Dear Commons Community,

State spending on higher education grew 5 percent for this fiscal year according to the results of the  annual  “Grapevine survey that was released this morning.  The survey provides a first look at state higher-education funding in the new fiscal year and is compiled by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the State Higher Education Executive Officers.

Two years ago, 18 states reported a drop in funding from the year earlier. This year, just three states cut appropriations to higher education: Alaska, Hawaii, and New York. States on the opposite end of the spectrum increased funding by as much as 11.4 percent.

Despite varying levels of support nationwide, nearly half of the states reported increases in spending of 5 percent or more. Spending in five states — California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas — accounted for about half of the total increase in state higher-education financing nationwide this fiscal year, the survey said.

The survey showed positive momentum in higher-ed financing over the longer term. State spending on colleges has increased by 18.8 percent since 2015.

Only five states saw declines from 2015 to 2020, with Alaska posting the biggest drop — nearly 22 percent. The state’s Republican governor, Michael J. Dunleavy, had threatened to cut funding to the University of Alaska system by $135 million last year. Eventually the university’s regents worked out a deal with him to limit the cut to $70 million over three years, or the drop would have been far worse.

With a few exceptions, good news for our colleges and universities!

Tony

Qassim Soleimani

Dear Commons Community,

Since his assassination, Qassim Soleimani has been characterized as Iran’s most critical strategist and mastermind in its quest for dominance in the Middle East.  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman views Soleimani in a different light and considers him the “most overrated” figure in the region.  Friedman’s conclusion is that Soleimani tried to push his country to build an empire, but drove it into the ground instead.   The entire column which appears in its entirety below, is worth a read.

Tony

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Trump Kills Iran’s Most Overrated Warrior

By Thomas L. Friedman

Jan. 3, 2020

One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

Think of the miscalculations this guy made. In 2015, the United States and the major European powers agreed to lift virtually all their sanctions on Iran, many dating back to 1979, in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program for a mere 15 years, but still maintaining the right to have a peaceful nuclear program. It was a great deal for Iran. Its economy grew by over 12 percent the next year. And what did Suleimani do with that windfall?

He and Iran’s supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. This freaked out U.S. allies in the Sunni Arab world and Israel — and they pressed the Trump administration to respond. Trump himself was eager to tear up any treaty forged by President Obama, so he exited the nuclear deal and imposed oil sanctions on Iran that have now shrunk the Iranian economy by almost 10 percent and sent unemployment over 16 percent.

All that for the pleasure of saying that Tehran can call the shots in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. What exactly was second prize?

With the Tehran regime severely deprived of funds, the ayatollahs had to raise gasoline prices at home, triggering massive domestic protests. That required a harsh crackdown by Iran’s clerics against their own people that left thousands jailed and killed, further weakening the legitimacy of the regime.

Then Mr. “Military Genius” Suleimani decided that, having propped up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping to kill 500,000 Syrians in the process, he would overreach again and try to put direct pressure on Israel. He would do this by trying to transfer precision-guided rockets from Iran to Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria.

Alas, Suleimani discovered that fighting Israel — specifically, its combined air force, special forces, intelligence and cyber — is not like fighting the Nusra front or the Islamic State. The Israelis hit back hard, sending a whole bunch of Iranians home from Syria in caskets and hammering their proxies as far away as Western Iraq.

Indeed, Israeli intelligence had so penetrated Suleimani’s Quds Force and its proxies that Suleimani would land a plane with precision munitions in Syria at 5 p.m., and the Israeli air force would blow it up by 5:30 p.m. Suleimani’s men were like fish in a barrel. If Iran had a free press and a real parliament, he would have been fired for colossal mismanagement.

But it gets better, or actually worse, for Suleimani. Many of his obituaries say that he led the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, in tacit alliance with America. Well, that’s true. But what they omit is that Suleimani’s, and Iran’s, overreaching in Iraq helped to produce the Islamic State in the first place.

