Dear Commons Community,

Actor Hugh Grant fully supports Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s decision to “step back” from their royal duties, live part-time in Canada and gain financial independence.

On Andy Cohen’s Sirius XM show (see clip above), Grant empathized with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — particularly the media attention they receive.

 “I’m rather on Harry’s side,” Grant said during the interview, which can be seen below. “The tabloid press effectively murdered his mother, now they’re tearing his wife to pieces.”

Grant was referring to the tragic death of Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who was killed at age 36 after a car crash in Paris. A swarm of paparazzi was pursuing the car Diana was in, and her driver, Henri Paul (who was later found to be drunk) lost control of the vehicle and eventually collided with a pillar.

Diana was injured but still alive after the crash. Prince Harry has been vocal about his disgust with the photographers who contributed to the accident and their behavior after the collision.

“She’d had quite a severe head injury but she was very much still alive on the back seat,” Harry said in the 2017 BBC documentary “Diana, 7 days.”

He added: “And those people that caused the accident, instead of helping, were taking photographs of her dying on the back seat.”

Harry also said in an October statement the paparazzi now treat his wife the way they treated his mother, waging “a ruthless campaign” against individuals “with no thought to the consequences.”

Grant has also had many negative interactions with the media, telling Cohen during his interview that his current relationship with the British tabloid press is “very poor.”

In 2018, he settled a phone-hacking lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers, in which he claimed the company misused “information obtained by hacking his voicemails, masquerading as other people, and surveillance” between 1998 and 2009, per the BBC.

The newspaper group apologized to Grant, saying it “deeply regretted” the acts and described them as “morally wrong.” Grant received a six-figure sum in the settlement, which he donated to the anti-hacking group Hacked Off.

“I think, as a man, it’s his job to protect his family,” Grant told Cohen of Harry on Wednesday. “So, I’m with him.”

You tell it like it is, Mr. Grant!

Tony

Lev Parnas

Dear Commons Community,

Rachel Maddow scored an interview coup last night with Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s associate, who is at the center of the Ukraine scandal that is the focus of the President Trump’s impeachment.  Besides Giuliani and Trump, he also implicates Attorney General William Barr.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“A close associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer says he delivered an ultimatum in May to the incoming president of Ukraine that no senior U.S. officials would attend his inauguration and all American aid to the war-torn country would be withheld if an investigation into Joe Biden wasn’t announced.

Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, made several potentially explosive claims in a televised interview last night with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The day after Parnas said he delivered the message, the U.S. State Department announced that Vice President Mike Pence would no longer be attending the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskiy.

Parnas alleged that Trump ordered Pence to stay away at the behest of Giuliani to send a clear message to the incoming Ukrainian administration that they needed to take seriously the demand for an investigation into Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate seen as a potential threat to Trump’s 2020 reelection.

Parnas said every communication he had with Zelenskiy’s team was at the direction of Giuliani, whom he regularly overheard briefing Trump about their progress by phone.

“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” said Parnas, a Soviet-born Florida businessman facing a raft of criminal charges related to campaign finance violations. “He was aware of all my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani, or the President.”

If true, Parnas’ account undercuts a key Republican defense of Trump deployed during the ongoing impeachment fight — that Trump’s withholding of vital military aid to Ukraine last summer wasn’t a quid pro quo for Biden investigations because Zelenskiy didn’t know the money was being held up.

Giuliani called Parnas’ statements “sad.”

“I feel sorry for him,” Giuliani said Wednesday in a text message to an AP reporter. “I thought he was an honorable man. I was wrong.”

Asked directly if Parnas was lying, Trump’s lawyer replied, “I’m not responding yet.”

Parnas said he also heard Giuliani and another Trump-aligned defense lawyer, Victoria Toensing, briefing Attorney General William Barr by phone about their efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce the investigation into Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings.

“Barr was basically on the team,” Parnas said.

The Justice Department said in September that Trump had not spoken to Barr about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens and that the attorney general had not discussed Ukraine with Giuliani. Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Wednesday that Parnas’ claims were “100% false.”

