we’re training all of these people, and giving them these degrees, and they’re producing all of this knowledge, and then most of them are leaving. Either we’re giving Ph.D.s to a bunch of people who were actually not good scholars, or we are losing a lot of human capital and a lot of future knowledge production. It’s got to be one of those two things. I don’t know what we do if we reckon that it’s the second.

You talk in the essay about how, when someone decides to leave, academics tend to say the same things: Your work is still valuable, you can still publish, you have all these great skills. What’s driving that?

You don’t want to think that it was all a waste. You’ve essentially as a field told people they’re not valuable enough to hire. But on a one-on-one basis, you want to tell someone, “No, no, no, I think you’re still valuable. It’s just that the market didn’t think you were valuable.” And, “I liked your stuff, but nobody could find a place for you.” And, “All of that stuff you packed into your brain, all of that knowledge, all of those analytical skills are still worth something.” And, “We know that you loved doing this — and you can still do it!”

It does ring kind of false. I don’t think that’s necessarily how people mean it, but that’s what it can feel like.

One of your key points is that those who remain should grieve the loss of these Ph.D.s who give up and move on. What might that look like?

Honestly, take a minute and think about all the people you’ve known in your academic career who didn’t make it. Not because of something else, but because the system didn’t find a place for them, and they left. Write down what they were going to do that they didn’t do. The books they were going to write.

I have friends who were going to write such amazing books. They took a unique perspective with them when they left, things that needed to be written. And those are gone.

In response to your essay, some people have been pointing to a need for better advising for Ph.D. students so they can have more realistic expectations. Would that have made a difference for you?

There’s a lot of stuff tied up in a knot here when it comes to advising. Many people will look at this and say, “Well, of course, she didn’t go to a top-tier program, what should she expect? She should publish more.” I have friends who went to better programs than me who published like crazy and are brilliant scholars, much better than I am, and nothing’s happening for them.

No one wants to actually dig into platitudes like, “It doesn’t matter where you went, it matters who your adviser was.” Stop saying that. That is not the real experience that people are having.

But then do we get rid of grad programs at certain schools? Many people would say if it’s not a top-tier grad program, it shouldn’t exist. But to be an R1 and to have a good faculty, you have to have grad programs. Also, no one wants to get rid of their grad programs because grad students do much of the teaching in most of these places.

It’s better to just stay in this bubble where you’ve ignored all of the causes because to actually confront them, to actually pull the thread, unravels a lot of stuff.

Are you hopeful that academics can get out of that bubble and reckon with some of this?

I’m not hopeful that they will do it. And I’m not saying that this would actually work. But one of the issues for historians — and I think for a lot of fields — is that the amount of scholarship you have to produce is just through the roof. And to put it bluntly, I have plenty of colleagues who I know have been turned down for jobs when their CVs as candidates already had more publications on them than senior members of that committee. That hurts.

It is possible for the American Historical Association as an organizing body to say that this type of productivity, particularly for a book-based discipline, is kind of out of control — that we are setting such unreasonable expectations for scholars that maybe it’s not producing the best scholarship.

Senior scholars say, “Oh, it’s such a shame. Back in the old days, we didn’t have to do that. Nowadays people have to.” We talk about it like it was just some natural thing that happened. Maybe we can imagine that something could be done about it.

You have gained a substantial following within academe right as you’ve chosen to leave the field. Does that mean anything for your career plans?

I needed to say this so that I could come to grips with the fact that it was over. And nothing that has happened in the past week has made me think that all of a sudden somebody’s going to be like, “Hey, here’s a job for you.”

I was thinking this morning: I was the same writer and thinker a week ago. I was the same person. It’s just like how the tenure-track job is the thing that validates you as a scholar. Had I not written this, I would have been nobody. And the essay didn’t matter until other people said that it was worth something. That’s pretty much the problem we’re dealing with in academia.

There are so many other people like me. Every one of my friends who’s left like I did could have written, and has written, really great stuff. But until we’re validated, we don’t exist.

This was your academic mic drop. What do you hope those who remain in the field will do with your essay?

