John and Debbie Dingell

Dear Commons Community,

Rep. John Dingell, who was the longest-serving member of the U.S. Congress when he died Feb. 7 at the age of 92, dictated a letter to his wife, Debbie, in the hours before his death.

“One of the advantages to knowing that your demise is imminent, and that reports of it will not be greatly exaggerated, is that you have a few moments to compose some parting thoughts.”

That’s how former U.S. Rep.John Dingell, D-Dearborn, started a farewell letter (see below for full text) that was posted by The Washington Post yesterday afternoon.

Dingell served in Congress from 1955 to 2015 and was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In the letter, Dingell reflects on the changes he had seen since he began in Congress, noting elder care, environmental concerns and race relations as areas where “we’ve made progress.”

“Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress,” Dingell said. “Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.”

Dingell also appeared to take a jab at President Trump, but did not name him:

“In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition…

“My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.”

And Dingell, a sensation on Twitter in his later years, noted in the letter: “And much as I have found Twitter to be a useful means of expression, some occasions merit more than 280 characters.”

He thanked the people in his life: friends, neighbors, family, but most of all, his wife

 “In my life and career I have often heard it said that so-and-so has real power — as in, ‘the powerful Wile E. Coyote, chairman of the Capture the Road Runner Committee.’ It’s an expression that has always grated on me. In democratic government, elected officials do not have power. They hold power — in trust for the people who elected them. If they misuse or abuse that public trust, it is quite properly revoked (the quicker the better).”

May he rest in peace!

Tony

The Washington Post

February 7, 2019

John Dingell: My last words for America

One of the advantages to knowing that your demise is imminent, and that reports of it will not be greatly exaggerated, is that you have a few moments to compose some parting thoughts.

In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.

And much as I have found Twitter to be a useful means of expression, some occasions merit more than 280 characters.

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Think about it:

Impoverishment of the elderly because of medical expenses was a common and often accepted occurrence. Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today.

Not five decades ago, much of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth — our own Great Lakes — were closed to swimming and fishing and other recreational pursuits because of chemical and bacteriological contamination from untreated industrial and wastewater disposal. Today the Great Lakes are so hospitable to marine life that one of our biggest challenges is controlling the invasive species that have made them their new home.

We regularly used and consumed foods, drugs, chemicals and other things (cigarettes) that were legal, promoted and actively harmful. Hazardous wastes were dumped on empty plots in the dead of night. There were few if any restrictions on industrial emissions. We had only the barest scientific knowledge of the long-term consequences of any of this.

And there was a great stain on America, in the form of our legacy of racial discrimination. There were good people of all colors who banded together, risking and even losing their lives to erase the legal and other barriers that held Americans down. In their time they were often demonized and targeted, much like other vulnerable men and women today.

Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress. Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.

I’m immensely proud, and eternally grateful, for having had the opportunity to play a part in all of these efforts during my service in Congress. And it’s simply not possible for me to adequately repay the love that my friends, neighbors and family have given me and shown me during my public service and retirement.

But I would be remiss in not acknowledging the forgiveness and sweetness of the woman who has essentially supported me for almost 40 years: my wife, Deborah. And it is a source of great satisfaction to know that she is among the largest group of women to have ever served in the Congress (as she busily recruits more).

In my life and career I have often heard it said that so-and-so has real power — as in, “the powerful Wile E. Coyote, chairman of the Capture the Road Runner Committee.”

It’s an expression that has always grated on me. In democratic government, elected officials do not have power. They hold power — in trust for the people who elected them. If they misuse or abuse that public trust, it is quite properly revoked (the quicker the better).

I never forgot the people who gave me the privilege of representing them. It was a lesson learned at home from my father and mother, and one I have tried to impart to the people I’ve served with and employed over the years.

As I prepare to leave this all behind, I now leave you in control of the greatest nation of mankind and pray God gives you the wisdom to understand the responsibility you hold in your hands.

May God bless you all, and may God bless America.

Dear Commons Community!

A divided Supreme Court yesterday blocked a Louisiana law that its opponents say could have left the state with only one doctor in a single clinic authorized to provide abortions.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s four-member liberal wing to form a majority. That coalition underscored the pivotal position the chief justice has assumed after the departure last year of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who used to hold the crucial vote in many closely divided cases, including ones concerning abortion.