The new accusations came as House Democrats made public a trove of documents, text messages and photos from Parnas’ smartphones that appear to verify parts of his account.

A federal judge earlier this month ruled that Parnas could provide the materials to Congress as part of the impeachment proceedings. Democrats voted in December to impeach Trump for abuse of power and for obstruction of Congress.

A House committee chairman said Wednesday his panel will investigate what he says are “profoundly alarming” text messages among the newly disclosed materials that have raised questions about the possible surveillance of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch before she was ousted by the Trump administration last spring.

The messages show that a Robert F. Hyde, a GOP candidate for Congress from Connecticut, disparaged Yovanovitch in messages to Parnas and gave him updates on her location and cellphone use.

Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that the messages are “profoundly alarming” and “suggest a possible risk” to Yovanovitch’s security in Kyiv before she was recalled from her post.

“These threats occurred at the same time that the two men were also discussing President Trump’s efforts, through Rudy Giuliani, to smear the ambassador’s reputation,” Engel said.

He said the committee staff flagged the information for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and is seeking assurances that proper steps have been taken to ensure the security of Yovanovitch and committee staff. He said he also wanted to know what, if anything, the State Department knew about the situation.

“This unprecedented threat to our diplomats must be thoroughly investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Engel said.

In a Twitter post Tuesday, Hyde called Parnas a “dweeb” and suggested the messages about surveilling the ambassador were a joke.

Parnas, in turn, also said Wednesday that Hyde’s texts shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Democrats released the files Tuesday and Wednesday as they prepared to send articles of impeachment to the Senate for Trump’s trial. The documents could add pressure on the Senate as it debates whether to hear witnesses in the trial.

The text and phone records show Parnas communicating with Giuliani multiple times a day before Yovanovitch’s removal, as well as a handwritten note that mentions asking Ukraine’s president to investigate “the Biden case.”

Among the documents is a screenshot of a previously undisclosed letter from Giuliani to Zelenskiy dated May 10, 2019, which was shortly after Zelenskiy was elected but before he took office. In the letter, Giuliani requests a meeting with Zelenskiy “as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent.”

The Associated Press reported in October that Zelenskiy had huddled three days earlier, on May 7, with a small group of key advisers in Kyiv to seek advice about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and Giuliani for a probe into the Bidens. He expressed his unease about becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the three-hour meeting. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, which has roiled U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

One of the documents released by Democrats is a handwritten note on stationery from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Vienna that says “get Zalensky to Annonce that the Biden case will be Investigated.”

Parnas told Maddow he took the notes as he was speaking by phone to Giulliani, receiving precise instructions about the demands Trump wanted to convey to Zelenskiy’s team.

Trump asked Zelenskiy in a July 25 call to investigate the Bidens. Hunter Biden served on the board of a gas company based in Ukraine.

The documents were sent to the House Judiciary Committee by three other House panels “to be included as part of the official record that will be transmitted to the Senate along with the Articles of Impeachment,” according to a statement. Some of the materials were made public while others were blacked out and marked as sensitive.

Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, both U.S. citizens who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, were indicted last year on charges of conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records. Prosecutors allege they made outsize campaign donations to Republican causes after receiving millions of dollars originating from Russia. The men have pleaded not guilty.

In several of the documents, Parnas communicated with Giuliani about the removal of Yovanovitch. The ambassador’s ouster, ordered by Trump, was at the center of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. Yovanovitch testified in the House impeachment hearings that she was the victim of a “smear campaign.”

Trump on the July call told Zelenskiy that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.” She had been recalled from her diplomatic post roughly three months earlier.

On April 23, just before Yovanovitch was directed to return to the United States, Giuliani texted Parnas, “He fired her again.” Parnas texted back, “I pray it happens this time I’ll call you tomorrow my brother.”

Parnas also received messages from Hyde, who referred to Yovanovitch as a “bitch.” Hyde is now running for a U.S. House seat in Connecticut.

After texting about the ambassador, Hyde gave Parnas detailed updates that suggested he was watching her. In one text, Hyde wrote: “She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Her computer is off.” He said she was under heavy security and “we have a person inside.”

