Dear Commons Community,

Here is Barack Obama’s statement on the passing of John Lewis.

“America is a constant work in progress. What gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further — to speak out for what’s right, to challenge an unjust status quo, and to imagine a better world.

John Lewis — one of the original Freedom Riders, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Member of Congress representing the people of Georgia for 33 years — not only assumed that responsibility, he made it his life’s work. He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise. And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.

Considering his enormous impact on the history of this country, what always struck those who met John was his gentleness and humility. Born into modest means in the heart of the Jim Crow South, he understood that he was just one of a long line of heroes in the struggle for racial justice. Early on, he embraced the principles of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience as the means to bring about real change in this country, understanding that such tactics had the power not only to change laws, but to change hearts and minds as well.

In so many ways, John’s life was exceptional. But he never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country might do. He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, a longing to do what’s right, a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. And it’s because he saw the best in all of us that he will continue, even in his passing, to serve as a beacon in that long journey towards a more perfect union.

I first met John when I was in law school, and I told him then that he was one of my heroes. Years later, when I was elected a U.S. Senator, I told him that I stood on his shoulders. When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made. And through all those years, he never stopped providing wisdom and encouragement to me and Michelle and our family. We will miss him dearly.

It’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Afterwards, I spoke to him privately, and he could not have been prouder of their efforts — of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office. I told him that all those young people — of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it. They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they had heard of his courage only through history books.

Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did. And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders — to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning based on a national survey of mask use during the COVID-19 pandemic.  In some American neighborhoods, it’s hard to spot even one person outside without a face covering. In others, your odds of seeing many maskless people are quite high.  The map illustrated in the article is interactive and you can click on different states and locals.  Here is an excerpt from the main text.

“Public health officials believe that face coverings can substantially slow transmission of the coronavirus, which is spreading rapidly in many states. But face coverings work best if they are adopted widely, and that is not the case everywhere. The accompanying map shows the odds of whether, if you encountered five people in a given area, all of them would be wearing masks.

Our data comes from a large number of interviews conducted by the global data and survey firm Dynata at the request of The New York Times. The firm asked a question about mask use to obtain 250,000 survey responses between July 2 and July 14, enough data to provide estimates more detailed than the state level. (Several states have imposed new mask requirements since the completion of these interviews.)

The map shows broad regional patterns: Mask use is high in the Northeast and the West, and lower in the Plains and parts of the South. But it also shows many fine-grained local differences. Masks are widely worn in the District of Columbia, but there are sections of the suburbs in both Maryland and Virginia where norms seem to be different. In St. Louis and its western suburbs, mask use seems to be high. But across the Missouri River, it falls.

Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, recently barred local governments in the state from requiring mask use, but on Friday he urged residents to wear them anyway.

In many parts of Georgia, seeing unmasked people is common, but mask use is very high in the area around the city of Albany, where there was an early and intense outbreak of coronavirus.

These variations reflect differences in disease risk and politics, but they also may reflect some local idiosyncrasies. Elizabeth Dorrance Hall, an assistant professor of communications at Michigan State University, said mask behavior can be subject to a kind of peer pressure: If most everyone is wearing one, reluctant people may go along. If few people are, that can influence behavior, too. Such dynamics can shape the behavior of friends, neighbors and communities.

“We definitely take our cues from our friends, and we often, almost always, already share values with our friends,” Professor Dorrance Hall said. “It takes a strong person to stand up and say: This is what we’re doing and we’re all doing it.”

Despite these variations, and despite the flare-ups over the issue that pepper social media, the rates of self-reported mask use in the United States are high. Several national surveys in recent weeks have found that around 80 percent of Americans say they wear masks frequently or always when they expect to be within six feet of other people. That number falls short of the sort of universal masking many public health officials have asked for, but it is higher than the rates of mask use in several other countries, including Canada, Finland and Denmark, according to a recent survey from YouGov.”

Interesting data and illustration.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

With the COVID-19 pandemic currently raging throughout the country, higher education has entered uncertain times.  The AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession lays out many of the issues affecting college faculty and higher education.  Here is a recap of the report courtesy  of New York Academe. 

“This year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession recaps the key findings from the AAUP’s 2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey, initially released earlier this year, presenting salary data for full-time faculty members as well as information on gender inequities, retirement and medical benefits, part-time faculty pay and benefits, and administrator salaries.

The report also highlights key data points related to the economy, institutional finances, enrollment, and the makeup of the academic workforce. The findings provide a snapshot of faculty compensation for the 2019–20 academic year, as the country was on the brink of what may be the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On average, salaries for full-time faculty members at US colleges and universities are 2.8 percent higher in 2019–20 than they were in the preceding academic year. With consumer prices growing by 2.3 percent during the year, the increase in real terms was 0.5 percent.