President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were among the four conservative members of the court who would have allowed the law to take effect.

Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in which he said the court’s action was premature because the state had made clear it would allow abortion providers an additional 45 days to obtain admitting privileges before it started enforcing the law.

If the doctors succeed, they can continue performing abortions, he said. If they fail, they could return to court, Kavanaugh said.

Louisiana abortion providers and a district judge who initially heard the case said one or maybe two of the state’s three abortion clinics would have to close under the new law. There would be at most two doctors who could meet its requirements, they said.

But the federal appeals court in New Orleans rejected those claims, doubting that any clinics would have to close and saying the doctors had not tried hard enough to establish relationships with local hospitals.

In January, the full appeals court voted 9-6 not to get involved in the case, setting up the Supreme Court appeal.

The law had been scheduled to take effect Monday, but Justice Samuel Alito delayed the effective date at least through Thursday to give the justices more time. He and Justice Clarence Thomas were the other dissenters Thursday.

The justices could decide this spring whether to add the case to their calendar for the term that begins in October.

The case is June Medical Services v. Gee.

Congratulations to the Justices Roberts, Kagan, Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The political crisis in Virginia spun out of control yesterday when the state’s attorney general confessed to putting on blackface in the 1980s and a woman went public with detailed allegations of sexual assault against the lieutenant governor.  As reported by the Associated Press:

“With Gov. Ralph Northam’s career already hanging by a thread over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook, the day’s developments threatened to take down all three of Virginia’s top elected officials, all of them Democrats.

The twin blows began with Attorney General Mark Herring issuing a statement acknowledging he wore brown makeup and a wig in 1980 to look like a rapper during a party when he was a 19-year-old student at the University of Virginia.

Herring — who had previously called on Northam to resign and was planning to run for governor himself in 2021 — apologized for his “callous” behavior and said that the days ahead “will make it clear whether I can or should continue to serve.”

The 57-year-old Herring came clean after rumors about the existence of a blackface photo of him began circulating at the Capitol, though he made no mention of a picture Wednesday.

Then, within hours, Vanessa Tyson, the California woman whose sexual assault allegations against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax surfaced earlier this week, put out a detailed statement saying Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hotel room in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

The Associated Press typically does not identify those who say they were sexually assaulted, but Tyson issued the statement in her name.

Tyson, a 42-year-old political scientist who is on a fellowship at Stanford University and specializes in the political discourse of sexual assault, said, “I have no political motive. I am a proud Democrat.”

“Mr. Fairfax has tried to brand me as a liar to a national audience, in service to his political ambitions, and has threatened litigation,” she said. “Given his false assertions, I’m compelled to make clear what happened.”

Fairfax — who is in line to become governor if Northam resigns — has repeatedly denied her allegations, saying that the encounter was consensual and that he is the victim of a strategically timed political smear.

“At no time did she express to me any discomfort or concern about our interactions, neither during that encounter, nor during the months following it, when she stayed in touch with me, nor the past 15 years,” he said in a statement.

Tyson said she suffered “deep humiliation and shame” and stayed quiet about the allegations as she pursued her career, but by late 2017, as the #MeToo movement took shape and after she saw an article about Fairfax’s campaign, she took her story to The Washington Post, which decided months later not to publish a story.

The National Organization for Women immediately called on Fairfax to resign, saying, “Her story is horrifying, compelling and clear as day — and we believe her.”

The string of scandals that began when the yearbook picture came to light last Friday could have a domino effect on Virginia state government: If Northam and Fairfax fall, Herring would be next in line to become governor. After Herring comes House Speaker Kirk Cox, a conservative Republican.

At the Capitol, lawmakers were dumbstruck over the day’s fast-breaking developments, with Democratic Sen. Barbara Favola saying, “I have to take a breath and think about this. This is moving way too quickly.” GOP House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert said it would be “reckless” to comment. “There’s just too much flying around,” he said.

The chairman of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Del. Lamont Bagby, said, “We’ve got a lot to digest.”

Cox issued a statement late Wednesday calling the allegations against Fairfax “extremely serious” and said they need a “full airing of facts.” Cox also urged Herring to “adhere to the standard he has set for others,” a nod to Herring’s previous call that Northam resign.