Hyde at one point texted Parnas that ″they are willing to help if we/you would like a price,” and “guess you can do anything in Ukraine with money … is what I was told.”

Parnas texted back: “lol.”

In an interview with The Associated Press, another committee chairman, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, said the texts are “deeply disturbing” and the evidence they compiled “certainly suggests that people were surveilling the ambassador.”

“What’s most disturbing about these texts is that they seem to suggest that there’s somebody inside the embassy who’s supplying information to Parnas and Hyde about the movement of the ambassador,” Schiff said. “So it raises a whole host of troubling questions,” he said, about how far the president and Giuliani were willing to go.

Lawrence Robbins, an attorney for Yovanovitch, called for an investigation into the messages.

“Needless to say, the notion that American citizens and others were monitoring Ambassador Yovanovitch’s movements for unknown purposes is disturbing. We trust that the appropriate authorities will conduct an investigation to determine what happened.”

On Twitter, Hyde dismissed the claims as “laughable” and appeared to try to distance himself from Parnas. He said he would “welcome” an investigation.

The text messages show that Parnas consulted Giuliani in January 2019 after the U.S. denied a visa to former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Giuliani replied: “I can revive it.”

The following day, Giuliani told Parnas, “It’s going to work I have no 1 in it.” Giuliani then predicted “he will get one,” before giving Parnas the phone number for Jay Sekulow, the leader of the president’s personal legal team. Sekulow is expected to be part of Trump’s legal team during the impeachment trial.

Trump has repeatedly denied knowing Parnas and Fruman, despite numerous photos that have emerged of the men together. Among the materials released from Parnas’ phone this week were more photos of him with Trump, as well as the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., first daughter Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Asked by Maddow about Trump’s denials of knowing him, Parnas said he had spoken one-on-one with the president numerous times.

“He lied,” Parnas said of the president. “I mean, we’re not friends. Me and him didn’t watch football games together, we didn’t eat hot dogs. But he knew exactly who we were, who I was especially.”

It will be interesting to see how the White House spins Parnas’ accusations!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched the Democratic Presidential Debate last night and thought it was a “blah” event.  No real fireworks and a lot of softball questions.  Mercifully, we are down to six debaters.  Here are a couple of observations.

Warren and Sanders Conflict Over Women Candidates

Tensions between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were running high before the debate following a CNN report that Sanders had told Warren during a 2018 meeting that a woman could not win the presidential election. Both candidates’ campaigns, and much of the broader progressive infrastructure, signaled that they wanted a de-escalation. 

When CNN brought up its own reporting, Sanders repeated his denial ― and Warren turned in what’s likely going to be a key moment of the debate. 

“Can a woman beat Donald Trump?” she asked. “Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women.” Her response won laughter and applause from the debate audience.

Joe Biden Keeps Ticking

Though Joe Biden isn’t the clear front-runner in Iowa, he is the clear leader nationally, thanks to his strength with Black voters and the primary electorate’s broad belief that he’d be the strongest candidate against Trump. And it’s not clear that a victory by another candidate in Iowa would change that. 

So it was somewhat surprising Biden did not face more attacks from the other candidates. Sanders, in particular, had signaled he wanted to challenge Biden on his vote for the Iraq War and his past support for cutting Social Security. The Social Security topic never came up in the debate, and Sanders did not force the issue. And though Biden and Sanders did clash over the war, a lack of pointed follow-ups from the moderators allowed each candidate to mostly repeat their standard talking points.

 “Joe and I listened to what Dick Cheney and George Bush and Rumsfeld had to say,” Sanders said. “I thought they were lying. I didn’t believe them for a moment. I took to the floor. I did everything I could to prevent that war. Joe saw it differently.”

“I was asked to bring 156,000 troops home from that war, which I did,” Biden responded, referring to his time as Barack Obama’s vice president. “I led that effort. It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war. They said they were not going to go to war.”

So we move on to the Iowa caucuses on February 3rd!

