Geoffrey Berman

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump yesterday fired the federal prosecutor whose office put his former personal lawyer in prison and is investigating his current one, heightening criticism that the president was carrying out an extraordinary purge to rid his administration of officials whose independence could be a threat to his re-election campaign.  As reported by The New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s dismissal of the prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan, whose office has pursued one case after another that have rankled Mr. Trump, led to political blowback and an unexpected result: By the end of the day, Mr. Berman’s handpicked deputy, not the administration’s favored replacement, was chosen to succeed him for now.

The abrupt ouster of Mr. Berman came as Mr. Trump sought to reinvigorate his campaign with its first public rally in months and days after new allegations by his former national security adviser that he had engaged in “obstruction of justice as a way of life.”

It was the latest move in a broader purge of administration officials that has intensified in the months since the Republican-led Senate acquitted Mr. Trump at an impeachment trial.

Since the beginning of the year, the president has fired or forced out inspectors general with independent oversight over executive branch agencies and other key figures from the trial.

Mr. Berman, who has been in office since 2018, had declined to leave his post after Attorney General William P. Barr announced late on Friday night that Mr. Berman would be replaced by Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Clayton is friendly with Mr. Trump and had golfed with the president at his club in Bedminster, N.J., as recently as last weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter.

But on Saturday, facing a standoff with Mr. Berman, Mr. Barr shifted course. In a letter released by the Justice Department, Mr. Barr told Mr. Berman that Mr. Trump had fired him and that he would be replaced temporarily with the prosecutor’s own chief deputy, Audrey Strauss.

The choice of Ms. Strauss appeared to mollify Mr. Berman, who then issued a statement saying he would step down in light of the reversal.”

Nothing but crass interference into the justice system!

Tony

Empty Seats at Bok Center during Trump’s Rally in Tulsa

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump has been touting that one million people wanted to attend his comeback rally yesterday in Tulsa,  but is lucky if as many as 15,000 showed up.  Inside the Bok Center there were thousands of empty seats and the outside staging area where a large video screen had been set up had a couple of dozen people.  Trump launched his rally by defining the upcoming election as a stark choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism, but his intended show of political force amid a pandemic featured empty seats and new coronavirus cases on his own campaign staff who were helping set up for the event.

As reported by the Associated Press.

“Trump ignored health warnings to hold his first rally in 110 days — one of the largest indoor gatherings in the world during a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and put 40 million out of work. The rally was meant to restart his reelection effort less than five months before the president faces voters again.

“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob, or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Trump unleashed months of pent-up grievances about the coronavirus, which he dubbed the “Kung flu,” a racist term for COVID-19, which originated in China. He also tried to defend his handling of the pandemic, even as cases continue to surge in many states, including Oklahoma.

He complained that robust coronavirus testing was making his record look bad — and suggested the testing effort should slow down.

“Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.”

“Speed up the testing,” Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, tweeted later.

In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to address an overflow space outdoors. When Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” about a third of the seats at his indoor rally were empty.

Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” But the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful, and Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.

Before the rally, Trump’s campaign revealed that six staff members who were helping set up for the event had tested positive for the coronavirus. Campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said neither the affected staffers nor anyone who was in immediate contact with them would attend the event.

The president raged to aides that the staffers’ positive cases had been made public, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Trump devoted more than 10 minutes of his 105-minute rally — with the crowd laughing along — trying to explain away a pair of odd images from his speech last weekend at West Point, blaming his slippery leather-soled shoes for video of him walking awkwardly down a ramp as he left the podium. And then he declared that he used two hands to drink a cup of water that day because he didn’t want to spill water on his tie — and proceeded to this time drink with just one hand.

But Trump also leaned in hard on cultural issues, including the push to tear down statue s and rename military bases honoring Confederate generals following nationwide protests about racial injustice.

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” Trump said. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime in its place.”

Trump also floated the idea of a one-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of burning an American flag, an act of protest protected by the First Amendment. And he revived his attacks on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who emigrated from Somalia as a child, claiming she would want “to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia: no government, no safety, no police, no nothing — just anarchy.”

“And now she’s telling us how to run our country,” Trump continued. “No, thank you.”

After a three-month break from rallies, Trump spent the evening reviving his greatest hits, including boasts about the pre-pandemic economy and complaints about the media. But his scattershot remarks made no mention of some of the flashpoints roiling the nation, including the abrupt firing of a U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the damaging new book from his former national security adviser or the killing of George Floyd..

Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the coronavirus. The rally was scheduled over the protests of local health officials as COVID-19 cases spike in many states, while the choice of host city and date — it was originally set for Friday, Juneteenth, in a city where a 1921 racist attack killed as many as 300 people — prompted anger amid a national wave of protests against racial injustice.

But Trump and his advisers forged forward, believing that a return to the rally stage would reenergize the president, who is furious that he has fallen behind Biden in polls, and reassure increasingly anxious Republicans.

But Trump has struggled to land effective attacks against Biden, and his broadsides against the former vice president did not draw nearly the applause as did his digs at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign, for its part, declared that it had received over a million ticket requests. The crowd that gathered was far less than that, though the rally, being broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

The president’s campaign tried to point fingers elsewhere over the smaller-than-expected crowds, accusing protesters of blocking access to metal detectors and preventing people from entering the rally. Three Associated Press journalists reporting in Tulsa for several hours leading up to the president’s speaking did not see protesters block entry to the area where the rally was held.

Tulsa, we have a problem!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

EdSurge reported on Thursday that MIT professor Justin Reich and colleagues just completed one of the largest-ever research studies exploring teaching techniques in online higher education, involving nearly 250,000 students from nearly every nation across the globe.

The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, was meant to show that small behavioral interventions, like asking students in a pre-course survey to describe when and how they planned to fit the required course work into their lives, would significantly improve completion rates in large MOOC-style online classes.

The team thought it would be a slam dunk. Their previous research with smaller numbers of courses and students found impressive results, with the “plan-making intervention” improving completion rates as much as 29 percent. “We thought this study was going to be six to nine months long, that we were going to get similar results and we were going to publish it and be heroes,” says Reich.

That’s not how things went, though. In a large-scale, years-long study with 250 courses running on the edX platform, the pre-planning intervention had no significant impact in overall completion rates. The intervention did correlate with increased course activity for a week or two, but the effect faded out over the length of the course. Other interventions the researchers tested in the experiment also failed to deliver the results found in smaller trials.

The scale and scope of this study is impressive but it must be remembered that large online MOOC courses are not the norm in higher education.

Tony

NOTE:  The information on this study was forwarded to me by my colleague, Fred Lane.

Nicholas Winford, left, debates Trump supporter Randall Thom, right, yesterday on the racial policies of President Donald Trump outside the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump is all but cheering for violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma today.

Trump took to Twitter yesterday to pick a fight with American citizens as preparation for his rally in the Sooner city, his first since COVID-19 gripped the nation in March.

He tweeted: “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!”

Mayor G.T. Bynum stated on Thursday:

“I have received information from the Tulsa Police Department and other law enforcement agencies that shows that individuals from organized groups who have been involved in destructive and violent behavior in other States are planning to travel to the City of Tulsa for purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally.”

Bynum didn’t elaborate as to which groups he meant, and police and city officials didn’t immediately respond to phone messages yesterday seeking further information. Although President Donald Trump has characterized those who have clashed with law enforcement after Floyd’s death as organized, radical-left thugs engaging in domestic terrorism, an Associated Press analysis found that the vast majority of people arrested during recent protests in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., were locals.

Bynum also said crowds of 100,000 or more are expected in the area around the rally.

Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, told Fox News yesterday that those unable to get inside the center are expected to attend what he described as a “festival” outside where the president might also appear.

“Tens of thousands of people will be able to be in attendance and we’re going to have multiple places where the president can speak,” he said.

It is also anticipated that there will be a good number of anti-Trump protesters in the area.

Tensions were always going to be high at the rally, given the nationwide movement against racism and the particular date and place the Trump campaign picked for his return to mass events.

Trump rescheduled the campaign event “out of respect” for Juneteenth, the day commemorating Black emancipation from slavery. He’s faced fierce criticism for holding the rally, originally slated for Juneteenth, in Tulsa, the site of a racist massacre in 1921 when white mobs torched a prosperous Black neighborhood and killed as many as 300 Black residents.

But moving the rally forward a day doesn’t remove the threat, and Tulsa is preparing for potential conflict. Some 250 soldiers with the Oklahoma Army National Guard have been activated to provide security at the event,

We hope for peace but a confrontation might be inevitable.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked twenty-three members of the higher education community about whether their colleges should open or not in Fall 2020.  Entitled, The Great Reopening Debate, the responses from professors, administrators, students, and staff give insights on what is the most  consequential question facing the sector in decades.  It is clear that it is not a simple question nor is there consensus on what should be done.

“Colleges and universities are up to the challenge,” wrote Christina Paxson, Brown University’s president.  Purdue’s Mitch Daniels Jr. agrees, arguing that “even a phenomenon as menacing as Covid-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life.” Among college leaders, their view seems widely held. Of the more than 600 colleges whose fall plans The Chronicle is tracking, the vast majority plan to open in person.