It was Suleimani and his Quds Force pals who pushed Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to push Sunnis out of the Iraqi government and army, stop paying salaries to Sunni soldiers, kill and arrest large numbers of peaceful Sunni protesters and generally turn Iraq into a Shiite-dominated sectarian state. The Islamic State was the counterreaction.

Finally, it was Suleimani’s project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro-democracy forces — both Sunnis and Shiites — in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

As the Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh pointed out in a wise essay in Politico, in recent years “Soleimani began expanding Iran’s imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran’s various enemies.”

It was precisely those Suleimani proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — that created pro-Iranian Shiite states-within-states in all of these countries. And it was precisely these states-within-states that helped to prevent any of these countries from cohering, fostered massive corruption and kept these countries from developing infrastructure — schools, roads, electricity.

And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies — his “kingmakers” in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump’s America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.

First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.

Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.

Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.

And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.

I write these lines while flying over New Zealand, where the smoke from forest fires 2,500 miles away over eastern Australia can be seen and felt. Mother Nature doesn’t know Suleimani’s name, but everyone in the Arab world is going to know her name. Because the Middle East, particularly Iran, is becoming an environmental disaster area — running out of water, with rising desertification and overpopulation. If governments there don’t stop fighting and come together to build resilience against climate change — rather than celebrating self-promoting military frauds who conquer failed states and make them fail even more — they’re all doomed.

Email Qaani

Dear Commons Community,

As the smoke settles after Donald Trump approved an airstrike that killed  Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the news media had non-stop coverage of what Iran will do in retaliation.  While we await its action, Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday announced that the slain Soleimani will be replaced by Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, who served as Soleimani’s deputy commander since 1997.  Qaani will take over the helm as head of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

Khamenei said in a statement that the program tasked with carrying on Iran’s influence via proxies across the Middle East “will be unchanged from the time of his predecessor.”

Iranian state media reported that Qaani previously warned Trump in 2017 that “threats against Iran will damage America.

“We are not a war-mongering country. But any military action against Iran will be regretted,” he reportedly said, according to Newsweek. “We have buried many … like Trump and know how to fight against America.”

Now what?  Does Trump order another airstrike to kill Qaani while awaiting retaliation?  I am also concerned that this is beginning to look a little like the Wag the Dog  movie in which government operatives try to fabricate a war to distract the American people from presidential scandals (or maybe an impeachment).

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The journal Nature published an article yesterday reporting the results of a study concluding that artificial intelligence  is more accurate in diagnosing breast cancer from mammograms than  six radiologists.  The study was conducted by an international team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, and used an algorithm based on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women.  As reported by the BBC.

“The current system in the UK’s National Health System (NHS)  uses two radiologists to analyse each woman’s X-rays. In rare cases where they disagree, a third doctor assesses the images.

In the research study, an AI model was given anonymised images, so that the women could not be identified.

Unlike the human experts, who had access to the patient’s history, AI had only the mammograms to go on.

The results showed that the AI model was as good as the current double-reading system of two doctors.

And it was actually superior at spotting cancer than a single doctor.

Compared to one radiologist, there was a reduction of 1.2% in false positives, when a mammogram is incorrectly diagnosed as abnormal.

There was also a reduction of 2.7% in false negatives, where a cancer is missed.

Dominic King from Google Health said: “Our team is really proud of these research findings, which suggest that we are on our way to developing a tool that can help clinicians spot breast cancer with greater accuracy.”

Most of the mammograms came from Cancer Research UK’s OPTIMAM dataset collected from St George’s Hospital London, the Jarvis Breast Centre in Guildford and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.

It takes over a decade of training as a doctor and specialist to become a radiologist, capable of interpreting mammograms.

Reading X-rays is vital but time-consuming work, and there is an estimated shortage of more than 1,000 radiologists across the UK.

Will AI take over from humans?

No. It took humans to design and train the artificial intelligence model.

This was a research study, and as yet the AI system has not been let loose in the clinic.

Even when it is, at least one radiologist would remain in charge of diagnosis.

But AI could largely do away with the need for dual reading of mammograms by two doctors, easing pressure on their workload, say researchers.