Tony

Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek

Dear Commons Community,

Ken Jennings officially became the greatest “Jeopardy!” player of all time. The “Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time” tournament concluded last night with Jennings emerging victorious against Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer — and it all came down to the Final Jeopardy question.

The question? “He has 272 speeches, the most of any non-title character in a Shakespeare tragedy.” Jennings correctly answered “Iago” while Rutter simply wrote: “You’re the best, Alex!” Holzhauer’s incorrect answer of “Horatio” was what sealed the deal for Jennings, who was awarded the $1 million prize.

The tournament wasn’t just a boon to the indisputably best “Jeopardy!” players on the planet. ABC also reaped the benefits, with viewership clocking in at roughly 15 million nightly over the course of the tournament, according to The Associated Press.

Thursday’s third match reached 15.5 million viewers on the night it aired, the biggest audience yet. To put that in perspective, Fox averaged 14 million viewers last fall for baseball’s World Series.

The emergence of Holzhauer, who set several records for single-day earnings, gave “Jeopardy!” three well-known players with distinctive claims to fame: Rutter has earned more money than any player in the game’s modern-day history, and Jennings set the record for longest run as champion.

Nostalgia for “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, who’s battling pancreatic cancer, has also made the competition resonate with viewers. Although he’s acknowledged his struggles with the disease, Trebek said he plans to continue his hosting duties for the foreseeable future.

“As long as I feel my skills have not diminished too much, and as long as I’m enjoying spending time with bright people like these three [contestants] … then I’ll continue doing it,” he said.

Congratulations to Mr. Jennings and prayers that Mr. Trebek wins his fight with cancer!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Russian military hackers have been sifting through the servers of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company which is the focus of the President Trump’s impeachment.  If true, this development is strikingly familiar to what the Russians did to Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.

The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Then, as now, the Russian hackers from a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U., and to private researchers by the alias “Fancy Bear,” used so-called phishing emails that appear designed to steal usernames and passwords, according to Area 1, the Silicon Valley security firm that detected the hacking. In this instance, the hackers set up fake websites that mimicked sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries, and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.

The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.

“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers.

“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For those of us who are baseball fans, we feel some justice was done yesterday when Commissioner Rob Manfred handed out penalties to the Houston Astros and will likely be issuing similar penalties to the Boston Red Sox shortly.  Both teams have been found to be using electronic equipment to steal signs during games especially those in the post season and World Series.  Teams that played them such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees were denied a fair chance to compete.  Below is a recap courtesy of the Associated Press.

“AJ Hinch won’t be managing in the big leagues any time soon, if at all. Alex Cora will soon join him in the unemployment line, and it’s hard to believe anyone will ever give him another job that involves being a leader of men.

The punishments — technically Cora’s is still to come — fit the crime, and for that baseball commissioner Rob Manfred deserves a pat on the back. Give another one to Astros owner Jim Crane, who did his part to clean up an increasingly smelly mess in Houston by immediately firing both his manager and general manager.

But that doesn’t bring real justice. It can’t.

Not to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are now at 32 years and counting without a World Series title

Not to Clayton Kershaw, whose postseason failings were magnified in game 5 at Minute Maid Park when the Dodgers ace was raked for six runs and didn’t make it out of the fifth inning.

And certainly not to Yu Darvish, whose reputation — and nearly his career — got trashed when he was routed by the Astros in two games of the 2017 World Series.

Yes, the official record shows the Houston Astros are still your 2017 World Series champions and that’s not going to change regardless of the outcry from Southern California.

But does anyone really believe it?

Watch the second inning of Game 3 once again and then decide. That’s when Darvish was touched up for four runs and the Astros took a 2-1 lead in the series.

It was almost as if the hitters knew what was coming — which, of course, they did.

If you’re still not convinced, Game 5 should be evidence enough. Like Game 3 it took place at Minute Maid Park, where the cameras were rolling, the dugout trash can was booming and the Astros bats were blazing.

All with arguably the best pitcher in baseball since the turn of the century on the mound for the Dodgers. Kershaw didn’t make it out of the fifth inning, surrendering six runs in a wild game that saw the Dodgers score a dozen times — and still lose.