There is a lot of emotional energy put into explaining this problem away and not dealing with what it means. What if we actually took that energy and said, “This is God-awful, and it’s actually very unfair.” I’m not saying I should have gotten a job — I don’t feel entitled to one. But we really want to feel like everyone is where they are because they were the best person.

I’ve had a lot of people admit to me that they got a job by the skin of their teeth. They know that they were on the knife’s edge. Or they VAPed [held a visiting position] for a long time, but as soon as they became tenure track, it was so easy to forget how things used to be. It would be very unsettling to people to have to grapple with this. I’m not saying that everybody in academia who made it didn’t deserve it. But what do we do with the fact that lots of other people deserved it, too?

Maybe sitting with that uncertainty is good and can help you be a little more understanding when you think about how you hire. Maybe it can give you ideas about how to make changes within your own university. I will unfortunately not ever be in a position to do these sorts of things, but lots of people are. Maybe just sitting with the pain and not putting it away in a box is a good thing.

 

New York Times Editorial:  “Saving Paul Ryan!”

Dear Commons Community, 

Yesterday the news media took a short break from the Mueller investigation, Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, Steve Zuckerberg, and Syria, to cover House Speaker Paul Ryan’s announcement that he is not running for reelection.  His decision puts in jeopardy the passing of any meaningful legislation for the remainder of this Congressional session.  However, a New York Times editorial this morning entitled, Saving Paul Ryan, pleads with Ryan to do the country a great service by calling out President Trump as needed in his remaining time in office.  Below is the entire editorial.

In sum, put the country ahead of your party, Mr. Ryan.

Tony

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New York Times

Saving Paul Ryan

By The Editorial Board

April 11, 2018

Well, Paul Ryan, you’re a free man now — at least, much freer than you were before you announced on Wednesday that you’d be stepping down as House speaker and departing Congress in January. What an opportunity you have to serve the country and to demonstrate, despite all the ground you’ve created for eye-rolling, that you care about something more than short-term partisan advantage.

Have you truly been offended, as you suggested in 2016, by the bigotry and bullying of Donald Trump? Would you like to see the White House, and the Republican Party, set a higher standard? Now you have the chance to go far beyond milquetoast observations, like “he could have done better,” your less-than-withering reaction to President Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people” among the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., who chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

You say you’ve been given assurances that the president doesn’t intend to fire law-enforcement officials who are investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. So you’re clearly worried about that possibility. Why not take steps to ensure your fellow citizens won’t have to suffer the constitutional crisis that a step like that would precipitate?

You don’t have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You don’t have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.

Unfortunately, the reputation you hoped to build for yourself across your nearly 20 years in Congress, as an earnest policy wonk in anguish over the federal deficit, vanished long ago beneath a flood of red ink. You talked a lot about making government more effective and efficient, but actually pushed a conventional hard-line agenda of huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and steep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families. The tax law you rammed through last year will blow up the deficit by more than $1.85 trillion over the next decade. All that debt is part of your legacy. Too late to fix that.

We’re also not trying to persuade you to redeem yourself by embracing Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act. Much as we disagree with you, it seems more than possible that you actually believe it’s right to strip funds from the former and destroy the latter. Whether you were being cynical or naïve, your insistence that an unregulated market will rush to the aid of society’s most vulnerable members — in defiance of so much hard human experience to the contrary — has been consistent.

But setting aside those lost causes, we know you’ve also talked about good government and transparency, about the critical role of Congress as a check on the executive. So step up. Exercise Congress’s constitutional responsibility to authorize the use of force in places like Syria. Have House committees hold hearings on the conflicts of interests that pervade the Trump administration. Demand that the president release his tax returns. Get outraged when Mr. Trump tosses aside ethical practices like releasing the logs of the visitors to the White House until the administration was sued. And speak out forcefully when the president insults or attacks minorities, women and anybody else less privileged than him.

You’re only 48 years old, and you have a long career ahead of you, but how you handle Donald Trump will surely decide how history sees you. So go out in style, Mr. Ryan. You will be doing the country — and your party — a service.

New York Times Editorial:  “The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump!”

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial this morning entitled, The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump, paints a situation that will soon engulf Mr. Trumps’s presidency.  While much if not the majority of the American people would like to see him go, my sense is that he is with us for a while given the reluctance of the leaders of the Repbulican Party to rein him in. Below is the full editorial.