Democrats have expressed fear that the uproar over the governor could jeopardize their chances of taking control of the GOP-dominated Virginia legislature this year. The party made big gains in 2017, in part because of a backlash against President Donald Trump, and has moved to within striking distance of a majority in both houses.

At the same time, the Democrats nationally have taken a hard line against misconduct in their ranks because women and minorities are a vital part of their base and they want to be able to criticize Trump’s behavior without looking hypocritical.

Northam has come under pressure from nearly the entire Democratic establishment to resign after the discovery of a photo on his profile page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook of someone in blackface standing next to a person in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe.

The governor initially admitted he was in the photo without saying which costume he was wearing, then denied it a day later. But he acknowledged he once used shoe polish to blacken his face and look like Michael Jackson at a dance contest in Texas in 1984, when he was in the Army.

Herring came down hard on Northam when the yearbook photo surfaced, condemning it as “indefensible,” and “profoundly offensive.” He said it was no longer possible for Northam to lead the state.

On Wednesday, though, Herring confessed that he and two friends dressed up to look like rappers, admitting: “It sounds ridiculous even now writing it.”

“That conduct clearly shows that, as a young man, I had a callous and inexcusable lack of awareness and insensitivity to the pain my behavior could inflict on others,” he said. But he added: “This conduct is in no way reflective of the man I have become in the nearly 40 years since.”

These allegations and confessions are a serious problem for the Democratic Party in Virginia and nationally.  The Democrats have been vociferous in the past when one of their own such as Al Franken was forced out as a U.S. Senator because of sexual harassment charges.  The Virginia situation is more complex because the entire Democratic Party elected leadership in the state is in jeopardy.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Every two years, hundreds of scientists enter a global competition that some refer to as the World Cup of biochemical research.  Tackling a biological puzzle they call “the protein folding problem,” they try to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins in the human body. No one knows how to solve the problem. Even the winners only chip away at it. But a solution could streamline the way scientists create new medicines and fight disease.  The contest, the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, was not won by academics. It was won by DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab owned by Google’s parent company.   AI is moving beyond games such as chess and Go to demonstrate its capabilities.  A new world order dominated by AI applications may be on the not too distant horizon.   Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New York Times yesterday on DeepMind’s accomplishment.

Tony

————————————————————————————————

Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence

By Cade Metz

Feb. 5, 2019

…Mohammed AlQuraishi, a biologist who has dedicated his career to this kind of research, flew in early December to Cancun, Mexico, where academics were gathering to discuss the results of the latest contest. As he checked into his hotel, a five-star resort on the Caribbean, he was consumed by melancholy.

….

“I was surprised and deflated,” said Dr. AlQuraishi, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. “They were way out in front of everyone else.”

DeepMind specializes in “deep learning,” a type of artificial intelligence that is rapidly changing drug discovery science. A growing number of companies are applying similar methods to other parts of the long, enormously complex process that produces new medicines. These A.I. techniques can speed up many aspects of drug discovery and, in some cases, perform tasks typically handled by scientists.

“It is not that machines are going to replace chemists,” said Derek Lowe, a longtime drug discovery researcher and the author of In the Pipeline, a widely read blog dedicated to drug discovery. “It’s that the chemists who use machines will replace those that don’t.”

After the conference in Cancun, Dr. AlQuraishi described his experience in a blog post. The melancholy he felt after losing to DeepMind gave way to what he called “a more rational assessment of the value of scientific progress.”

But he strongly criticized big pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Novartis, as well as his academic community, for not keeping pace.

“The smartest and most ambitious researchers wanting to work on protein structure will look to DeepMind for opportunities instead of Merck or Novartis,” he wrote. “This fact should send chills down the spines of pharma executives, but it won’t, because they’re clueless, rudderless, and asleep at the helm.”The big pharma companies see the situation differently. Though Merck is not exploring protein folding because its researchers believe its potential impact would be years away, it is applying deep learning to other aspects of its drug discovery process.

“We have to connect so many other dots,” said Juan Alvarez, associate vice president of computational and structural chemistry at Merck.

In the spring of 2016, after making headlines with A.I. systems that played complex games like the ancient board game Go, DeepMind researchers were looking for new challenges. So they held a “hackathon” at company headquarters in London.