Kershaw, Darvish and the rest of the Dodgers were called chokers. Manager Dave Roberts was taken to task on social media for not handling his pitchers properly.

It turns out what really happened is the Astros cheated. Cora, their bench coach at the time, concocted a scheme to steal signs that made an already good team even better.

To make matters worse, they celebrated on the field at Dodger Stadium like they had earned every moment of it.

The bitter taste still lingers for both Dodger fans and players.

“We were close, but we did it the right way,’’ National League MVP Cody Bellinger told ESPN before the results of MLB’s investigation were released.

It didn’t help that the Dodgers would make the World Series the next year, too, only to see the visiting team celebrating a championship once again at Dodger Stadium. And who was the manager jumping up and down with his players and spraying champagne with his players for the second year in a row at Chavez Ravine?

That would be Cora, who at least for the moment is still the manager of the Red Sox. Manfred didn’t discipline him Monday but only because MLB is still investigating to see if Cora cheated in Boston as much as he did in Houston.

And cheat he did as the bench coach of the Astros, setting up the system that fed sign sequences to a monitor near the dugout. Manfred’s investigation put Cora at the center of it all, and the guess is he will eventually be kicked out of baseball, never to return.

So now the Astros will go down in baseball infamy for being cheaters on a level never seen before. They’re not quite the Black Sox of 1919 but the damage they’ve done to the sport is not insignificant.

Their reputation is in tatters, the feel good story of a city recovering from Hurricane Harvey obliterated. There’s an asterisk attached to their championship, and no way for their fans to feel good about anything from the 2017 season.

There’s also no way to make things right for the Dodgers, who were the real victims in all this. Baseball isn’t about to vacate a title from three years back, and you can’t claim a championship you didn’t win on the field anyway, even if you were cheated.

In the end, the Dodgers never got to hold the World Series trophy. They sat and shed tears in their clubhouse after Game 7 instead of celebrating with 55,000 faithful fans.”

This is a major disgrace for baseball and for the Astros and Red Sox that will reverberate for years.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning entitled, Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. It highlights the differences – some extensive and some subtle – in the American history textbooks used in California and Texas.  Here is an excerpt:

“We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here’s how political divides shape what students learn about the nation’s history.

The textbooks cover the same sweeping story, from the brutality of slavery to the struggle for civil rights. The self-evident truths of the founding documents to the waves of immigration that reshaped the nation.

The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides.

Hundreds of differences emerged in a New York Times analysis of eight commonly used American history textbooks in California and Texas, two of the nation’s largest markets.

In a country that cannot come to a consensus on fundamental questions — how restricted capitalism should be, whether immigrants are a burden or a boon, to what extent the legacy of slavery continues to shape American life — textbook publishers are caught in the middle. On these questions and others, classroom materials are not only shaded by politics, but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters.

Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a “radical left” that wants to “erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”

The left has pushed for students to encounter history more from the ground up than from the top down, with a focus on the experiences of marginalized groups such as enslaved people, women and Native Americans.

The books The Times analyzed were published in 2016 or later and have been widely adopted for eighth and 11th graders, though publishers declined to share sales figures. Each text has editions for Texas and California, among other states, customized to satisfy policymakers with different priorities.

“At the end of the day, it’s a political process,” said Jesús F. de la Teja, an emeritus professor of history at Texas State University who has worked for the state of Texas and for publishers in reviewing standards and textbooks.

The differences between state editions can be traced back to several sources: state social studies standards; state laws; and feedback from panels of appointees that huddle, in Sacramento and Austin hotel conference rooms, to review drafts.

Requests from textbook review panels, submitted in painstaking detail to publishers, show the sometimes granular ways that ideology can influence the writing of history.

A California panel asked the publisher McGraw-Hill to avoid the use of the word “massacre” when describing 19th-century Native American attacks on white people. A Texas panel asked Pearson to point out the number of clergy who signed the Declaration of Independence, and to state that the nation’s founders were inspired by the Protestant Great Awakening.