Read it!

Tony

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The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump

 

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

April 10, 2018

Why don’t we take a step back and contemplate what Americans, and the world, are witnessing?

Early Monday morning, F.B.I. agents raided the New York office, home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the president of the United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes — including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who say they had affairs with the president before he took office and were paid off and intimidated into silence.

That evening the president surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden into a tirade against the top American law enforcement officials — officials of his own government — accusing them of “an attack on our country.”

Oh, also: The Times reported Monday evening that investigators were examining a $150,000 donation to the president’s personal foundation from a Ukrainian steel magnate, given during the American presidential campaign in exchange for a 20-minute video appearance.

Meanwhile, the president’s former campaign chairman is under indictment, and his former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to lying to investigators. His son-in-law and other associates are also under investigation.

This is your president, ladies and gentlemen. This is how Donald Trump does business, and these are the kinds of people he surrounds himself with.

Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence.

On Monday, when he appeared with his national security team, Mr. Trump, whose motto could be, “The buck stops anywhere but here,” angrily blamed everyone he could think of for the “unfairness” of an investigation that has already consumed the first year of his presidency, yet is only now starting to heat up. He said Attorney General Jeff Sessions made “a very terrible mistake” by recusing himself from overseeing the investigation — the implication being that a more loyal attorney general would have obstructed justice and blocked the investigation. He complained about the “horrible things” that Hillary Clinton did “and all of the crimes that were committed.” He called the A-team of investigators from the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, “the most biased group of people.” As for Mr. Mueller himself, “we’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “Many people have said, ‘You should fire him.’”

In fact, the raids on the premises used by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, were conducted by the public corruption unit of the federal attorney’s office in Manhattan, and at the request not of the special counsel’s team, but under a search warrant that investigators in New York obtained following a referral by Mr. Mueller, who first consulted with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. To sum up, a Republican-appointed former F.B.I. director consulted with a Republican-appointed deputy attorney general, who then authorized a referral to an F.B.I. field office not known for its anti-Trump bias. Deep state, indeed.

Mr. Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into” Mr. Cohen’s office. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time. He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the American legal system, but it does not protect communications in furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the privilege in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that he has a lot to hide.

This wasn’t even the first early-morning raid of a close Trump associate. That distinction goes to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and Russian oligarch-whisperer, who now faces a slate of federal charges long enough to land him in prison for the rest of his life. And what of Mr. Cohen? He’s already been cut loose by his law firm, and when the charges start rolling in, he’ll likely get the same treatment from Mr. Trump.

Among the grotesqueries that faded into the background of Mr. Trump’s carnival of misgovernment during the past 24 hours was that Monday’s meeting was ostensibly called to discuss a matter of global significance: a reported chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians. Mr. Trump instead made it about him, with his narcissistic and self-pitying claim that the investigation represented an attack on the country “in a true sense.”

No, Mr. Trump — a true attack on America is what happened on, say, Sept. 11, 2001. Remember that one? Thousands of people lost their lives. Your response was to point out that the fall of the twin towers meant your building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. Of course, that also wasn’t true.

 

Senator John Kennedy to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: “Your user agreement sucks!” 

 

Dear Commons Community,

If we could get passed all of the media coverage yesterday of the F.B.I. raid on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and homes, there was drama at the U.S. Senate hearing with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  During hours of questioning before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees over Cambridge Analytica and security concerns on the social network, several senators alluded to Facebook’s complex user agreement.  They argued that the text is written so that the average user likely does not understand how their data is being used by the company. No one put it as bluntly as Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“Your user agreement sucks,” Kennedy said to Zuckerberg. “The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear end. It’s not to inform your users about their rights. Now, you know that and I know that.”

The senator then urged the Facebook CEO to “go back home and rewrite it.”

He added, “Tell your $1,200-an-hour lawyers ― no disrespect, they’re good ― but tell them you want them written in English, in non-Swahili, so the average American can understand.” 

Putting aside his disparaging remark about Swahili, Kennedy got his point across and it was the toughest blow of the day to Zuckerberg.

Tony