Prof Ara Darzi, report co-author and director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Imperial Centre, told the BBC: “This went far beyond my expectations. It will have a significant impact on improving the quality of reporting, and also free up radiologists to do even more important things.”

Women aged between 50 and 70 are invited for NHS breast screening every three years – those who are older can ask to be screened.

The use of AI could eventually speed up diagnosis, as images can be analysed within seconds by the computer algorithm.

Sara Hiom, director of cancer intelligence and early diagnosis at CRUK, told the BBC: “This is promising early research which suggests that in future it may be possible to make screening more accurate and efficient, which means less waiting and worrying for patients, and better outcomes.”

Helen Edwards, from Surrey, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 44, before she was eligible for screening.

She required surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but has been cancer-free for more than a decade.

She was a patient representative on the CRUK panel which had to decide whether to grant Google Health permission to use the anonymised breast cancer data.

Helen told the BBC: “Initially I was a bit concerned about what Google might do with the data, but it is stripped of all identifiers.

“In the long term this can only benefit women.

“Artificial intelligence machines don’t get tired… they can work 24/7 whereas a human being can’t do that, so to combine the two is a great idea.”

We will continue to hear major advances in AI in the health area in the years ahead.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading David Blight’s biography, Frederick Douglass:  Prophet of Freedom.  It is a deep dive (800 pages plus eighty pages of notes) into the life of probably the most famous abolitionist of the 19^th century.  The beginning and end move along briskly but you will have to slog through the middle where it gets into the interactions of Douglass with other prominent abolitionists of the period.  The description Douglass’s time as a slave and his escape are very well-done.

In addition to the many details about his private life especially his wife and children, possible lovers (handled respectfully), and conflicts with contemporaries, Blight also reviews much of the background of the abolitionist movement in this country and in Europe, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crowe.  There are interesting details of the Douglass’s interactions with American presidents including Lincoln, Johnson, Grant and Harrison.  It also contains insights into the evolution of the post Civil War Republican and Democratic parties.

Below is the New York Times review which highly praises Blight’s work.  I recommend this book if you want to learn more about Douglass and the middle/latter parts of 19^th century America.

Tony

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Frederick Douglass in Full

Brent Staples

Nov. 5, 2018

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Prophet of Freedom
By David W. Blight
Illustrated. 888 pp. Simon & Schuster. $37.50.

The alchemy that transformed an unknown fugitive slave named Frederick Douglass into one of the most celebrated orators and political theorists in the world finished its work with astonishing speed. Douglass was just 20 years old when, on Sept. 3, 1838, he dressed up as a sailor and stole out of Baltimore carrying borrowed freedom documents. He and his wife — a free black Marylander who had aided the escape — fled to New Bedford, Mass., where Douglass was recruited to the abolitionist movement while honing his oratory at a local church.

As the historian David W. Blight shows in his cinematic and deeply engaging “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were smitten with Douglass, instantly recognizing the value of a recruit just out of chains whose eloquence refuted the claim that Negroes were inferior and who could condemn slavery as immoral by drawing on America’s founding documents as well as his own bitter experience under the lash. It could not have been lost on the dapper, self-regarding Douglass that men and women swooned over him, describing him in terms that bordered on erotic. Garrison himself went starry-eyed, declaring that God had authored the young man’s soul “but a little lower than the angels.” Enraptured by the young orator in 1841, a white New England newspaper editor wrote: “As this Douglass stood there in manly attitude, with erect form, and glistening eye and deep-toned voice, telling us that he had been secretly devising means to effect his release, we could not help thinking of Spartacus, the Gladiator.” The activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw him a year later at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and spoke for many white women when she wrote: “He stood there like an African prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with keen wit, satire and indignation he portrayed the bitterness of slavery.”

Douglass became a marathon traveler for the abolitionist cause at a time when moving about the country by train was punishing in itself. Racist conductors worsened the ordeal by exiling him to “mean, dirty and uncomfortable” Negro cars or ejected him from the train altogether. Adoring crowds at some stops alternated with mobs like the one in Indiana that cried “kill the nigger” while beating Douglass unconscious and breaking his right hand. The itinerant orator was just seven years out of chains — and already the equivalent of a modern-day rock star — when the first of his three memoirs, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” made him the most well-known Negro on the globe.