Working with two other computer scientists, the DeepMind researcher Rich Evans homed in on protein folding. They found a game that simulated this scientific task. They built a system that learned to play the game on its own, and the results were promising enough for DeepMind to greenlight a full-time research project.

The protein folding problem asks a straightforward question: Can you predict the physical structure of a protein — its shape in three dimensions?

If scientists can predict a protein’s shape, they can better determine how other molecules will “bind” to it — attach to it, physically — and that is one way drugs are developed. A drug binds to particular proteins in your body and changes their behavior.

In the latest contest, DeepMind made these predictions using “neural networks,” complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of proteins, a neural network can learn to predict the shape of others.

This is the same deep learning technology that recognizes faces in the photos you post to Facebook. Over the past decade, the technology has reinvented a wide range of internet services, consumer products, robotic devices and other areas of scientific research.

Many of the academics who competed used methods that were similar to what DeepMind was doing. But DeepMind won the competition by a sizable margin — it improved the prediction accuracy nearly twice as much as experts expected from the contest winner.

DeepMind’s victory showed how the future of biochemical research will increasingly be driven by machines and the people who oversee those machines.

This kind of A.I. research benefits from enormous amounts of computing power, and DeepMind can lean on the massive computer data centers that underpin Google. The lab also employs many of the world’s top A.I. researchers, who know how to get the most out of this hardware.

“It allows us to be much more creative, to try many more ideas, often in parallel,” said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive and a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired for a reported $650 million in 2014.

Universities and big pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to match those resources. But thanks to cloud computing services offered by Google and other tech giants, the price of computing power continues to drop. Dr. AlQuraishi urged the life-sciences community to shift more attention toward the kind of A.I. work practiced by DeepMind.

Some researchers are already moving in that direction. Many start-ups, like Atomwise in San Francisco and Recursion in Salt Lake City, are using the same artificial intelligence techniques to accelerate other aspects of drug discovery. Recursion, for instance, uses neural networks and other methods to analyze images of cells and learn how new drugs affect these cells.

The big pharma companies are also beginning to explore these methods, sometimes in partnership with start-ups.

“Everyone is trending up in this area,” said Jeremy Jenkins, the head of data science for chemical biology and therapeutics at Novartis. “It is like turning a big ship, and I think these methods will eventually scale to the size of our entire company.”

Mr. Hassabis said DeepMind was committed to solving the protein folding problem. But many experts said that even if it was solved, more work was needed before doctors and patients benefited in any practical way.

“This is a first step,” said David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. “There are so many other steps still to go.”

As they work to better understand the proteins in the body, for instance, scientists must also create new proteins that can serve as drug candidates. Dr. Baker now believes that creating proteins is more important to drug discovery than the “folding” methods being explored, and this task, he said, is not as well suited to DeepMind-style A.I.

DeepMind researchers focus on games and contests because they can show a clear improvement in artificial intelligence. But it is not clear how that approach translates to many tasks.

“Because of the complexity of drug discovery, we need a wide variety of tools,” Dr. Alvarez said. “There is no one-size-fits-all answer.”

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald  Trump delivered his state of the union address in the U.S. Congress last night.  His major theme was a call for unity in order for America to achieve greatness while basically pushing the Republican Party’s agenda. The Republicans clapped at everything he said while the Democrats were cordial throughout and selectively clapped for some of his comments.

The address was about 90 minutes and covered thirty topics/issues by my count.  He never mentioned the federal government shutdown, climate change, or voting rights issues. He was passionate and graphic when talking about immigration, the border wall, and abortion but much less so when talking about other issues.  He asked Congress “to resist the politics of retribution and revenge” and to move beyond “ridiculous partisan investigations”.  He had one sentence on education calling for more school choice. 

The highlights of the evening were when he referred to people in the audience especially:

• three veterans of the World War II Normandy Invasion (75th Anniversary);
• Buzz Aldrin, one of the astronauts who walked on the moon (50th Anniversary);
• Alice Johnson and Matthew Charles whose prison sentences he commuted;
• 10 Year Old Grace Eline who is fighting brain cancer;
• Judah Samet, a survivor of Auschwitz and of the mass shootings last year at the Pittsburgh synagogue (the audience sang Happy Birthday to the 81-year old);
• his nod to and mention that there were more women in Congress than ever before;
• Joshua Kaufman who was a prisoner at Dachau and liberated by American soldiers including Herman Zeitchik, one of the three veterans of the Normandy Invasion mentioned earlier.