The 2019–20 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession discusses key data points relevant to monitoring the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education. Some areas of concern discussed in the report include the following:

• Full-time faculty salary growth has been flat for several years. Following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, nominal salary growth remained below consumer price growth until 2015–16, and real salary growth has remained flat ever since.
• Salary growth has varied by institution type. Average real salaries for full-time faculty members at doctoral institutions remained below pre-recession levels until  2015–16 and have remained flat ever since. For master’s, baccalaureate, and associate’s institutions, average real salaries have yet to return to pre-recession levels and have, in fact, declined over the last three years.
• Almost all full-time faculty members receive retirement benefits. Almost 97 percent of full-time faculty members earn additional compensation in the form of contributions by the institution or state or local government toward retirement plans, with an average expenditure of 10.7percent of the average salary of faculty members who are covered.
• Most part-time faculty members do not receive benefits. Overall, 35 percent of reporting institutions contribute toward retirement plans for some or all part-time faculty members, and 33 percent contribute to premiums for medical insurance plans.
• Enrollment has steadily declined in recent years. After rising unemployment rates drove up enrollment in the wake of the Great Recession—particularly in community colleges—enrollment peaked at 13 million full-time-equivalent students (FTES) in 2010–11 but has since declined sharply to the pre-recession level of about 11 million FTES.
• Funding for public institutions never recovered after the Great Recession. Appropriations for public institutions have declined 12 percent, after adjusting for inflation, from $8,100 per FTE in 2007–08 to $7,100 per FTE in 2017–18, and growth has been flat for several years. In addition, there is huge variation between states.
• Over two-thirds of faculty members are on contingent appointments. Over 50 percent of faculty members are employed part time overall. From 2009 to 2019,the proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty members in doctoral institutions decreased from 51 to 45 percent, and now more than half of faculty members in doctoral institutions are serving in either full-time (20.5 percent) or part-time (34.5 percent) contingent positions.

The report also describes improvements that were made to the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey this year, including full-time faculty benefits data collection and the inclusion of regional price parities to account for cost-of-living differences between states and metro areas.

The US economy is facing a crisis that is unprecedented in recent memory, with an estimated unemployment rate higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

The findings presented in the 2019–20 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession provide a snapshot of faculty compensation for the 2019–20 academic year.

In the coming months and years of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis, the AAUP Research Office will study key data points related to the economy, institutional finances, enrollment, the academic workforce,and salaries.”

The full report can be found at: https://nyscaaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/NY-Academe-Summer-2020.pdf

Tony

Huckabee’s Learn Our History’s $1 gift promotion may be more of a bait and switch scheme

Dear Commons Community,

Learn Our History, the company that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee co-founded in 2011 “to make it fun for kids to learn American history,” has spent the past week funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Facebook ads promoting a “no-risk” deal. The two-time presidential candidate’s firm said it’s giving away its educational booklets — such as “The Kids Guide to President Trump” — for free, or just $1 per item, in a “patriotic bundle” special.  But the “free” offer appears to be more of a “bait and switch scheme.” As reported by the Huffington Post.

“The mainstream media doesn’t want your children to know the truth about President Trump and his achievements in office,” declared the recent ads for “The Kids Guide,” a new offshoot of Learn Our History that has also ramped up its Facebook spending to push the promotion. “That’s why Mike Huckabee’s team created ‘The Kids Guide to President Trump,’ and that’s why we’re making it free.”

But the offer is far from free. Parents across the country described a bait-and-switch scheme that they said duped them into signing up for $20-per-month subscriptions without their knowledge. Many said that Learn Our History ignored their repeated requests to cancel the subscriptions, leaving them locked into payments for products that they never wanted in the first place — all so their children can learn Huckabee’s version of history, which critics described as “pretend,” “kiddie propaganda” and “full of Christian nationalist revisionism and right-wing political propaganda.”

This isn’t the first time that Huckabee has cashed in on apparent scams. The former Fox News host has spent much of his post-gubernatorial life shilling for grifters, including the sellers of a $74 biblical cancer cure and a diabetes “reversal” treatment containing a “secret ingredient”: cinnamon. (“Let me tell you that diabetes can be reversed. I should know because I did it — and today you can, too!” he said in a 2015 infomercial before railing against prescription drugs, Big Pharma and the “mainstream medical community.”)