Yet vociferous resistance has emerged. Robert Kelchen, a professor at Seton Hall University, has argued that college leaders are guilty of political posturing and unrealistic optimism. Stan Yoshinobu, a mathematician at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, wrote: “I have a hard time imagining a more efficient way to ruin a community than by forcing it to reopen in the middle of a global pandemic.”

As someone who lives in New York, the hottest of coronavirus spots in the United States and with a governor who has taken a very cautious and prudent approach, I favor being safe rather than risk being sorry.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an Executive Order declaring Juneteenth a state holiday.  As a result, CUNY will be closed tomorrow, June 19^th.  Below is an email from Chancellor Matos Rodriguez.

Tony

——————————————————————————-

OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR

Dear CUNY Community,

I am pleased to announce that the CUNY community will observe Juneteenth as a holiday tomorrow, June 19. All offices will be closed to mark the 155th anniversary of the day that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. The action approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees today follows Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order yesterday declaring it a holiday for state employees.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when word of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, finally reached slaves in Texas. It is an observance that today carries the renewed weight of history as the country reckons with the anguish of racism and persistent racial injustice.

This is a day for all of us to contemplate the structural and societal forces that make the freedom of African American people still fundamentally incomplete. If slavery is America’s original sin, its modern-day equivalent is that we still live in a country where it needs to be said that Black Lives Matter.

The City University of New York was established 16 years before the Emancipation Proclamation and the modern CUNY grew out of the decades after World War II when the struggle for racial equality and justice became a steady undercurrent in American society. CUNY, with its historic mission of diversity, inclusion, opportunity and social justice, has always forged a place in this battle.

I hope that everyone in the CUNY community — students, faculty, staff and campus leadership — spends some time tomorrow thinking about the meaning of this day. All of us have the obligation to help make change, whether through structural remedies or small acts in our daily lives. We must keep working to confront the past and create a more just and equitable future.

Sincerely,

Felo

Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court today rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants.  This is the second stunning rebuke from the court in a week after its ruling that it’s illegal to fire people because they’re gay or transgender.

Immigrants who are part of the 8-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program will retain their protection from deportation and their authorization to work in the United States at least through the end of this year, immigration experts said.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“The 5-4 outcome, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices were in the majority, seems certain to elevate the issue in Trump’s campaign, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first presidential run in 2016 and immigration restrictions his administration has imposed since then.

The justices said the administration did not take the proper steps to end DACA, rejecting arguments that the program is illegal and that courts have no role to play in reviewing the decision to end it. The program covers people who have been in the United States since they were children and are in the country illegally. In some cases, they have no memory of any home other than the U.S.”

As expected, Trump didn’t hold back in his assessment of the this decision:

“These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!” he wrote on Twitter, apparently including the LGBTQ ruling as well”

Poor Donald!

Tony

Patricia Ann Quillin and Reed Hastings

Dear Commons Community,

At a time when Covid-19 has ravaged the finances of many of their students and depleted their own budgets, two of the nation’s most prominent historically Black colleges will each receive $40 million for student scholarships, officials at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, in Atlanta, announced yesterday.

Each, by itself, was a record-setting investment in educating Black students, but they were joined by a third $40-million gift to the United Negro College fund, a major supplier of student scholarships and supporter of Black colleges.

Reed Hastings, co-founder and chief executive of the video-streaming service Netflix, and his wife, Patricia Ann Quillin, said they wanted to make the kind of donation that would spur others to act.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Generally, white capital flows to predominantly white institutions, perpetuating capital isolation. We hope this additional $120 million donation will help more Black students follow their dreams.”

Morehouse, the nation’s only historically Black college focused on educating men, and Spelman, often described as a sister HBCU for educating women, are in the city that in recent weeks has seen some of the most heated protests against racial discrimination. Like other historically Black colleges, Morehouse and Spelman are heavily dependent on tuition and have worried about the potential for steep enrollment declines in the fall, especially given the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black families.

The gifts will provide full scholarships for at least 200 Morehouse students, said David A. Thomas, the college’s president. He said Hastings directed that the scholarships be named for Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the UNCF and a Morehouse graduate.

“We’ll use the money to allow a select group of students from high-need families to graduate debt free,” Thomas said in an interview. This will allow them to take jobs that fuel their passions, and don’t just provide a paycheck, he said.

Hastings, who co-founded Netflix in 1997, is a former member of the California State Board of Education and an advocate for education reform. Hastings and Quillin said in a statement that supporting the education of young Black people is one of the best ways ways to invest in America’s future.