In sum, I don’t think Trump’s address moved anyone’s opinions of him or his administration. There have been too many personal attacks, lies, and egotistical craziness during the past two years.

The video above is a complete recording of the address and includes Stacy Abrams’ rebuttal which was as effective as could be given the nature of her assignment.  If you wish to read the address, you can find it here. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Unemployment is at an all-time low in this country but the condition of the American worker may not be so rosy. The New York Times has a featured article this morning that begs the question as to whether high technology is splitting the American workforce into a small group of well-educated professionals who enjoy high and  rising wages, and a much larger group who toil in low-wage jobs with few chances to advance.  Relying on a recent study by researchers at M.I.T. and Utrecht University, the author of the article comments that jobs are falling in every industry that introduced technology to enhance productivity.  Here is an excerpt:

“Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.

The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”

Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.

“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject; The Luddites were wrong and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and presidential economic adviser, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”

The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.

But the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.

Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.”

The questions raised in this article should be of concern because the introduction of advanced technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (A.I.)  is really just beginning.  Over the next ten to fifteen years, we will see massive movement in our economy to these technologies.  White-collar workers as well as blue-collar workers will be severely impacted.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night much of America was watching the Boston Patriots win their 6th Super Bowl 13-3  over the Los Angeles Rams.  The Patriots won with defense in what was the lowest scoring Super Bowl game ever.  Gladys Knight was absolutely fabulous singing the National Anthem.  The halftime show was okay and without incidents.  At the end of the game, The Washington Post had an ad entitled, Democracy Dies in Darkness (see above).  It was a tribute to the important role that a free and open press plays in our democracy.  It concluded with photographs of murdered journalists, Marie Colvin and Jamal Khashoggi AND the words:

Knowing Empowers Us!

Knowing Helps Us Decide!

Knowing Keeps Us Free!

A very important message for all the viewers. 

Donald Trump must have had a fit!

Tony

Justin Fairfax and Ralph Northam

Dear Commons Community,

Calls are mounting for the resignation of Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam, a white Democrat whose medical school yearbook page included a photo of people in blackface and in Ku Klux Klan robes.  If Gov. Northam resigns,  Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax is next in line to be governor.

Mr. Fairfax, the second African-American ever to win a statewide election in Virginia, finds himself surrounded once more by the commonwealth’s racial history. Mr. Fairfax, a 39-year-old Democrat who presides over the State Senate as lieutenant governor, a part-time post, has built a reputation as an affable and effective politician who can speak passionately about racial divisions while also appealing to a broad base of voters. As reported in the New York Times:

“Should Mr. Northam resign  — and for now, he seems to have no intention of doing so — Mr. Fairfax’s ascendance could help Democrats repair some of the mounting political damage, or at least change the conversation, in time for next year’s presidential election. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont were among the potential Democratic presidential candidates who posted hopefully about the possibility of a Fairfax governorship.

 “Governor Northam has lost all moral authority and should resign immediately,” Mr. Biden wrote on Twitter. “Justin Fairfax is the leader Virginia needs now.”

Among Democrats in Virginia, the message about Mr. Fairfax was much the same.

“He’s got charisma; I think he’s got vision; he’s got stick-to-it-iveness,” said Representative A. Donald McEachin, who called Mr. Fairfax’s approach to discussing racial issues “a breath of fresh air” and who urged Mr. Northam to step aside.

In the days since the yearbook photo surfaced on Friday, Mr. Fairfax, who would be the state’s second black governor, has treaded cautiously in the public eye.

Mr. Northam, who at first apologized for the yearbook photo, changed course on Saturday in a strange, lengthy news conference, insisting that he was not either of the people depicted. But even as Mr. Northam resisted calls to resign, he acknowledged having once applied shoe polish to his face to imitate Michael Jackson in a dance contest.

After the governor spoke, Mr. Fairfax issued a statement saying that Mr. Northam’s actions “at the very least” indicated “a comfort with Virginia’s darker history of white supremacy, racial stereotyping and intimidation.”