Rather than targeting the medically desperate and vulnerable, Huckabee’s history for kids company, an EverBright Media brand, has been pandering to parents with children who are “stuck at home” and bored during the coronavirus pandemic. And with its recent Facebook ad splurge, Learn Our History has succeeded in drawing in new customers — along with a wave of complaints from those who said they were shocked to discover additional charges on their credit card bills.

“I have tried numerous times to cancel a ‘subscription’ to this, … but no one responds to my emails or messages. I was not aware I had subscribed to anything, and I keep getting billed $20.90 a month for something I do not use or want. Buyer beware,” one woman posted to the ‘Kids Guide’ Facebook page. “Do not debit any more from my account,” another pleaded. “I sent a message, but no one responded.”

It’s no surprise that one buyer after another seeking Learn Our History’s free advertised materials is unwittingly purchasing monthly subscriptions. At the checkout page for the bundle deal, the order total is listed as $2, and the offer’s terms and conditions are presented like this:

Learn Our History The terms and conditions of Learn Our History’s $1 deal are cut off from view before mentioning the additional charges.

The non-scrollable text conveniently cuts off right before telling customers that they will automatically receive a subscription to Learn Our History’s “Kids Guides” that come “around once a month for the low price of $15.95 plus $4.95 [shipping and processing] per set, billed conveniently to your credit or debit card on file,” as well as an additional subscription to EverBright Kids magazine for an extra $5.75. All of that information is hidden from customers unless they notice and click on the small gray text in the gray box leading to the complete terms and conditions.

Many people have reported that once they signed up for subscriptions through Huckabee’s company — whether they wanted them or not — they were unable to cancel the subscriptions.

Susanne Rosenhouse, a mother of two in Dallas, ordered “The Kids Guide to the Coronavirus” after seeing it in a Facebook ad. Unaware of the partisan nature of Learn Our History’s products, she figured it would be useful for her 8-year-old daughter.

“I thought to myself, ‘For a dollar, that sounds worth it,’” Rosenhouse told HuffPost. 

The order took longer than expected to arrive, so she emailed Learn Our History’s customer service team requesting an update and immediately received a response that her package was on its way. But later — once she noticed the additional charges — she said she emailed the same team to cancel her subscription and never heard back.

“All of a sudden, there was no response,” she said.

Addressing complaints filed through the Better Business Bureau’s website, EverBright Media argued that complainants “affirmatively agreed to the terms and conditions of our offer (by checking the box that [they] had read and agreed to our terms).” It failed to acknowledge that the terms and conditions are cut off in the preview box.

“We are a subscription education company, and across our various websites, … we explain how our subscription offers work to our customers,” an EverBright Media representative told HuffPost in an emailed statement. “We also provide them with our terms during the checkout process, even requiring each customer to check a box acknowledging that they have reviewed our terms and conditions before we will process their order.”

The representative added that customers receive an email confirming the terms after placing an order, are entitled to a refund within 90 days of their purchase and can cancel their subscriptions at any time. The company’s response time for such requests has been affected by the coronavirus, he said.

Other Huckabee-affiliated firms have deployed similar tactics to quietly hit customers with additional fees. After ordering a booklet from Barton Publishing that Huckabee advertised for $19.97, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel reported that he “found a $120.08 charge to his Visa card, which included a $67 coaching video that was not ordered.” 

Huckabee did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Learn Our History Critics described Learn Our History’s books and videos as religious right-wing propaganda.

Learn Our History said on its website that it offers children “positive, patriotic and unbiased” history lessons free from the prejudice “found in many textbooks in use today.” But along with its pro-Trump religious slant, it has also been accused of attempting to capitalize on crises.

Ahead of the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, the company released a cartoon film about the attacks, which blamed “Muslim terrorists” and depicted men dressed in traditional Islamic attire wielding AK-47s and screaming, “Death to the Americans!” with heavy accents. 

And in June, as Black Lives Matter protests erupted nationwide following the police killing of George Floyd, Learn Our History started aggressively running Facebook ads for its “Civil Rights Bundle for Kids,” which included a DVD about America’s “founders and fighters” and encouraged children to “take pride in America’s past.”

The ads showed a young, grinning Black boy giving two thumbs up beneath the text, “In times like these, it’s critical for your children to understand the fight for equality. That’s why we want your family to enjoy this important civil rights bundle from Learn Our History for free while supplies last!”

Of course, like the booklet bundles, the terms are cut off — and the deal isn’t free!”

Huckabee is just another scam artist.  Should we venture to guess that some of his slimy ways rubbed off on his daughter, former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education has taken the first step toward consolidating several of its campuses in response to a decade of enrollment drops and financial pressures.