“Both of us had the privilege of a great education, and we want to help more students — in particular students of color — get the same start in life,” they said. “HBCUs have a tremendous record, yet are disadvantaged when it comes to giving. Generally, white capital flows to predominantly white institutions, perpetuating capital isolation. We hope this additional $120 million donation will help more Black students follow their dreams and also encourage more people to support these institutions — helping to reverse generations of inequity in our country.”

The gift is the largest in Morehouse’s 153-year history and brings to $105 million the amount the college will have raised in one year, according to a college spokeswoman.

In an interview Wednesday on CBS This Morning, Spelman’s president, Mary Schmidt Campbell, said she “just about fainted” when she learned of the contribution. 

“This gift is such an affirmation of all of those gifted, hardworking students who want to come to places like Spelman and Morehouse,” she said. “Now we have the resources to support 200 students each over the next 10 years. That’s a game-changer.”

Hastings said Lomax, whom he’s known for about 15 years, offered to introduce the couple to HBCUs after learning about a program Hastings had helped set up at his alma mater, Bowdoin College.

“This year with the tragedy in America and everyone feeling hopeless, we realized this is the time to do something bigger and to really try to bring the HBCU story front and center,”  Hastings said during the CBS interview.

Lomax said he told the donors that great education happens at historically black colleges, “but we need great philanthropists to step up and invest.”

We meed more people like Hastings and Quillin!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, will be a best-seller due to all of the publicity that the White House has given it by trying to suppress its publication.  It is available for pre-order and is already number one on Amazon’s rankings.  Here are eight claims that Bolton makes courtesy of The Guardian.

“The explosive allegations came after a White House lawsuit sought to block the publication of Bolton’s book. But ahead of its scheduled release next week it has now been leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post, which reported on some of the stunning claims. An excerpt also appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Here are eight of the most shocking revelations:

1. Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election

According to the excerpt of Bolton’s book published by the Wall Street Journal, Trump asked China to use its economic power to help him win a second election.

In one instance, Trump and President Xi Jinping were discussing hostility to China in the US. “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes.

“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

2. Trump suggested he was open to serving more than two terms

In another eye-opening exchange published in the Wall Street Journal, Trump also seems to support Xi’s idea of eliminating presidential term limits. “Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him,” Bolton writes. “Xi said the US had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.”

3. Trump offered favors to dictators

Bolton’s book reportedly details cases where Trump tried to kill criminal investigations as favors to dictators. One incident published in the Washington Post includes a 2018 discussion with the Turkish president, Recep Erdoğan. Bolton says Erdoğan gave Trump a memo claiming that a Turkish firm under investigation in the US was innocent. “Trump then told Erdoğan he would take care of things, explaining that the southern district prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.”

4. Trump praised Xi for China’s internment camps

According to Bolton, Trump was also approving when Xi defended China’s internment of Uighur Muslims in detention camps. “According to our interpreter,” Bolton writes, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

According to leaked Communist party documents published in November, at least 1 million Uighur Muslims are detained in the camps.

5. Trump defended Saudi Arabia to distract from a story about Ivanka

Trump made headlines in November 2018 when he released a bizarre statement defending the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. It included lines such as “The world is a very dangerous place!” and “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

According to Bolton’s book, making headlines was the point. A story about his daughter Ivanka using her personal email for government business was also in the news at the time. After waging war on Hilary Clinton during the 2016 campaign for doing the same thing, Trump need a distraction.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump reportedly said. “If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”

6. Trump’s top staff mocked him behind his back

From what has been reported, it sounds like Bolton’s book provides one of the clearest insights into the despair of Trump’s top officials behind the scenes.

In one example given by the New York Times, Bolton claims he received a note from the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, after Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, simply saying, “He is so full of shit.” On top of this, Pompeo also allegedly said a month later that Trump’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea had “zero probability of success”.

7. Trump thought Finland was part of Russia

Bolton’s book reportedly details some giant holes in Trump’s knowledge. In one instance, Bolton says Trump didn’t seem to know basic knowledge about the UK, asking its former prime minister Theresa May: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?”. On top of this, he also alleges that Trump once asked if Finland was part of Russia, and repeatedly mixed up the current and former presidents of Afghanistan.

8. Trump thought it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela

According to the Washington Post, Bolton claims Trump said invading Venezuela would be “cool”, and that the country was “really part of the United States”.

These excerpts remind me of the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, where Groucho plays the comically inept Rufus T. Firefly who accidentally becomes the president of Freedonia.

Tony