Dependent upon abolitionist charity for his family’s daily bread, Douglass nonetheless chafed under a stifling Garrisonian orthodoxy that required adherents to embrace pacifism and abstain from politics. He charted a course away from all that by starting his own newspaper and openly embracing as household saints blood-drenched figures like the slave-rebellion leader Nat Turner and the white revolutionary John Brown, both of whom he classed with the founders. His fledgling newspaper, The North Star, served as the school where he sharpened his grasp of politics and developed a penetrating style as an editorialist. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, Douglass understood full well that slavery could be purged from the United States only with blood — as his friend John Brown had put it on the way to the gallows — and launched blistering attacks on those who sought to compromise with the institution rather than obliterate it.

Douglass thought comparatively little of Lincoln at first — describing him as “honest” but without claim to “any literary culture beyond the circle of his practical duties” — and breathed fire when Lincoln used the first-ever presidential meeting with African-Americans to promote a racist plan for colonizing Negroes outside of the country. As the Civil War raged toward conclusion, Douglass attacked Lincoln for vacillating on black rights in the South. Wounded, the president summoned him to the White House and sought his help with the war effort. By this point, the man who had slipped out of Baltimore with borrowed freedom papers was poised to play a central role in America’s postwar transformation.

The novelist William Burroughs once complained about autobiographers who conceal their lives in print, quipping that the Paul Bowles memoir “Without Stopping” would have been better titled “Without Telling.” Blight makes a similar case against Douglass, who shrouded his domestic life in secrecy even as he wrote and rewrote his personal story in three widely read autobiographies that totaled more than 1,200 pages. “Douglass invited us into his life over and over,” Blight writes, “and it is a rich literary and historical feast to read the music of Douglass’s words. But as he sits majestically at the head of the table, it is as if he slips out of the room right when we so wish to know more — anything — about his more private thoughts, motivations and memories of the many conflicts in his personal life.”

Douglass cultivated the fiction that he was “self-made” and had sprung fully formed from his own forehead. Blight dismantles this pretense in a tour de force of storytelling and analysis, showing that the young orator-to-be had benefited from a great deal of mentorship and good fortune. Viewed through this lens, the fabled escape from slavery takes on different contours. The slave master’s decision not to sell the rebellious young Fred into a living death in the Deep South — and instead to consign him to the custody of a brother in Baltimore — can be credibly seen as an act of familial grace by a slave owner toward a half-white member of his extended family. Among those in the free black community of Baltimore who embraced Fred and propelled him toward freedom was his wife-to-be, the housekeeper Anna Murray.

Blight draws on new archival material and insights gleaned from a lifetime in the company of his subject to shed light on the orator’s complex relationship with his wife, Anna, and the two white women who came between the couple within the walls of the Douglass family home in Rochester.

The great man’s vocation as a wandering oracle was possible because Anna, who bore five children (only four lived to adulthood), ran the household with a sure hand, hosting fugitive slaves, far-flung relatives and others who turned up at the front door in need. Anna, whom Blight describes as “largely illiterate,” could be of little help with her husband’s journalism. For that, the charismatic orator called up the British abolitionist Julia Griffiths, who put aside her life and moved in 1849 to be with him in Rochester and to get The North Star off the ground. She enabled Douglass to survive personally and professionally, managing and raising money for the newspaper and for the food that came across the Douglass family table. She helped “to polish a raw genius into a gem and, for a time, managed his emotional health as well as his bank accounts.” Together with her sister, Eliza, Griffiths relieved the Douglasses of an enormous financial burden by purchasing the mortgage of the family home. White Rochester was scandalized when Griffiths moved into the Douglass home, an arrangement that spawned rumors of a romantic link between patron and orator. It is alleged that she moved out when Anna “ordered it.”