The system’s Board of Governors voted yesterday to authorize Daniel Greenstein, the system chancellor, to conduct a review of what merging six of its 14 universities would mean for the system financially.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to sustain viable, affordable educational activity at our universities,” said Greenstein in an interview before the board’s meeting, “not just for their communities and their students — although that’s vitally important — but as a matter of financial importance.”

As part of the review, the system plans to explore the possibility of merging six universities: California and Clarion Universities, Lock Haven and Mansfield Universities, and Edinboro and Slippery Rock Universities.

It’s not yet clear how the combined institutions would be named or branded, although Greenstein said that “local brand identity” was important and should be respected. He said he envisioned that each pair of merged institutions would have a single leadership team, budget, and enrollment strategy, but other aspects of consolidation remained unclear. “The reason we’re on this process,” he said, “is to find out the answers to those questions.”

Pennsylvania, like many states in the Northeast and Midwest, faces a dwindling number of college-bound high-school graduates, and enrollment in the system, known as Passhe, has sunk from 119,513 students in the fall of 2010 to 95,782, a decline of 20 percent. A 2017 report on the system, compiled by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, warned that “it is just a matter of time before all of the universities become financially unsustainable.”

Greenstein, a former director of postsecondary success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, took over as chancellor in 2018, and began trying to right the system’s slide. Over the past two years, the system has renegotiated its labor agreement with the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, increased its use of shared services among institutions, and lobbied the state government for legislative changes that would allow the system to restructure itself without state approval. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, signed such legislation this month.

Greenstein reviewed for the board several options to solve the system’s financial woes, including dissolving the system, closing institutions, increasing state funding, and maintaining the current course.

Closing institutions would hamstring the economic and educational life of their regions. It would also transfer flailing campuses’ financial obligations to the other institutions in the system — tens of millions of dollars in debt laid on the other universities, many of which are already struggling. Greenstein estimated that the state would need to provide an additional $350 million over two years to stabilize the universities’ budgets, at a time when state-support levels everywhere are endangered by economic turmoil caused by Covid-19. The system could try to continue with 14 independent institutions, but, he said during the meeting, “everything would have to go flawlessly” to avoid financial ruin.

Greenstein recommended the board support the exploration of consolidations. Many details remain uncertain, but the system needs to look into that possibility in order “to figure out whether the juice is worth the squeeze,” he told the board.

The system needs to look into mergers ‘to figure out whether the juice is worth the squeeze.’

Strategic mergers of certain campuses would save money for the system, “but we can’t cut our way out of this situation,” Greenstein said in the interview. “We really have to think about this in terms of growth opportunity. And the opportunity is in reallocation [of resources] into areas that allow us to grow.”

Each prospective merger will be considered with a strategic goal in mind, Greenstein said. California and Clarion, both in western Pennsylvania, have substantial online operations that could be combined to better serve undergraduates and working adults hoping to complete a degree. Lock Haven and Mansfield, in the rural center of the state, would focus on work-force development, including nondegree credentials. Slippery Rock, which has enjoyed enrollment growth and fiscal stability, would join with Edinboro, which has struggled, to create a larger university that could compete “more effectively in the western part of the state, Ohio, and the surrounding region,” he said.

Reached after the meeting, a spokeswoman for the faculty union said it “needs to learn more about the state system’s plans before commenting on them.”

The importance of the system’s educational mission persuaded the Board of Governors to support the review, said Brad Roae, a board member and a Republican state representative: “We want to make sure that students everywhere in Pennsylvania have access to a Passhe university.”

Greenstein plans for the financial review to be completed in the fall. If the Board of Governors accepts its recommendations, the system would develop a plan and solicit public comments. If approved, the mergers would take effect in the fall of 2022 at the earliest.”

Pennsylvania is following other states such as Georgia, Wisconsin, and Connecticut.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I was going to blog this morning about Anthony Fauci and the way Donald Trump and the White House have been treating him this past week. This culminated in a scathing op-ed article by President Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, that declared Dr. Fauci “wrong about everything”. It even caused a fissure within the White House with some Trump aides scrambling to disavow the attack on the most trusted public figure of the coronavirus crisis.  However, this morning I came across a piece by New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, where he comments that even with all of the gloom we have been experiencing, there is hope and light at the end of the tunnel.  He reminds his readers that:

“Yes, our nation is a mess, but overlapping catastrophes have also created conditions that may finally let us extricate ourselves from the mire. The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.