“At this critical and defining moment in the history of Virginia and this nation, we need leaders with the ability to unite and help us rise to the better angels of our nature,” Mr. Fairfax said in the statement, which did not call for Mr. Northam’s resignation. A spokeswoman for the lieutenant governor did not respond to a request to interview him.

Mr. Fairfax, a married father of two, grew up in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood that he described on his campaign website as having shifted “from a close-knit middle-class community to one ravaged by a growing drug epidemic, increasing violence, and dwindling economic opportunities.” He attended Duke University on a scholarship, graduated with a degree in public policy and had a low-level position on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, compiling briefing books for Mr. Gore’s wife, Tipper.

 …

“If he becomes governor, he’ll combine the sunny, inclusive style of President Reagan and the hope and inspiration of President Obama,” Neil H. MacBride, the former United States attorney who hired Mr. Fairfax and assigned him to help lead a sex trafficking task force, said in an email on Saturday.

Mr. Fairfax made his first bid for public office in 2013, running a close second in the Democratic primary for attorney general. He is in the liberal mainstream of the party on most policy issues, from gun control and abortion rights to addressing climate change and raising the minimum wage.

Republicans have been less entranced by Mr. Fairfax over the years — he has been criticized especially for supporting a “Medicare for all” health care system — but few of them seemed eager to speak ill of him on Saturday.

During the 2017 race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Fairfax’s Republican opponent, Jill Holtzman Vogel, said during a debate that he was not informed enough “to talk intelligently” about campaign issues. The National Rifle Association has given him an F rating.

Several Republican state legislators replied to emailed requests for interviews about Mr. Fairfax on Saturday with statements calling on Mr. Northam to resign, or did not immediately respond at all. The Virginia Republican Party, which called for the governor’s resignation, declined to make of any of its leaders available to discuss Mr. Fairfax.

For Democrats, who by Saturday afternoon had mostly abandoned Mr. Northam, the prospect of a Fairfax governorship loomed as a tantalizing alternative to what seemed likely to be months of controversy and unflattering news coverage with Mr. Northam still in office.

Seeking to avoid that, Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, called for Mr. Northam to step down and “let Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax heal Virginia’s wounds and move us forward.”

I think it is only a matter of time before Northam resigns and Fairfax takes over.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Daily News cover this morning says it all as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree to suspend a nuclear treaty that had been signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.    The announcement came just ahead of the expiration of a deadline that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave Moscow to come into compliance with the treaty.

Pompeo said yesterday that it was suspending one of the last major nuclear arms control treaties with Russia, following five years of heated conversations over accusations by the United States that Moscow is violating the Reagan-era agreement.

The decision has the potential to incite a new arms race — not only with Russia, but also with China, which was never a signatory to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, widely known as the I.N.F.

It also comes as the United States has begun building its first long-range nuclear weapons since 1991, a move that other nations are citing to justify their own nuclear modernization efforts.

Taken together, the two moves appear to signal the end of more than a half-century of traditional nuclear arms control, in which the key agreements were negotiated in Washington and Moscow.

It is unclear whether President Trump plans to replace the I.N.F. or to renew another major treaty, called New Start, which drove American and Russian nuclear arsenals to their lowest levels in nearly 60 years. That accord expires in 2021, just weeks after the next presidential inauguration.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the decision to suspend the accord, declaring that “countries must be held accountable when they break the rules.”

“We can no longer be restricted by the treaty while Russia shamelessly violates it,” Mr. Pompeo said, adding that the United States would terminate the accord in six months unless Russia destroyed its growing arsenal of intermediate-range missiles and launchers.

Mr. Trump said later that “I hope we’re able to get everybody in a big, beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better.” He did not define what he meant by “everybody.”

The Russian government counteraccused the Trump administration of looking for any excuse to end the Cold War-era agreement. Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, said the United States failed to negotiate in good faith.

“On the whole, the reluctance of the Americans to listen to reason and to hold any kind of substantive talks with us shows that Washington decided to crush the treaty a long time ago,” Mr. Peskov told reporters.

Maybe Trump and Putin should ask China’s President Xi Jinping help them ease the tension.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times had an op-ed on Thursday painting a worrisome picture of Hampshire College’s financial situation. Written by Jon Krakuer, an alumnus of the school, the article quotes its President Miriam Nelson saying that the college may “be forced to close within the next three or four years.”