That Griffiths loved Douglass is clear on the face of things, but any claim that the two carried on a sexual relationship right under Anna’s nose seems far-fetched. The eccentric German intellectual Ottilie Assing was another matter. She wandered into the Douglasses’ lives in 1856, seeking permission to translate his second autobiography, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” into German. She remained in the family orbit for nearly three decades, serving as confidante and interlocutor — and lover. Douglass frequented her rooms in Hoboken, N.J., where the participants of her salon lionized him, validating his rise from slavery into the thinking classes. Assing shielded him when he was on the run from conspiracy charges in connection with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, when he came within a hairbreadth of being captured and marched to the gallows with his revolutionary friend.

That Assing was obsessed with the famous orator would have been readily apparent to Anna during the interloper’s frequent intrusion on the family home, where she lived for months at a time. We know nothing of Anna’s feelings on the matter — but the triangle of Frederick, Anna and the love-struck Ottilie comes through like the plot of an Edith Wharton novel. At different points, Assing referred to Anna as a “veritable beast” who kept her from her beloved Frederick, and as the “border state” that prevented her from advancing toward her heart’s true goal. As Blight writes, “Although Assing sipped tea occasionally with Mrs. Douglass, she held Anna in utter contempt, disrespecting her lack of education and even at times privately denigrating her role as homemaker.” The amorous German lingered in Douglass’s circle year after year, waiting in vain for the divorce that would allow her to “walk tall as the rightful ‘Mrs. Douglass.’”

By the time Anna died in 1882, Assing was bitterly aware that the aging orator intended to marry Helen Pitts, a well-educated white woman in her 40s, who worked for Douglass in the recorder of deeds office in Washington. The nearly 66-year-old Douglass held the plan secret even from his children, with whom he also worked daily, and who seem to have learned of the marriage from press inquiries. He failed to notify his faithful British friend Julia, who received the news secondhand from friends in Rochester. Gracious as usual, she wished the newlyweds well and hoped that the union would give him “true happiness” in the evening of his days. Later that year, Assing killed herself in a Paris park — drinking potassium cyanide — leaving her beloved a tidy sum in her will.

Dear Commons Community,

I remember coming home from school one day in October, 1956, and my mother had the black and white 18-inch television on and was watching the Yankees playing the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. This was most unusual because she rarely watched TV and new little about professional baseball. As soon as I walked in, she tried to explain to me what was going but she was not making sense. After watching for a few minutes, I realized that baseball history was being made if Yankee pitcher Don Larsen could hold onto the perfect game he was pitching.  He did hold on and history was made.  No one before or since has even come close to matching his feat in a World Series game.  Don Larsen died yesterday of esophageal cancer at the age of 90.  Below is an excerpt from his obituary as it appears in the New York Times this morning.

“When Larsen took the mound against the Brooklyn Dodgers on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1956, at the original Yankee Stadium, he was in the fourth season of an unremarkable career.

He possessed an imposing physique for his time, at 6 feet 4 inches tall and 215 pounds or so, his frame topped by a brush cut and oversize ears. His repertory of a fastball, slider and curve seemed weapons enough for a fine career.

But Larsen had lost 21 games pitching for the Baltimore Orioles two years earlier, and he had difficulty controlling not only his pitches but also his affinity for night life.

Nonetheless, for one day Larsen was the picture of perfection. Twenty-seven times, the batters in a Dodgers lineup with four future Hall of Famers came to the plate, and all returned to the dugout without a hit, a walk or an error by a Yankees fielder.

Larsen’s 2-0 masterpiece came 34 years after the major leagues had last witnessed a perfect game. No pitcher has so much as thrown a no-hitter in the World Series.”

The iconic photo above is of catcher Yogi Berra jumping on Larsen after the last out was recorded.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I started working full-time at the City University of New York on January 1, 1970.  My first position was working at the Lehman College (formerly Hunter College in the Bronx) Computer Center.  Administrative and faculty positions followed at five CUNY colleges.  My colleagues at all of these institutions  have been the best that any academic can have.  The students have been my inspiration and the air that I breathe in my professional life. 

Thank you all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A Happy and Healthy New Year to all!

Tony