The last time our economy was this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election with a mandate to revitalize the nation. The result was the New Deal, Social Security, rural electrification, government jobs programs and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that built the modern middle class and arguably made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.”

Yes, let’s hope.  Below is Kristof’s entire column.

Tony

———————————————————————

We Interrupt This Gloom to Offer … Hope!

Nicholas Kristof

July 16, 2020

Just one in six Americans in a poll last month was “proud” of the state of the country, and about two out of three were actually “fearful” about it. So let me introduce a new thought: “hope.”

Yes, our nation is a mess, but overlapping catastrophes have also created conditions that may finally let us extricate ourselves from the mire. The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.

The last time our economy was this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election with a mandate to revitalize the nation. The result was the New Deal, Social Security, rural electrification, government jobs programs and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that built the modern middle class and arguably made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. And when I reached out through the gloom to consult experts, I was struck by how much hope I heard.

“On balance, I am very hopeful and I’m very optimistic,” Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, told me. “What we’re seeing today is a sort of national convulsion over the recognition that racism in America is real and it’s not a figment of the imagination of Black people in this country.”

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, who for six decades has been battling for a more just society, told me, “I’m very optimistic. I think we have a chance of getting something done.”

Like others I spoke with, she said that one reason for hope is, paradoxically, President Trump and the way he has become the avatar of failed “let them eat cake” policies and narratives. “Mr. Trump is the perfect opposition to have,” Edelman said. “He represents the implosion of the American dream, and we can’t go down his road much farther.”

“If we can’t get something done now,” she added, “then shame on us.”

Betting markets like PredictIt expect Joe Biden to sweep into the presidency in January with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. By then we may have lost a quarter million Americans to Covid-19 and remain mired in the worst economic downturn of our lifetimes, with racial antagonisms inflamed by a president whom a majority of Americans regard as a racist. I’ve known Biden since he was a senator, and he’s no radical — but that reassuring, boring mien may make it easier to win a mandate and then use it to pivot the United States onto a new path.

So perhaps today’s national pain, fear and loss can also be a source of hope: We may be so desperate, our failures so manifest, our grief so raw, that the United States can once more, as during the Great Depression, embrace long-needed changes that would have been impossible in cheerier times.

The United States faces at least three simultaneous crises: more coronavirus deaths than any other country, the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and overflowing outrage over racial inequity. Yet these crises are all interlinked, all facets of the same core failure of our country, one that has its roots in President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of 1968 and in the racialization of social safety net programs thereafter.

Why is the United States just about the only advanced country to lack universal health care? Without universal paid sick leave?

Many scholars, in particular the late Alberto Alesina, a Harvard economist, have argued that one reason for America’s outlier status is race. Investing in safety nets and human capital became stigmatized because of a perception that African-Americans would benefit. So instead of investing in children, we invested in a personal responsibility narrative holding that Americans just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps to get ahead.

This experiment proved catastrophic for all Americans, especially the working class. Marginalized groups, including African-Americans and Native Americans, suffered the worst, but the underinvestment in health and the lack of safety nets meant that American children today are 57 percent more likely to die by age 19 than European children are.

This boomerang effect of obdurate white racism — what Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl calls “dying of whiteness” — means that Americans now are less likely to graduate from high school than children in many peer countries. Meanwhile, people die in the United States from drug overdoses at a rate of one every seven minutes.

Nicholas Kristof’s Newsletter: Get a behind-the-scenes look at Nick’s gritty journalism as he travels around the United States and the world.

This is deeply personal to me. As I’ve written in a recent book, “Tightrope,” a quarter of the children on my old No. 6 school bus in rural Yamhill, Ore., are dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — deaths of despair. Others are homeless or in prison. Although they were white, they perished because of policy choices, partly rooted in racism, that the United States has pursued for 50 years.

Gaps in safety nets left us in turn particularly vulnerable to a pandemic, for underinsurance and lack of paid sick leave helped spread the coronavirus. The pandemic then caused people to lose their jobs, which in the United States meant that they lost health insurance just when it was most needed. Trump bungled the pandemic, as did some local leaders, but the failure was also 50 years in the making.

Do we now have a chance for a reset? Yes, I think we do.

It may already have been in the works. Kansas Republicans rebelled against tax cuts that had devastated schools. Texas helped lead the way in reversing mass incarceration. Red states like Idaho, Utah and Oklahoma expanded Medicaid.

To the extent that America’s 50 years of failures had their roots in racism, it’s also striking that the new possibilities arise in part from mass revulsion at a short video that showed the undeniable truth of racism today.