Hampshire was founded in 1970 as an idealistic experiment in higher education. There are no majors or grades at Hampshire. Instead, each student is responsible for creating his or her own course of study, and then devising a series of six “exams” that must be passed to graduate. Attaining a bachelor’s degree might require four years of study, or six. Or three, for that matter.

Hampshire was, and remains, too avant-garde for many prospective students, but thousands of kids who took the plunge have been propelled by their experience there into careers in education, medicine, law, business, science and the arts. Two-thirds of the school’s graduates went on to earn advanced degrees. Twenty-five percent have started their own businesses or organizations. Hampshire grads have been honored with Fulbright scholarships, Pulitzer and Hillman prizes; Peabodys, Grammys and Emmys, and at least four Oscars. Alumni include the filmmaker Ken Burns, the actors Lupita Nyong’o and Liev Schreiber, the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and the economist Heather Boushey.

Regardless the college is facing intense fiscal scrutiny after a routine 10-year reaccreditation review expressed  had “deep concerns about our finances” Dr. Nelson said. Those concerns resulted largely from the college’s dependence on tuition and student fees for 87 percent of its revenue. In response, Hampshire pledged to increase its revenue by significantly increasing the size of the class entering in September 2019. The number of new students who committed to enroll did indeed increase, but not by nearly as much as the school had promised, causing projected revenues to drop by millions of dollars.

With a $54 million endowment and some very wealthy alumni, Hampshire would seem to have the means to weather a temporary shortfall without going under, just as it has survived lean years in the past. But after the abrupt shuttering of several small, underfunded New England colleges recently left their students in the lurch, the regulatory environment changed dramatically for schools like Hampshire. A consumer-protection policy now being formulated by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education is likely to require private colleges to abide by stringent new financial sustainability rules. According to Dr. Nelson’s interpretation of the proposed policy, Hampshire is legally and ethically required to keep enough cash in the bank to fund the school for four years so that first-year students will have the opportunity to graduate.

If her assumptions are correct, the college, with a $42 million operating budget, needs to set aside at least $168 million before it can enroll the next freshman class. This isn’t likely to happen. Dr. Nelson is adamant that the only way out of this conundrum is to cancel that class and merge Hampshire with a much wealthier “strategic partner.”

This a sad situation but one that higher education will see again and again in the coming decades.

The complete op-ed is below.

Tony

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 New York Times

A Small New England College Struggles to Survive

Is there still room for unconventional schools like Hampshire College?

By Jon Krakauer

Jan. 31, 2019

Two weeks ago, Hampshire College warned of financial problems that could keep it from enrolling new students next fall. The school’s president, Miriam Nelson, insisted, “We are not planning to shut down.” But speaking as a Hampshire alum, I was not reassured by her words. If anything, her statement only sharpened my alarm.

Hampshire was founded in 1970 as an idealistic experiment in higher education. When I enrolled in 1972, my father got so angry he stopped speaking to me. The campus was situated on 800 acres among bucolic fields and orchards outside Amherst, Mass. The first time I went there, I drove by the entrance without realizing it was a college. I thought I’d gone past a farm. As it turned out, however, there were a few brick and concrete buildings just up the hill, and my classes were lively, challenging and intimate. Creative problem solving was emphasized. Our professors encouraged us to consider the big picture and the long view, and embrace risk as a life strategy. Failing spectacularly in pursuit of an ambitious goal was thought to be salutary, and the shellacking instilled some humility. Whatever success I’ve had is rooted in those lessons. (Though even at Hampshire, one of my final academic projects — a four-week expedition to Alaska to attempt a very difficult peak in Denali National Park — provoked a fierce debate with the dean.)

There are no majors or grades at Hampshire. Instead, each student is responsible for creating his or her own course of study, and then devising a series of six “exams” that must be passed to graduate. Attaining a bachelor’s degree might require four years of study, or six. Or three, for that matter.

Hampshire was, and remains, too avant-garde for many prospective students, but thousands of kids who took the plunge have been propelled by their experience there into careers in education, medicine, law, business, science and the arts. Two-thirds of the school’s graduates went on to earn advanced degrees. Twenty-five percent have started their own businesses or organizations. Hampshire grads have been honored with Fulbright scholarships, Pulitzer and Hillman prizes; Peabodys, Grammys and Emmys, and at least four Oscars. Alumni include the filmmaker Ken Burns, the actors Lupita Nyong’o and Liev Schreiber, the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and the economist Heather Boushey.