All the members of the California panel were educators selected by the State Board of Education, whose members were appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. The Texas panel, appointed by the Republican-dominated State Board of Education, was made up of educators, parents, business representatives and a Christian pastor and politician.

McGraw-Hill, the publisher whose annotated Bill of Rights appears differently in the two states, said it had created the additional wording on the Second Amendment and gun control for the California textbook. A national version of the pages is similar to the Texas edition, which does not call attention to gun rights, the company said in a written statement.

Pearson, the publisher whose Texas textbook raises questions about the quality of Harlem Renaissance literature, said such language “adds more depth and nuance.”

Critical language about nonwhite cultural movements also appears in a Texas book from McGraw-Hill. It is partly a result of debates, in 2010, between conservative and liberal members of the Texas Board of Education over whether state standards should mention cultural movements like hip-hop and country music. Their compromise was to ask teachers and textbook publishers to address “both the positive and negative impacts” of artistic movements.

Texas struck that requirement in 2018, but its most recent textbooks, published in 2016, will reflect it for years to come.”

Insightful article!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In partnership with The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Babson College announced a $50 million gift that will establish the Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership. This is the largest gift ever given in the 25-year history of the Blank Family Foundation and is a transformative investment for the College. The new Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership will be defined by entrepreneurial action and values-based leadership on a global scale.  This gift was made in November 2019 with details reported in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education as follows:

“The gift comes as Babson College, the No. 1-ranked entrepreneurship educator for more than a quarter-century, caps its Centennial year and celebrates Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Entrepreneurial leadership is needed now more than ever before. As jobs and entire industries evolve, people at all stages of their lives and careers must think and act like an entrepreneur in order to thrive. “As the best school for entrepreneurship, Babson is uniquely positioned—even obligated—to shift the paradigm and lead the change that today’s environment demands,” says Babson College President Stephen Spinelli Jr., PhD.

As jobs and entire industries evolve, people at all stages of their lives and careers must think and act like an entrepreneur in order to thrive.

At the Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership, “every member of Babson’s global ecosystem will have the opportunity to build and practice the skills needed to address grand challenges,” says Spinelli. “Learners will change the world through the innovations they introduce, the problems they solve, the jobs they create, and the sustainable values they instill in the organizations they impact.”

“The best companies provide world-class service to their customers and their communities,” says Arthur Blank. “The next horizon of business education is equipping and connecting more entrepreneurial leaders who create solutions and growth by putting people first, leading by example, and giving back to others, especially those in need.”

This partnership between Babson College and the Blank Family Foundation lays groundwork that will transform and define entrepreneurship education for generations to come. The new Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership will provide:      

• Need-based scholarships to increase access and affordability for promising entrepreneurial leaders who would not otherwise be able to afford college
• A newly endowed faculty position, the Blank Chair in Values-based Entrepreneurial Leadership
• New experiential learning opportunities where learners will problem solve in uncertain, rapidly changing, technology-driven conditions
• An “Entrepreneurial Village,” dedicated campus space for community members to come together to create solutions and growth opportunities through collaborative learning and experimentation
• Greater access to Babson’s renowned entrepreneurial centers and institutes, including award-winning cocurricular activities and global networks
• Funding for applied research that generates practical, actionable outcomes to expand the global understanding of entrepreneurship and addresses societal challenges.

Congratulations to Babson and to the Blank Foundation!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A new study by the Pew Research Center finds Trump’s favorability tanking to below 30% around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center, a median of 64% say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29% express confidence in the American leader. The data also suggest that any lack of trust is less about the United States than it is about Trump specifically.

Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three-in-four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands. He also gets especially poor reviews in Mexico, where 89% do not have confidence in him.

In nearly all nations where trends are available, Trump receives lower ratings than his predecessor, Barack Obama. As reported by the Center in 2017, international confidence in the U.S. president plummeted after Trump’s inauguration, while favorable ratings for the United States also declined. Trump also trails other world leaders such Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and even Vladimir Putin.