In 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois, writing about racial injustice, said there have “been few other cases in the history of civilized people where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference.” Yet maybe the video of George Floyd’s life being snuffed out by police officers is dispelling that indifference. The current Black Lives Matter protests, measured by the number of participants (roughly 20 million), appear to constitute the largest movement in American history.

“There was something about seeing a man’s knee on another man’s neck that woke people up,” said Helene Gayle, the chief executive of the Chicago Community Trust. “People think I’m crazy, but I have a sense of possibility.”

The polling is striking. Sixty percent of Americans, including a majority of white people, said in a CBS News poll last month that they support ideas promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement. Almost as large a majority supports a national health care plan. An astonishing 89 percent favor higher taxes on the rich to reduce poverty in America.

The Majority

Despite some vocal opposition, many sensible positions enjoy broad support among Americans.

The sense of opportunity thus is emerging not solely from the wreckage of past policies but also from new attitudes, particularly among young people. Half a century ago, there was something to Nixon’s claim of a “silent majority” that backed his racist dog whistles; today, polls indicate, the silent majority want more spending to address racial inequity, more effort to address climate change and more input from scientists on how to handle Covid-19.

It’s not clear, of course, that these views will translate into wiser policies. Congress is often more responsive to wealthy donors than to voter opinions. And while white Americans may chant “Black Lives Matter,” they may not want to back policies to share the bounty that they have been hogging; few are talking about fixing our unequal system of local school funding built to transmit advantage from one generation to the next.

Yet this inchoate movement is gaining ground, and Trump is on the defensive. In the rural Oregon town where I grew up, most people voted for Trump in 2016, and until early this year they stuck with him because they liked his nominations of conservative judges and his pro-gun stance, but most of all they liked the roaring economy. Now the collapsing economy and Trump’s manifest failures in managing the pandemic test that support.

In the 1930s the unequivocal nature of Hoover’s failures helped win Roosevelt his mandate and made the New Deal possible. Maybe national anguish can again be the midwife of progress.

“It is possible that the best thing that could have happened to make progressive change possible is the crass, self-interested, ineffective politics of Donald Trump,” Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard historian, told me.

But wait! Even if Biden wins with both chambers of Congress — a huge if — this is an age of toxic polarization. Republican senators will filibuster (if the filibuster survives), conservative judges will overturn Biden executive orders, and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity will spew venom.

Actually, that sounds rather like the 1930s. Roosevelt was (initially) blocked by the Supreme Court, and fervently denounced by Father Charles Coughlin on the right and Senator Huey Long on the left. F.D.R. was regularly accused of being a “warmonger” and a “fascist dictator,” or of taking America on the road to Communism. He didn’t even have the full backing of his wife, Eleanor (history vindicated her on most of their disagreements, such as anti-lynching legislation that she supported and the internment of Japanese-Americans that she opposed).

Skeptics worry that Trump has permanently damaged American institutions and norms, in ways that will impair future progress. Perhaps. But Nixon likewise challenged institutions, norms and the rule of law, and the result was that Americans came to value them more. One result was the Democratic tidal wave of 1974.

Like Trump, Nixon took on journalists — his vice president, Spiro Agnew, excoriated critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism” — but ultimately Agnew was convicted of a felony, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein inspired a generation of kids to become journalists. Me included.

I often hear Americans say that our country has never been so divided. That doesn’t ring true. Far more than today, households in the 1960s were riven by civil warfare, with children denouncing parents as murderers for supporting the Vietnam War and parents despairing of their offspring as immoral, impractical good-for-nothings who lived in sin, smoked pot and threatened the nation’s future. If we survived the chasms of the ’60s, we can get through this.

“I know we will see a better future,” President Jimmy Carter told me recently. “We have been through many painful crises, some spanning years, but we have always gotten back on our feet. Sometimes there must be a reckoning and course correction.”

I reached out to Carter because his administration in the late 1970s roughly marked the end of the postwar cycle of inclusive capitalism. At age 95, he’s still guardedly optimistic, as is Walter Mondale, his vice president, a classic liberal who at age 92 — “not too many more years, and I’ll be getting old,” he told me — said he feels “a lot of hope.”

History does not unfold smoothly; policies do not “evolve” gradually. Rather, they develop, like animal species, through what evolutionary biologists call “punctuated equilibrium” — long periods of stasis and short bouts of intense variation. The change is often driven by traumas, like the American Revolution or the Great Depression.

Roosevelt was a somewhat conventional, privileged figure who seized upon the catastrophe of the Depression to transform America. Lyndon B. Johnson was a corrupt and manipulative Southern politician who seized upon the Kennedy assassination to pass civil rights legislation and the Great Society programs.