Before Dr. Nelson agreed to take the helm in April 2018, she had spent most of the previous 30 years at Tufts University as a distinguished scientist in health and nutrition, an admired professor and an associate dean. Last May, two weeks after she accepted the job, and 10 weeks before she was to begin her duties as president, she received an urgent phone call from the outgoing Hampshire president, Jonathan Lash. He warned her that the next batch of new students was drastically smaller than anticipated. “When Jonathan told me the numbers,” Dr. Nelson said, “I knew it posed an existential threat to the college.”

Hampshire had just undergone a routine 10-year reaccreditation review. Academically, the school passed the review with flying colors. “But they had deep concerns about our finances,” Dr. Nelson said. Those concerns resulted largely from the college’s dependence on tuition and student fees for 87 percent of its revenue. In response, Hampshire pledged to increase its revenue by significantly increasing the size of the class entering in September 2019. The number of new students who committed to enroll did indeed increase, but not by nearly as much as the school had promised, causing projected revenues to drop by millions of dollars.

With a $54 million endowment and some very wealthy alumni, Hampshire would seem to have the means to weather a temporary shortfall without going under, just as it has survived lean years in the past. But after the abrupt shuttering of several small, underfunded New England colleges recently left their students in the lurch, the regulatory environment changed dramatically for schools like Hampshire. A consumer-protection policy now being formulated by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education is likely to require private colleges to abide by stringent new financial sustainability rules. According to Dr. Nelson’s interpretation of the proposed policy, Hampshire is legally and ethically required to keep enough cash in the bank to fund the school for four years so that first-year students will have the opportunity to graduate.

If her assumptions are correct, the college, with a $42 million operating budget, needs to set aside at least $168 million before it can enroll the next freshman class. This isn’t likely to happen. Dr. Nelson is adamant that the only way out of this conundrum is to cancel that class and merge Hampshire with a much wealthier “strategic partner.” Otherwise, she told a group of prominent alumni, donors and former administrators this week, Hampshire will be forced to close within the next three or four years.

As she explained it, the demographic changes threatening Hampshire’s future are a serious concern to all but the most well-endowed universities. Increasingly, America’s colleges and universities will be competing more and more fiercely for fewer and fewer applicants from a rapidly shrinking pool of high school graduates. This reality has almost every school with an endowment less than $500 million quaking in its boots right now, she said.

Since November, Dr. Nelson has been having secret discussions with potential partners. Perhaps the best fit is the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a member of the Five College Consortium that includes Hampshire, Amherst, Smith and Mount Holyoke. Students in the consortium can already take classes and use the resources at any of those schools — an arrangement that has been particularly advantageous to students at Hampshire, with its relatively limited curriculum and small library. But whatever the perceived benefits of a merger, nobody denies it would inflict severe pain. Many of the school’s faculty and staff members would probably lose their jobs.

Within the extended Hampshire community, there is emphatic disagreement with the course Dr. Nelson appears to have set. Kenneth Rosenthal, the college’s official historian and its first treasurer, believes it would be a grave mistake for Hampshire to jump into an asymmetrical partnership out of a panicked reaction to the financial challenges of the moment. And he thinks it would be an even bigger mistake for Hampshire to forgo enrolling new students in September, which would ensure the inevitability of a merger.

Mr. Rosenthal points out that Hampshire owns several hundred acres of valuable land that could be commercially developed. “Half the colleges in the country would love to have this kind of problem,” he said. “Plenty of alumni have put Hampshire in their wills, but because the oldest of them are only 66 or 67 years old, they haven’t started dying yet. That’s problematic in the short term, but not in the long term.”

Be that as it may, it seems foregone that Dr. Nelson will soon announce that no new students will be enrolled at Hampshire for the next academic year. Soon thereafter, she will likely propose some kind of lopsided merger with a securely endowed educational institution.

Hampshire’s iconoclastic educational model is widely admired and deservedly praised. Given what lies ahead, however, it is not at all clear how much of the Hampshire philosophy — to say nothing of the Hampshire soul — will survive.