The Pew Report provides a lot of interesting data on how different countries perceive the United States, Trump, and other world leaders.  Also the survey was conducted prior to the Jan. 3, 2020, U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat,  this morning has a piece on the crisis occurring in English Departments in our colleges and universities.  I have posted on this blog a number of times on issues facing the humanities.  Entitled, The Academic Apocalypse, Douthat takes the issue to the general public and declares that the crisis of English Departments “is also a crisis of faith.”  He may be right.  He ventures into the Western Canon debates and concludes that:

“…the irony is that the very forces that have undermined strictly Western and white-male approaches to canon-making have also made it easier than ever to assemble a diverse inheritor. This should, by rights, be a moment of exciting curricular debates, over which global and rediscovered and post-colonial works belong on the syllabus with Shakespeare, over whether it’s possible to teach an American canon and a global canon all at once. Instead, humanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”

Douthat provides us with a provocative, if not poignant, commentary.

The entire piece is below.

Tony

—————————————————————————————————————

The Academic Apocalypse

The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith.

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Jan. 11, 2020

This column tries to keep its cool, but last week I briefly surrendered to crisis and existential dread, to the sense that an entire world is dissolving underneath our feet — institutions crumbling, authorities corrupted, faith in the whole experiment evaporating.

How did I enter this apocalyptic mood? Not by reading about Trump’s Washington or the Middle East, but by downloading a package of essays from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the academic world that helped educate me — the humanities and especially the study of literature, whose apparently-terminal condition makes the condition of the American Republic look like ruddy health.

The package’s title is a single word, “Endgame,” and its opening text reads like the crawl for a disaster movie. “The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it.” Jobs are disappearing, subfields are evaporating, enrollment has tanked, and amid the wreckage the custodians of humanism are “befuddled and without purpose.”

The Chronicle essays cover administrative and political battles, the transformed hiring process, the rebellions of graduate students, and the golfing-under-a-volcano aspects of the Modern Language Association conference. But the central essays are the ones that deal with the existential questions, the ways that humanism tries — and lately fails — to justify itself.

In the most interesting one, the University of Melbourne’s Simon During portrays the decline of the humanities as a new form of secularization, an echo of past crises of established Christian faith. Once consecrated in place of Christianity, he suggests, high culture is now experiencing its own crisis of belief: Like revelation and tradition before it, “the value of a canon … can no longer be assumed,” leaving the humane pursuits as an option for eccentrics rather than something essential for an educated life.

During’s essay is very shrewd, and anyone who has considered secularization in a religious context will recognize truths in the parallels it draws. But at the same time they will also recognize the genre to which it belongs: a statement of regretful unbelief that tries to preserve faith in a more attenuated form (maybe “our canon does not bear any absolute truth and beauty,” but we don’t want to live with an “empty heritage” or “disown and waste the pasts that have formed us”) and to make it useful to some other cause, like the wider left-wing struggle against neoliberalism.

And if there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications.

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation or recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

This is not a dead belief in the humanities; I know many professors, most of them political liberals, for whom it is essential. But it is a contested belief, which is why the other key essays in the Chronicle package stage an argument on exactly this subject — with Michael Clune of Case Western insisting that the humanities must offer “judgment” on what is worth reading, and G. Gabrielle Starr and Kevin Dettmar of Pomona answering that no, humanists can only really “teach disciplinary procedures and habits of mind … we model a style of engagement, of critical thought: we don’t transmit value.”

The Starr-Dettmar belief was my alma mater’s philosophy when I was an undergraduate; back then our so-called “core” curriculum promised to teach us “approaches to knowledge” rather than the thing itself. It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds; no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance.

And the irony is that the very forces that have undermined strictly Western and white-male approaches to canon-making have also made it easier than ever to assemble a diverse inheritor. This should, by rights, be a moment of exciting curricular debates, over which global and rediscovered and post-colonial works belong on the syllabus with Shakespeare, over whether it’s possible to teach an American canon and a global canon all at once. Instead, humanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”

Escaping that dichotomy will not restore the academic or intellectual worlds of 70 years ago. But the path to recovery begins there, with a renewed faith not only in humanism’s methods and approaches, but in the very thing itself.