“F.D.R. wasn’t by nature a revolutionary, but out of the trauma of the Great Depression he helped unleash a revolution that made America a richer, fairer and better country,” said Cohen. “The same is possible again — if we get everything right.”

Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, along with a broad recognition that America has taken a wrong path, create a similar opportunity for Joe Biden. While Biden isn’t charismatic, he’s a reassuring veteran who knows how the system works and doesn’t frighten voters — and who thus has a chance, like F.D.R., to be elected with a mandate and make history.

Some of Biden’s aides are telling him to think in such grand terms, and he seems drawn to the idea. “I do think we’ve reached a point, a real inflection in American history,” he told reporters a few days ago. “And I don’t believe it’s unlike what Roosevelt was met with.”

Biden added that “we have an opportunity to make some really systemic change,” but for now his policy positions don’t show much sign of that. He is likely to favor a public option as a path to universal health coverage, stronger moves on climate change, a higher federal minimum wage, easier access to college, and jobs programs to reduce inequality. If enacted, these would put America on a path more like that of Europe and Canada, but they would be short of Rooseveltian.

Add a universal child care/pre-K program modeled on the military’s, universal dental coverage, Canada-style child allowances to cut child poverty in half, major investments in K-12 education for disadvantaged children, “baby bonds” to reduce wealth inequality, greater union protections and “bandwidth for all” — then you are talking history.

Is that a pipe dream? Perhaps. But a series of national crises may have exposed our failings enough to give us a chance at a do-over.

This hope is not Pollyannaish. It rests on a tragic toll of Covid-19 deaths, and it requires a thousand caveats. Trump might win in November. If Biden wins, a Republican Senate might stymie his proposals and block his nominees. Deficits are now so enormous that politics may become a dispiriting fight about which programs to cut, not which dreams to finance. Veteran liberals are scarred by memories of unfulfilled hope that followed Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Bill Clinton’s in 1992, Jimmy Carter’s in 1976: Hope is the engine oil of campaigns, but it burns up in the heat of governing.

And yet.

“Hope right now in America is bloodied and battered, but this is the kind of hope that is successful,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. “It’s hope that has lost its naïveté.”

Besieged as we are by plague and crisis, a dollop of this “calloused hope,” as Booker calls it, offers an incentive to persevere. If in the depths of the Great Depression we could claw a path out and forge a better country, “calloused hope” can guide us once more to a better place.

Dear Commons Community,

The University of Akron’s  Board of Trustees voted unanimously yesterday to eliminate 178 positions, including 96 unionized faculty members and 82 staff and contract professionals through layoffs. Taking into account previous layoffs and voluntary retirements, the university has eliminated about 23 percent of its unionized full-time faculty since the pandemic began. The university says the reductions in personnel have saved it $16.4 million — 5 percent of its budget for the 2020 fiscal year. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The layoffs must still be ratified by the union membership, and the matter could enter into binding arbitration, said Pamela Schulze, president of the Akron chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

“The university regrettably reduced its work force in order to sustain its future.”

When announcing the staffing cuts to the board, Gary L. Miller, Akron’s president, said the move was necessary because of the pandemic, state budget cuts, declining enrollment, and the need to protect the university’s financial reserves.

“Unfortunately, the considerable sacrifices already made by our employees were insufficient to design a budget that will sustain the University of Akron under the conditions that we now face,” Miller said.

“The institution’s financial challenges are just too steep to overcome without this sacrifice, and the university regrettably reduced its work force in order to sustain its future,” added Joseph M. Gingo, the board’s chairman.

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

Akron is the latest university to lay off faculty members after Covid-19 disrupted the spring semester and decimated university budgets across the country. Akron had previously announced plans to cut $65 million from its $325-million budget, Cleveland.com reported in June.

Wednesday’s cuts were met with harsh criticism from the faculty union, which protested outside the student union as members of the Board of Trustees arrived for the meeting.

The latest cuts will send a message to students that Akron is an institution in decline, which will have “a devastating impact on our enrollment,” said Schulze, a professor of child and family development at Akron.

“I think it’s going to hurt the university’s reputation, I think it’s going to send us into some downward spiral beyond anything we can recover,” Schulze said.

The faculty union had proposed alternatives to the cuts, including deeper cuts in athletics and compensation, furloughs, and a more incremental budget-cutting approach, Schulze said.

Now, the laid-off faculty members will be left without health insurance during a pandemic and will very likely struggle to find other jobs, Schulze said. “These are people with families that depend on them. These are community members. This is just the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.”

I am afraid we will be hearing more about college layoffs as budgets firm up for Fall 2020.

Tony

Bari Weiss

Dear Commons Community,

Bari Weiss, an opinion writer for the New York Times, resigned from the newspaper on Monday, blasting the institution on her way out in a scathing letter explaining why she chose to leave her job.

In the resignation letter Weiss posted online yesterday, the self-described “politically homeless” writer criticized The Times for fostering what she called an “illiberal environment” that she said was “especially heartbreaking.”

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times,” Weiss wrote. “But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

“Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions,” Weiss added.  As reported by CNN.

“News of Weiss’ departure was first reported by Vice and confirmed by The Times. Kathleen Kingsbury, The Times’ acting editorial page editor, thanked Weiss in a statement for her “many contributions.”

“I’m personally committed to ensuring that The Times continues to publish voices, experiences and viewpoints from across the political spectrum in the Opinion report,” Kingsbury said. “We see every day how impactful and important that approach is, especially through the outsized influence The Times’s opinion journalism has on the national conversation.”

Weiss generated controversy for her criticism of aspects of progressive culture, particularly with regards to free speech. Last week, she was one of the dozens of writers who signed an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine that spoke out against so-called cancel culture.

Weiss faced criticism in June when the newspaper faced backlash over the publication of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed, which argued for sending in military troops to U.S. cities to quash unrest that had broken out in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. In a series of tweets, Weiss tweeted that there was a “civil war” that has been “raging” inside The Times between the “wokes” and older “liberals.” The tweets drew public backlash from some of Weiss’ own colleagues.

Weiss said in her resignation letter that she was subject to “constant bullying” by her colleagues at The Times who disagreed with her views. She wrote that colleagues have called her a Nazi and racist and that she was “demeaned on company-wide Slack channels.”

“There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name,” Weiss wrote. “Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”

Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for The Times, did not respond to the specifics of Weiss’ resignation letter. But Murphy said, “We’re committed to fostering an environment of honest, searching and empathetic dialogue between colleagues, one where mutual respect is required of all.”

The media pundits especially those on the right will jump all over this story.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Governor Andrew Cuomo translated the nightmare of the coronavirus pandemic into a graphic poster of an island mountain, festooned with icons of death, decline and accomplishment. For some politicians, only art can calm the passions after a long day — and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, now steering New York to a cautious reopening after the deaths of 32,000 citizens, has lately taken solace in the discipline of graphic design.

Dear Commons Community,

Facing eight federal lawsuits, opposition from hundreds of universities, Silicon Valley, and twenty states, the Trump administration yesterday rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer or leave the country if their schools held classes entirely online because of the pandemic.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The decision was announced at the start of a hearing in a federal lawsuit in Boston brought by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said federal immigration authorities agreed to pull the July 6 directive and “return to the status quo.”

A lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said only that the judge’s characterization was correct.

The announcement brings relief to thousands of foreign students who had been at risk of being deported from the country, along with hundreds of universities that were scrambling to reassess their plans for the fall in light of the policy.

Under the policy, international students in the U.S. would have been forbidden from taking all their courses online this fall. New visas would not have been issued to students at schools planning to provide all classes online, which includes Harvard. Students already in the U.S. would have faced deportation if they didn’t transfer schools or leave the country voluntarily.

Immigration officials issued the policy last week, reversing earlier guidance from March 13 telling colleges that limits around online education would be suspended during the pandemic. University leaders believed the rule was part of President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure the nation’s schools and colleges to reopen this fall even as new virus cases rise.

The policy drew sharp backlash from higher education institutions, with more than 200 signing court briefs supporting the challenge by Harvard and MIT. Colleges said the policy would put students’ safety at risk and hurt schools financially. Many schools rely on tuition from international students, and some stood to lose millions of dollars in revenue if the rule had taken hold.

Harvard and MIT were the first to contest the policy, but at least seven other federal suits had been filed by universities and states opposing the rule.

Harvard and MIT argued that immigration officials violated procedural rules by issuing the guidance without justification and without allowing the public to respond. They also argued that the policy contradicted ICE’s March 13 directive telling schools that existing limits on online education would be suspended “for the duration of the emergency.”

The suit noted that Trump’s national emergency declaration has not been rescinded and that virus cases are spiking in some regions.

Immigration officials, however, argued that they told colleges all along that any guidance prompted by the pandemic was subject to change. They said the rule was consistent with existing law barring international students from taking classes entirely online. Federal officials said they were providing leniency by allowing students to keep their visas even if they study online from abroad.”

Welcome international students!

Tony